Page 70 of College Town

Tommy makes a wounded noise, but then lets go all at once.

Lawson staggers. He blames it on the wine, on being tired, on this stupid, crazy day, but it’s really disappointment. He has to walk away, for his own sanity, but for a moment, it felt really good to have Tommy cling at him again.

He leaves the kitchen, stumbling at the threshold, catching himself on the doorjamb. He looks back, because he’s weak, and his moment of weakness reveals Tommy with both hands gripping the countertop, arms straight out before him, head bowed between them.

For a moment, he feels a spike of satisfaction: good. He’s hurting, too. And then it’s flooded out by sadness, and his feet drag so heavily on the stair treads he doesn’t think he’ll make it all the way up to his borrowed room.

24

Despite a cozy pair of sweats, and the softest mattress Lawson’s ever had the pleasure of stretching out in, he sleeps like shit. An unsurprising development, but it still makes everything worse.

He replays his conversation with Tommy over and over again until sometime after two – until he’s sick of himself for micro-analyzing each eyebrow twitch and meaningless head tilt. He berates himself for his “baby” slip – because using a pet name with someone who hurt him that badly and is now hurting him again is stupid – and then berates himself for not having spent the hours from eleven to two worrying about his parents instead. They should be his true concern, right now. And he ought to worry about his future, too, because it doesn’t feel like he has much of one in store after all that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours.

Then there’s the house. For all that it’s elegant and well-appointed, it’s not a quiet house. There are too many people seemingly moving around all night, and though highly-polished, the floors are original and they creak rather a lot. He hears doors open and close well past four; the occasional snatch of a voice, some disjointed bit of conversation. He recognizes Tommy speaking, once, and stuffs the quilt over his ears so he doesn’t have to listen.

At dawn, he pulls on a pair of Noah’s jeans, a hoodie, and his own shoes, and slips out into the garden.

Slipis perhaps the wrong word, because he encounters a number of intimidating, well-dressed men along the way, most of whom give him sharp or disapproving looks. No doubt he appears on a variety of hidden security cameras. But no one stops him, and that surely counts for something. He saw the French doors in the kitchen last night, and passes out through them, past a man standing sentry on the back deck, and down a flight of stairs to the garden.

It's lovelier even than expected. He likes to think of himself as someone who’s appreciates loveliness – it’s part of the job description for a writer, after all – but he knows he isn’t someone who’s studied it in its finer forms. He knows nothing of gardens; he recognizes the roses for what they are, because of their thorns, and he thinks the bridges built over the streams have a distinctly Japanese quality to them, but he can’t tell one tree from another; doesn’t know the names for the forms of the topiaries or flower beds. It’s a blend of formal and wild that pleases him, though; order amongst the chaos that he can actively feel lowering his blood pressure.

It's early autumn, but there are tall, spilly clusters of white flowers blooming at the tops of straight stalks. He bends down to sniff at them and someone says, “Mr. Granger.”

He has a minor heart attack.

When he startles upright, he sees one of the men in suits has followed him across this patch of lawn, and waits expectantly, hands folded together.

“Yeah?” Lawson asks while he tries to wrest control of his pulse.

“You have a breakfast meeting,” the man says, as though it’s a normal thing that Lawson should have been expecting to hear.

“I have a what now?”

“A breakfast meeting. In Mr. Cattaneo’s office.” He checks his watch. “It begins in fifteen minutes.”

Lawson blinks and stares, waiting on an elaboration. When none comes, he points to his own chest. “I have a breakfast meeting?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ihave abreakfast meeting?”

“Yes.” The watch is checked again. “In thirteen minutes.”

Lawson laughs, without humor and without wanting to. “Sure. What the fuck. I have a breakfast meeting. Lead the way, chief.”

The man frowns, but motions him forward and heads back toward the house.

Something Lawson realized on his garden walk was that no one watched him closely, last night or this morning, because everyone knew he couldn’t get off the property. A massive stone wall encircles the grounds, and the only other access points he could find were two gates: one at a rear driveway, one pedestrian-sized, both locked and equipped with keypads. The wall’s too high to scale, and no roses or trellises have been placed at convenient climbing spots.

Feeling twice as trapped, he follows the man sent to fetch him back inside, through a kitchen now redolent with savory breakfast smells, and back upstairs to Tommy’s office.

It’s not a private meeting.

Tommy’s at his desk, but extra chairs and TV trays have been brought in for the others in attendance, all of whom turn to regard him as he enters. He spots Noah, and Frank, and two other men, one slender and gray-headed, the other squat, round, and florid-faced. Belatedly, he notes a woman over in the corner, sitting pressed up against the wall, and then feels his brows fly up when he realizes it’s Tommy and Noah’s mother.

She hasn’t changed much from what he remembers of her: still tiny and too-thin, her eyes huge and brown like Tommy’s, panicked like a frightened deer’s. She sits up higher in her chair at sight of Lawson, and makes an aborted gesture at her chest as though she meant to clutch at her honest-to-God pearl necklace.

The air smells of bacon. A table’s been brought in over against the window, a buffet spread laid out.

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