The Men Who Walked Out novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Lights on the Porch

Elliot takes them in and Daphne's card is declined in a gas station line; Gerard's funding goes under review.

The gas pump in Warwick asked me for my zip code, and then it declined my card.

I tried the second card.

It declined that one too, in the same flat beep.

There were three cars lined up behind us at nine in the morning, and the man in the first one leaned on his horn.

"Try the debit," Dad said from the passenger seat. He had let me drive without a word.

I tried the debit.

The screen said CARD NOT ACCEPTED, and the man honked again.

Dad took his wallet out of his back pocket.

He kept his thumb over the middle fold and slid out two twenties from behind it.

"Pay inside," he said.

I walked into the station with my face hot and handed the cashier forty dollars in front of five people.

When I came back out, Dad was staring through the windshield at nothing.

"Mom did that before breakfast," I said. "While we were still in the house."

"Yes," Dad said.

That was all he said until Cambridge.

Elliot Rowe's grandmother's house was a narrow yellow place at the end of a street of narrow houses.

The porch light was on at ten in the morning.

Elliot stood in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder, and I knew him from the lab holiday parties.

He was thirty-two, tall, with dark curls he never combed and ink on his shirt cuffs.

In four years he had said maybe forty words to me, and thirty of them were about coffee.

"Dr. Bradstreet," he said, and took the suitcase out of Dad's hand.

"Elliot. Thank you."

"You called at two. The back room's made up. The kettle's on."

I looked at him.

"He called you at two in the morning?"

"He did."

"I was awake at three," I said. "I was on the balcony with him."

"Then he called before that," Elliot said. He didn't make it sound like anything.

Dad had already gone inside.

I stood on the porch step with my bag and my dead cards.

"I can find a hotel," I said. "I've got eleven dollars and a phone, but I can find a hotel."

"There's a room upstairs," Elliot said. "It had my grandmother's sewing machine in it until Tuesday."

"Why Tuesday?"

"I didn't know you'd be coming until two a.m. I had to move it somewhere."

I almost laughed.

Brent's name came up on my phone.

I turned the screen face down on the porch rail.

"Your fiancé?" Elliot asked.

"He says he's done unless I apologise to my mother."

"Are you going to?"

"No."

Elliot nodded once and held the door.

"Then I'm housemates with someone's fiancée," he said. "Fine by me. Nothing else, until your dad has his own place. Deal?"

"Housemates," I said. "Nothing else. Deal."

It was an odd thing to agree to on a porch, and I agreed to it anyway.

By afternoon, the sewing machine had gone to the basement and Dad had gone to bed.

He lay on top of the covers in the back room in his shoes, and he was asleep before I closed the door.

I sat on the stairs and watched the house go dark around me.

Elliot washed one cup at the kitchen sink and dried it and put it away.

"There's soup," he said, without turning around. "I made too much."

"You made it before two a.m.?"

"I make too much on Tuesdays."

I ate it standing at his counter.

Around nine, my phone started buzzing against the wood.

Mom. Brent. A number I didn't know. Mom again.

I didn't answer any of them.

At six the next morning I came downstairs and found my father at the kitchen table in yesterday's shirt.

He had his reading glasses on and Elliot's laptop open in front of him.

He wasn't reading.

He was looking at one email, with his lips pressed together.

Elliot stood behind him with his jaw set and his phone in his hand.

"What is it?" I said.

Elliot held his phone out to me.

The subject line read: Aldrich Institute, Bradstreet Polymer Lab, funding under review.

"It's from the director," he said. "It says the review is at the request of the lab's principal donor."

I knew who the lab's principal donor was.

Dad closed the laptop.

"She works fast," he said.

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