I found him in his room, standing at the window with his arms braced above him, holding onto the top of the sill, looking out at Lake Michigan.
He must have heard me come in because he didn't turn around, but he did acknowledge my entrance. "I can't believe the view from here."
I walked over and wrapped my arms around his solid waste and tucked my head into the hollow between his shoulder blades. With a deep breath, I inhaled his wonderful smell and thought it was sad that he was still so tense. I tugged on his arm. "Why don't you come and lie down? I'll give you a rubdown."
"You know that Bo has money, right?"
I shrugged even though he couldn't see it. "Maybe. I guess I never really thought of it."
"He doesn't live anything like this. Sure, he's got a big house, but it's in West Texas. It looks out over oil rigs."
"And this house, that I don't even own, looks out over Lake Michigan."
Noah shook his head. "You just don't get it, Grace."
He was right. I didn't get it. Noah was disconcerting in these moods. He always seemed to know what he wanted and when he wanted it. Things moved on his timeline or they didn't move at all. But there wasn't any budging him from these moods. The last time he had been like this, he’d fought an illegal fight, and we broke up soon after. I didn't want to revisit that experience. I realized that I needed to be more independent. So even though Noah was withdrawing from me, I had to suck it up. He’d come back. This was just a phase.
The holiday season was never much fun, and it wasn’t just because our parents were intolerable. It was because Josh was often gone, practicing for his bowl game. This year Noah had a New Year’s Eve fight, and Josh’s game was the next day. We'd see Josh for two whole days before he had to go back to State to practice for the big game. He was a junior this year, and there wasn't much more time for him to make a statement as a player if he wanted to go pro. Josh had told me privately he didn't think he would make it.
Listening to both guys in my life express such concern wasn't ordinary. I was used to being the one who was indecisive and uncertain, yet in this case, I could see their futures so clearly. Noah was so driven that it didn't seem possible that he wouldn't achieve every goal that was set in front of him, and Josh was so talented there was no way he wouldn’t get drafted.
But all I could do now was hold their respective hands and listen to them and encourage them.
"How did they figure out you didn't like water in boot camp?" I asked suddenly.
"Huh?" The question caught Noah off guard and he turned to look at me over his shoulder. I sidled around the front and pushed against his chest so that he wasn't leaning up against the window and staring at the cold water. Nudging him backward until he fell into one of the upholstered chairs in front of a gas fireplace, I settled in on top of him. His arms closed around me automatically.
"When you wrote to me, you said that you hadn't realized that water would be such a big part of your military experience, that you hadn't realized that the Marines were part of the Navy."
He nodded, then, catching on. "Besides the recruiter? I hesitated. We were supposed to jump in the water and do an equipment removal test, and I hesitated. I'd never hesitated before. I was always the first one off the mark, running, jumping, climbing, whatever they wanted me to do, I was doing it first. But when we came to the pool, I stopped and people brushed past me. All except Bo. Bo waited with me. Not because he was scared of the water."
"I can just imagine what he said."
"Yeah," Noah gave a small gruff laugh full of affection for his best friend. "He said to me later that he always let me go first so that he knew where to go, but this time he waited for me and waited, and then he just grabbed my vest and jumped in. Later he said that he got tired of waiting and he was hot. But—“
"But he was saving you," I finished.
"Yeah, I had to do that part of the training. It was a whole third of boot, Grace, and I hated it. Every day."
"But you jumped in. You conquered it, and now it is just a thing that's behind you."
"You can't put a house this big behind you, Grace."
"It's not my house."
"But you come from here. This is your world. I grew up in a shack and lived on welfare. Do you see why I didn't come inside so many years ago when I thought about visiting you?"
Even though we'd exchanged letters for four years while Noah was deployed, sometimes he was a complete mystery. This insecurity of his over the size of this house, this house that belonged to Uncle Louis and not even to me, was unfathomable. Noah had gone to the Marines, owned his own business, and was part of an exclusive group of mixed martial artists who fought for money in Vegas and other venues in front of thousands of fans. He'd been on television, for crying out loud. But take him out of his element and set him down in a 12,000-foot, overblown McMansion in the Northern suburbs of Chicago, and he'd immediately forgotten all of the success that he had made for himself.
I tried for distraction. "How do you think Manuel is doing with the shop?"
"Good," Noah grunted. "Although maybe I should call him and see."
"Maybe if you want him to quit."
"I've called too many times?" He grimaced when I nodded. He heaved a big sigh and pushed me off his lap so he could leverage himself out of the chair. "I'm no good at giving up control, Grace." He looked down at me with a serious expression and then out toward the lake again.
"I know." I had some ideas about helping him with that, but I'd tell him about them later, when we were alone and didn't have to go down to dinner with the entire family sans Josh.
Noah took one last long look at the lake and said "I'm going to live here someday. Oh not in this house, specifically, but I'm going to have a big-ass house right here on Lake Michigan."
"I believe it," I said. And I did.
DINNER WAS EXCRUCIATING. LANA’S MOM had brought out the Royal Daulton china, the stuff with the 14k gold trim and lapis lazuli inlay. It was grotesque, and I think I read somewhere that you could actually get food poisoning from this stuff. Lana looked at me from across the table, a smirk on her face. For Aunt Sarah to bring out this china, she must feel really threatened by Noah. She was obviously trying to prove something, although I'm not quite sure what. Maybe she just liked playing Marie Antoinette to our peasant.
Noah looked thunderous and grim as he stared at the elaborate place setting and the dozens of utensils lined up on the side and top. I nudged him and waved my hand across the setting from the outward to the interior, and I think he got it. He nodded at me but didn't look any happier.
Uncle Louis came in at the end, and Noah stood up to shake his hand. Lana rolled her eyes at me and mouthed "suck up." Sadly the table was too big so I couldn't kick her, but I quickly stuck my tongue out. Unfortunately this did not go unnoticed by my mother. Her medication dosage must be working pretty well for her to be a sentient being at this late hour of 7:00 p.m.
"Really, Grace, those are terrible manners," she said reprovingly. She sat next to Lana, with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Louis filling out the head and foot respectively. Yes, Aunt Sarah was the head of our household. She claimed that it was easier for her to direct the staff in serving from her position. No one dared point out that the serving door was in the middle of the room.
We were sitting at one of the smaller tables. I think Aunt Sarah had three that she cycled in and out of here depending on the number of guests in the party. The room looked rather silly with just the six of us seated in here, but that was Aunt Sarah for you. The family was a joke, but we all ate together in this formal setting when we were home. Lana and I speculated that this was because Aunt Sarah was a poor, pageant girl, and this was the way she thumbed her nose at the DAR, the Daughters of the Revolution. She'd never gotten into their exclusive Mayfair club, even though she spent days trying to trace down some member of her family somewhere that could be one of the original boaters.
I wondered what Noah's family lineage looked like but was afraid to ask. He'd probably take it wrong and as a sign that we shouldn't be together. God only knew what was cycling through his mind right now as he looked at the gold-tinted silverware and the fancy plates. But tonight was bound to be a circus, and hopefully that would put to rest any thoughts of inferiority he had.
As the evening wore on, though, Lana’s earlier advice to be more assertive took root. Maybe I could make Noah feel more secure, but not in the way Lana had thought. I’d be assertive in my own way.
Noah
THIS HOUSE LOOKED LIKE A friggin’ palace. I knew I was going to hate this place just from the exterior. Having only seen about a quarter of the house, if you could call it a house and not a mini hotel, everything had confirmed my initial feelings that this was a bad place. Every big house I'd ever been in—which was all of two, Bo’s and Grace’s—was filled with nice shit and unhappy people.
Grace's mom looked half dead. She'd warned me, but I don't think I was fully prepared. She wore some long, filmy thing that Grace swore was not a nightgown, but I wasn't really convinced. Grace's aunt, Sarah, spent the whole dinner criticizing Lana. Heck, if I stepped wrong it was somehow Lana's fault.
"I see that you are still taking those psychology courses," Sarah said. "Has it done anything to help your own psychosis?"
Nothing like having your momma call you crazy at the dinner table to make the meal taste like sawdust. Lana picked at her meal, and that brought about another wave of criticism. "Do you need to go back to the clinic and learn how to eat?"
No one mentioned Grace or even looked at her. She might as well have been invisible. Her uncle Louis talked to me, and that was about it.
"Josh tells us that you'll be on a pay per view match this New Year's Eve."
"Yes, sir," I said, holding back the urge to salute. "My second."
"Who's your opponent?"
"It's Fred 'Granite' Marquita."
"And why's he 'Granite’?” Uncle Louis asked. Bo would've said it's because Fred is dumber than a caveman and just as unwieldy. Privately, we call him Flintstone.
"He's a hard hitter. His jaw is like granite."
Grace made a worried sound beside me. I knew that she was afraid I’d get hurt. MMA was a bloody sport, and everyone, even the winner, walked away with injuries. I’d told her that few people got seriously injured and then joked that if I did break something that it’d put me out of the game. She didn’t think that was very funny.
The fighting was just a means to an end. It was a way to make big money in a short time, legally, and then I’d pour those funds into buying and selling franchises and then leveraging those assets into something bigger. Something big enough that I could buy a house like this. Except we wouldn't eat in a room like this. I'd want a room with a ton of windows that overlooked the lake and the table would be round and filled with our kids and Grace's gorgeous face.
In my vision, Grace would be smiling too, instead of staring at her plate.
"You going to win, then?"
"Yes, sir." I had to win. Winning was the only option. What I didn't tell anyone but Bo was that I wasn't sure if I could win. Flintstone had years of experience on me. I had only one professional fight under my belt. I'd won dozens of gym matches, but I'd only fought on a pay per view card once. I just got signed a few months ago. My small rise had been called meteoric, and I knew that Flintstone was aching to take me down a notch or five. But I had to win. I had to. In a fight, the person who wants it most wins. The person who is the hungriest wins. It isn't always the one with the harder jaw or the most experience. And I knew that Flintstone would never want this win like I did.
We finished the meal in near silence, broken only by the clatter of the forks against the plates. I didn't even know what I was eating. I think it was fish, but it had a ton of sauce and was far too rich in flavor. I abstained from eating it, explaining to Louis that I had a strict dietary regimen to follow. This was a mistake.
"I wish you would have said something about your guest's eating habits," Sarah sniped to Lana.
Grace had had enough of this and interjected, "It's no big deal. Noah can get something from the kitchen later."
"If you think that the staff works at your pleasure, Grace, you are sorely mistaken. We eat together, even if we aren't all family, isn't that right, Deborah?” Sarah was amazing in her ability to hit more than one target with her insults. “Grace, you aren't a true member of this family, and your mother is a wastrel.” Grace nibbled on the corner of her lip and opened her mouth to say something more but Lana, shook her head from across the table, and Grace sat back.
"I'm fine," I said and shoveled a big piece of glazed, sauced fish into my mouth. I washed it down with a big gulp of water and then wiped my mouth.
"You are a big boy," Sarah said, eying me. It sounded vaguely like a come on, and if we were anywhere but here at the table, I would've pegged that as an invitation, but surely not. I looked uncertainly to Uncle Louis who had checked out by checking his cellphone.