Chương 5
The restaurant fixtures were ridiculous.
I knew that.
Maybe ridiculous was the only language left.
“It explains that I’m done being embarrassed by it.”
Owen studied me.
Then he nodded once.
“That answer I believe.”
We loaded the first table into the truck.
By noon, we had made two trips to my parents’ house.
Luis and his movers arrived while we were carrying in chairs.
He looked at the furniture, then at me, then through the front door.
“Training?”
“That’s what the paperwork says.”
Luis grinned.
“I don’t get paid to read paperwork.”
His crew handled my parents’ furniture with more care than my family had handled me.
Every piece was photographed, wrapped, labeled, and carried out without scraping a wall.
Mom’s wellness books went into a plastic tote.
The family photograph came down last.
I held it for several seconds.
Owen stood nearby without speaking.
“Storage?” he asked.
I looked at the four faces behind the glass.
“No.”
I carried it into Dad’s office and placed it facedown on his desk.
By three, the living room was empty except for the wall-mounted television and the rug.
The room looked larger and oddly vulnerable.
Sunlight fell across pale rectangles where furniture had protected the floor.
Buddy wandered through the open space, sniffing locations that had previously been inaccessible to him.
Owen stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips.
“You can still stop.”
“I know.”
“You’ve made your point to yourself.”
“Not yet.”
“Dan.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“I just don’t want you waking up tomorrow and realizing you became the crazy person in this story.”
That stung because it was fair.
I walked to the window.
Outside, Luis’s truck disappeared at the end of the street.
For a few seconds, all I could hear was Buddy drinking water in the kitchen.
“I’ve spent years making sure nobody could accuse me of overreacting.”
Owen said nothing.
“So I underreacted to everything.”
I turned back toward the empty room.
“This is probably stupid.”
“Probably.”
“But I’m not destroying anything.”
“No.”
“I’m not stealing anything.”
“No.”
“I’m not costing them money.”
“Your therapy bill might.”
I laughed despite myself.
Owen smiled.
Then he picked up one end of the first gray table.
“Fine.”
I took the other end.
“Where?”
“Center.”
By six that evening, my mother’s perfect living room had become something she would have considered a personal attack on civilization.
Owen took three steps backward and stared at what we had done.
The pale oak coffee table had been replaced by two laminate tables pushed together beneath the television.
Gray chairs stood in pairs around them.
The retired counter panels created a low service area along the wall where Mom’s decorative console had been.
One digital menu display glowed above it with a generic training layout Marcus had emailed me, all blank item names and colored rectangles, no active prices or promotions.
The second screen stayed dark because its power cord had developed the kind of electrical personality Owen described as “probably haunted.”
Buddy sat beneath the lit display as though waiting for his order.
“This is deeply upsetting,” Owen said.
“It’s furniture.”
“It’s McFurniture.”
“That isn’t a word.”
“It became one about forty minutes ago.”
I stepped into the center of the room and turned slowly.
Nothing had been drilled into the walls.
Nothing had been glued down.
Every cable was taped safely along the baseboard.
The television remained untouched.
The rug was covered by removable floor protection beneath the heaviest pieces.
The room could be restored in a day.
That mattered to me more than I wanted to admit.
I had spent the afternoon imagining my mother’s face when she walked in, but the closer the room came to completion, the less triumphant I felt.
Mostly I felt tired.
Owen opened a paper bag of sandwiches he had picked up from a deli and handed me one.
“You look disappointed.”
“I’m hungry.”
“You’ve been hungry for twenty minutes and refused to stop.”
“I was working.”
“You were aligning chairs.”
“They were crooked.”
“They’re restaurant chairs in your mother’s living room.”
“They can still be crooked.”
We ate at one of the tables.
It was the first actual meal I had ever eaten in that living room.
Mom allowed drinks there only if they had lids and usually moved family gatherings into the kitchen because she worried about stains.
I unwrapped my turkey sandwich directly over the protected floor.
Owen watched me.
“Rebel.”
“Shut up.”
Buddy rested his chin on my thigh.
“You had dinner.”
Buddy did not move.
Owen tore a tiny corner from his bread.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were absolutely going to.”
“I was assessing portion size.”
“His mother runs a wellness blog.”
“Then he deserves bread.”
Buddy received no bread, although Owen looked personally betrayed by the decision.
My phone had accumulated seventeen notifications.
Most were ordinary work messages from managers who had been told I was on vacation and apparently interpreted that as meaning I was available only for emergencies, which meant everything had become an emergency.
One store had a broken ice machine.
Another had two employees call out for the evening shift.
A general manager named Priya had solved both problems before I even opened the messages.
She ended her update with, Enjoy Alaska.
I stared at that line.
Owen noticed.
“What?”
“Work thinks I’m on the cruise.”
“Tell them you’re not.”
“I’m supposed to be off.”
“That wasn’t my point.”
I opened Priya’s message, typed Thanks, good call on moving the spare unit from storage, then deleted everything after Thanks.
I did not want to explain.
Not yet.
There was something humiliating about admitting you had organized a family vacation and been edited out of it.
As if exclusion were a failure you could catch.
I checked the family chat next.
Megan had posted six photographs since morning.
A buffet.
A lounge.
May you like
Kyle holding two drinks.
Mom beside a window.
