“What about Ryan?” Ethan said. “The apartment in Denver,” Linda said. “He’s already moved most of his things. The big furniture went yesterday.” She looked at him steadily. “He’s not gone yet. He’s coming back for the last of it this weekend. I thought you’d want to know.” “Thank you,” he said. “Linda, for everything.” She waved a hand. “Oh, don’t. I have extensive experience writing formal statements and I was looking for an excuse to use it.” But she softened the deflection with a slight smile. “You’re good people, Ethan. This street is better for having you on it.” Biscuit pushed his enormous head against Ethan’s leg with profound enthusiasm. “And Biscuit agrees,” she said. She walked away.
He stood on his porch and watched her go and thought about the particular way that communities worked. Not as single unified organisms, but as collections of individual choices. Each person deciding every day what they were going to contribute and what they were going to overlook and what they were going to stand up for. Linda had stood up. Dave and Patrice had stood up. Marcus had stood up. Small things, all of them. But small things in the same direction at the right moment added up to something that bent the outcome. He owed them. Not in a way that could be repaid directly, but in a way that he’d carry.
On Saturday morning, Ethan was on his porch at 7:30 when Ryan’s truck, a rental, a simple gray pickup, nothing like the Challenger or the Porsche, pulled up. Ryan got out alone. No friends, no entourage. He walked to his front door, went inside, and started carrying boxes out. Ethan watched for a few minutes, then he stood up. He walked across the yard to the property line. “You need help?” he called. Ryan stopped on his porch steps with a box in his arms and looked at him. The look lasted about three seconds. Surprise first, then something working through it, then something that settled. “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Actually, yeah, I could use a hand.”
Ethan walked over. They carried boxes for an hour. They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t a lot to say that hadn’t already been said. And they were both the kind of person who understood that sometimes the most honest thing two people can do is work alongside each other in silence and let the work be the conversation. Ryan was stronger than Ethan had given him credit for in non-combat contexts, efficient, methodical, not wasting motion. He’d clearly been taught at some point how to actually work. When the truck was mostly loaded, Ryan sat on the tailgate and drank from a water bottle and looked at the house. Ethan leaned against the side of the truck and did the same.
“Do you think it would have been different?” Ryan said. “If you’d come over that first day, introduced yourself.” “Maybe,” Ethan said. “Probably. I don’t know. You were already who you were when you arrived. Whether you would have been willing to see it differently that early.” He shrugged. “Hard to say.” Ryan nodded. “I want to say I would have,” he said. “But I don’t know if that’s true. I was pretty committed to being an idiot.” “You were pretty committed,” Ethan agreed. Ryan looked sideways at him. Something that might have been a laugh if it had gone a little further. “That’s as close as you get to giving me a hard time, isn’t it?” “Pretty much,” Ethan said.