The Night He Said No One

The Room

It started small.

The dishes. He had never cared about the dishes in two years, and suddenly he cared about them a lot. He would come home and stand in the kitchen and say, “Seriously?” loud enough that I could hear it through my door.

Then it was my room.

“It smells like a gas station in there,” he said one night. I was standing in my doorway in my work clothes, so tired my eyes hurt. “You know that, right? You know it smells?”

“I’ll clean it Sunday.”

“You said that last Sunday.”

He wasn’t wrong. That was the problem with it. Everything he said to me that summer was a little bit true. My room was a mess. I did eat garbage. I did work too much and sleep too much and let my laundry pile up for weeks. I had stopped calling people back. All of it was true, and he had never mentioned any of it before Memorial Day, and now he couldn’t stop.

“You need help, man,” he said once, in the middle of a fight about a trash bag I had forgotten to take out. “Like actual help. This isn’t normal.”

He said it like a weapon, not like a friend.

I remember standing in the kitchen after he went to bed, holding that trash bag, thinking: he knows I know. He can’t say it, so he’s saying everything else.

I didn’t fight back much. I didn’t have the energy. I would apologize, clean whatever he was mad about, go to work, come home, and do it again. Some nights I sat in my truck in the driveway for twenty minutes before I went in.

Kenzie came over a lot that summer. She was always nice to me. She once brought me a container of her mom’s chicken and rice because Brody had mentioned I worked doubles. I thanked her and couldn’t look at her, and I’m sure she thought I was just shy.

The Text

On a Tuesday in August I was eating lunch in the break room at the plant when my phone buzzed.

We need to talk when you get home.

That was the whole message. No emoji. No “hey man.” Brody had texted me probably ten thousand times since seventh grade and none of them had ever looked like that.

I knew. I read it once and put my phone face down on the table and finished my sandwich, and the whole time I knew.

When I got home he was sitting at the kitchen table with a sheet of paper in front of him. He had printed the lease.

He had a speech ready. I could tell because he didn’t look up from the paper while he gave it. He said we had “different standards.” He said the apartment was “affecting his mental health.” He said Kenzie was going to start staying over more, and he needed “a clean, adult space.” He said he had talked to the landlord and I could be out by the first of October, and he’d cover my half of the deposit difference, and he hoped we could “stay cool.”

“Is this about the room,” I said, “or is this about Memorial Day?”

He finally looked up.

For one second I saw the real thing in his face. Not anger. Fear.

Then it was gone.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “This is about the room.”

I moved out on the twenty-eighth of September. My dad drove over from Seward with his trailer. Brody was “at Kenzie’s” all day. When I came back for the last load, he had already put my spare key on the counter on top of a sticky note that said Leave this.

I sat in my dad’s truck afterward and my dad didn’t say anything for a long time.

“You want to tell me what happened with you two?” he finally asked.

“Not really.”

“Okay,” my dad said, and started the truck.