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“I was thinking lunch.”

“Naked lunch?”

“No. But if you play your cards right, I’ll take you with me to see a man about some sausages.”

“Should I hold out any hope that’s a euphemism?”

“I wouldn’t.”

He reached over to open his door and then looked back at Nina. “I’m so sorry about your husband.” She smiled over the sweet pang that went through her, an echo of grief mixed up with lust and tenderness.

He reached up and pulled her braid.
I like you
, his little yank said.

“Me, too,” she said.

I like you
,
too.

Sam opened his email to write a letter to Des, his little sister who had recently left with her boyfriend for Europe.

He hadn’t wanted her to go. It had made him feel like he hadn’t done enough, after their father had died this last winter, to keep the family together. She insisted she needed it for herself, and he’d made himself stop making her feel bad for living her life, because he knew he had depended on her too much, depended on how well she helped him care for all of them, how easy she made it look.

She was a good sister.

Des
, he wrote,

He read it over. Pushed his fingers into the corners of his eyes. Saved it, but instead of sending it, put it in the folder with the rest of the emails he hadn’t sent to his sister. She’d get on a plane back to Ohio if she got some strange email from her older brother about cats.

He started another about picking tomatoes.

The right way to do it.

* * *

“Jesus Henry Caramel Corn, Sam, your place is a dump.” Mike kicked a gym bag to the side, where he’d tripped over it coming into Sam’s apartment.

“Didn’t ask you in.” Sam grabbed the water bottles he’d been after out of his fridge and slammed the door hard enough the condiment bottles rattled.

“What you want? Me standin’ in the hallway like goddamned Jehovah’s Witness?”

“Jesus.” Sam threw a water at Mike with a snap meant to catch his head, but Mike snatched it out of the air like it hadn’t been twenty years since he’d been high school first baseman.

“Fuck you, Sam.”

“I was saving myself for you, but you broke my heart.”

Mike toed his shoes off and lifted a stack of papers from one of Sam’s barstools to sit and drink his water. “You were always a slob, but look at this place. You’re gonna need a backhoe.”

Sam squinted. Refused to look. Refused to feel the embarrassed heat creeping up his neck under the sweat from his workout with Mike.

His place
was
a dump—the breakfast bar covered in papers from the clinic, useless outdated ones mixed with ones Lacey was sure to ask for Monday. Laundry all over the living room, a stack of mail by the door so tall it was sliding into drifts.

He squeezed his water bottle helplessly.

This is why he didn’t have anyone over, ever. He didn’t need a witness to what was most likely his impending failure.

Even if he could bring a backhoe in here, he’d stand in front of its metal jaw, frozen, uncertain what should be taken away, what he should keep.

It was better, but worse, to hang on to everything, all at the same time.

He got distracted, he knew. He got turned around. He sat down with one thing, and then answered his phone for another.

It was all so fucking important. Every small thing.

He knew, because when he lost grip of those small things was when he lost it all, and even in times like these—when he felt the weight of the shit piling up in his apartment, had started hating hearing the phone ring—the only way to make sure he didn’t miss something was to care about everything.

The emergency room, where he took shifts, was the only time triage made sense, and it became something he could submit to, relax in. It meant something, to let go, in that setting.

To let go was to find that elusive focus on what was right in front of him.

Airway. Breathing. Circulation.

He knew that standing in his apartment, talking to Lacey about the clinic, he couldn’t breathe, his airway choked with piles and stacks and interruptions.

Except there was nothing to relegate to some moment when he could breathe again.

What could he triage in his own life? His sisters and brother? They were all he had left.

His work? The whole neighborhood needed him, and Lacey was depending on him, giving up her work in the hospital to risk something for him.

He remembered, suddenly, the stacks and piles in his house growing up. How his mom was constantly rearranging them, rescuing them from his dad, who would toss them. She’d claim a box had important documents for taxes, or school papers she needed to organize and save.

He remembered he sometimes came home from school and found his mom crying for what seemed like no reason.

Everyone said Sam and his mom were two peas in a pod, and it was true. She understood everything no teacher ever did, what baffled his father. His impulses, his sudden tears, the restless feeling he was coming out of his skin every minute in school.

She told him about her own wasted nights doing homework at the kitchen table, but reassured him she would help him make it different.

Feel strong.

All those nights he couldn’t sleep, his mind filled with worries chasing worry, it was his mom who somehow knew. When he was little, she would climb into his narrow bed with him, let him play with her dark curls until he felt he was boneless, weightless, careless.

Later, when he was all elbows and knees and outbursts, she would still come and sit by him, and she never pointed out the tears he wasn’t supposed to have anymore.

And then she was gone.

A handful of rushed and chaotic hours in the hospital, no one but strangers at her bedside, and the mother who would read and knit in their rooms rather than let any of her children suffer a head cold alone was
gone.

PJ and Des, his small brother and sister, were tearful and confused, and, in the first weeks, prone to childish storms of sudden grief. But the storms passed swiftly enough and they clung so tight to their father that Sam, a teenager, was certain they couldn’t have really loved her.

Sarah, in middle school, understood, but she retreated to her friends, to her friends’ mothers. Their father had his hands full with two young children and Sarah was at an age that is awkward for fathers and daughters, and so he let her go.

His father understood, likely better than anyone, Sam’s grief, but not his anger.

His father was never comfortable with the pediatrician Sam’s mother found and the Ritalin the doctor prescribed for Sam. His dad didn’t feel it was right for a teenager to take drugs every day, didn’t like the idea that it worked on Sam’s brain and behavior when he felt that was something a parent should do, a family.

But after the first few days of pills, Sam had come home from school with tears in his eyes, and Sam’s mom
knew
, she knew, and she reached up and grabbed him around the neck, because Sam was already so much taller, and they hugged and cried.

Happy. Relieved. Hopeful.

Went out for ice cream where he giggled with his mom for the first time since he was little.

She knew.

She
knew
Sam wasn’t really angry and impulsive; she saw his fierce intelligence and how much the tears were just an ache, the frustrated pain he felt trying to figure out how to help everybody else.

Over that celebratory ice cream, his last report card a tangle of C’s and D’s, he told his mother he was going to be a doctor. She believed him, laughed, said, “Of course you are, baby boy.”

He
believed it.

And then she was gone.

Sam ignored the cramp in his gut. He took a long drink of water. “I’ve been busy.”

“What? Playin’ doctor?” Mike was a nurse and called every physician at Lakeside, from the first-year residents to the most terrifying attendings, by their first names. When Sam asked him about it once, appalled, Mike had rolled his eyes and said, “
they sure as fuck don’t call me
Nurse
Mike
,
Sam. They act familiar with me, I’ll be familiar with them. Callin’ ’em
Doctor
don’t give ’em superpowers.

“It’s not some game opening a clinic, yeah I’ve been busy.”

Sam closed his eyes. Their southside neighborhood was small, the talk fast, every stoop connected to the next like an endless game of telephone. He’d known Lacey almost his whole life; she was a friend of both of his sisters. He and Mike had been born within days of the other.

He could go to medical school, put on a white coat, save fucking
lives
, but he’d never be more than
Paddy and Marie Burnside’s kid, and since they’d had four, that wasn’t much of a distinction.

No wonder he couldn’t get anyone to call him
doctor.

Even though there were neighbors and families who depended on him.

“I thought you had to go pick up Mikey from preschool camp.”

“Oh shit. Right. DeeDee’ll kill me if I’m late again.” Mike got up and looked around Sam’s apartment again, rubbing a big hand over his face. “Worried about you, brother.”

“It’s just busy. I haven’t had a break since we lost Dad and Sarah got hurt and Des went overseas. I’m still working at Lakeside’s urgent care to keep extra cash coming in before we open.”

“It’s why I’m worried. You know you don’t do so well with a bunch of shit going on like that.”

“We’re not in high school anymore, and in case you haven’t noticed I’ve handled a lot since then.”

“Have you?” Mike shoved his feet into his sneakers.

“Have I what?”

“Handled it?”

“I handle it.” Sam met Mike’s eyes, as familiar as his own. Mike, who had needed to handle his own fair share of sometimes unimaginable shit, but always pulled down deep, seemed to find a source of reserves that drew ease to him, people to him, love to him. It had drawn Sam to him, over and over, and even when Sam had inevitably been a total fucking asshole, Mike just took Sam back.

It had been the most successful relationship of his entire life.

Mike must have seen something nearly sentimental in Sam’s face, because he grabbed Sam by the shoulder and yanked him into a one-armed hug. “You come for dinner soon, you bastard. DeeDee and the kids haven’t seen you for a couple weeks. It would do you good to see what I’m doin’ with the old place, too.”

Mike and DeeDee had bought the Burnside’s family home after Sam’s dad died in the winter, when Sam and his siblings had needed the cash to pay the balance on Paddy’s medical bills.

One more thing he hadn’t been able to hang on to.

“Yeah, okay.”

“I mean it.” Mike grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a little shake. “And clean up this dump for chrissakes. You’re a grown man. ’Sides, this what you gonna bring that Nina back to when you trick her into a date?”

Sam shoved Mike back. “Are you fucking kidding me? What do you know about Nina? You’re getting as bad as the old ladies in the neighborhood.”

“Those old ladies know their shit, Sam. I’ve started bringin’ ’em beer to loosen ’em up. How else am I supposed to keep up when you don’t return my calls? If I get one more fuckin’ text from your ass I’m gonna throw your phone in the goddamned lake.”

“Nina’s like … a colleague. I’m just volunteering for her project to drum up some goodwill for the neighborhood.” Sam ignored how the words felt stiff in his mouth. Almost a lie. He’d thought about her every day since they’d worked together last weekend, and he was dying to work with her again today.

Mike grinned. “You wouldn’t try to even explain yourself to me if you didn’t like her, you bogon. Plus, I’ve met her. I’ve gotta good feeling about her, if you don’t fuck it up.”

“You a matchmaker now, too? Some kind of southside dating service?”

“Hey, not a bad idea. More guys oughta ask happily married bastards like me. Isn’t a night I don’t come home I’m not happy to see the fine woman that is DeeDee Masserson née Carlisle sittin’ on my stoop lookin’ at me like I still got it.”

“I can handle my own love life.”

“Says the saddest over-the-hill bachelor in Lakefield, Ohio.”

“Get the fuck out of my apartment, Mike. I’m supposed to go meet PJ.” Sam’s little brother. They had been trying to meet weekly at a neutral location to put the pieces of their relationship back together since their latest falling out. They were always falling out. They had never really fallen in.

“Oh, yeah. Say hi to Peej for me, though I’ll tell you, him I see. He watched the kids for me and DeeDee so we could see that space western movie and didn’t even flicker the porch lights when he knew we were out there mackin’ like teenagers.”