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“Remember you’re picking Hanna up from hockey practice later,” Emery tells him
“Am I?” Jack says, face showing only mild surprise as he sits down at the kitchen table and trades crutches for his prosthetic. The trouble, unfortunately, with co-parenting from separate houses for thirteen years, before horrifying your teenage daughter and actually falling in love, is that you get somewhat used to a set schedule. A way of parenting that is as individual as it is collaborative. The trouble with moving into the same apartment and consolidating your lives and having a second, entirely unplanned, kid together, is that it moves the goalposts; disrupts the routine you thought you had all figured out.
“Well”, Emery sighs, turning away from where she’s rinsing one of Katie’s bottles in the sink, so she can make a face at him, “unless you want to be the one to help my idiot brother pick out a ring for the latest situationship he promises is definitely the one this time, Emery?” she mimics, in what’s a surprisingly passable impression.
Jack raises an eyebrow- finishes tying his laces, a neat double knot pulled tight. Emery’s brother’s are twins, but Tom is happily married and Declan is, as Emery so succinctly put it, an idiot – so he’s pretty he knows which one of them she’s talking about. The insanity of the Walsh family dynamic, however, is something he can do without at seven in the morning, so, “what’s a situationship?” he questions instead.
“Ask your daughter.” Emery responds without pause. Grinning in a sure sign that she’s about to call him an old man. “Not that one,” she adds, exasperated and more than a little bit fond, when Jack immediately turns to Katie, not quite six months old and babbling nonsense in her high chair.
“How much will it embarrass Hanna if I ask her in front of her friends, do you reckon?” he asks, smiling back at her. Always ready and willing to embrace his role as a dorky dad. So different from all the other masks he wears; more relaxed than she ever sees him otherwise, like there is a part of him that can only switch off when he’s parenting. Soft in a way that makes her want to reach out for his hand and never let go.
Instead of saying all that though, she just shakes her head, “so, so much,”
“Thought so.” He pulls himself to his feet with a wince; she’d make a joke about old man joints, but it’s overplayed at this point. Overplayed, and more or less untrue. He’s in better shape than most men his age and looking good on it, she thinks to herself, as he brushes past her to open the fridge and add a litre bottle of water to his rucksack. “Oh” he adds, leaning his hip up against the counter casually and turning back towards her, “I forgot to tell you. Donnie wants to do a playdate with the girls.”
“Why,” she asks him, glancing over a Katie who’s chewing on her own fingers, “they’ve barely developed object permanence. It’s not like they are going to be friends.”
“Not with that attitude,” he grins, eyes crinkling round the sides in a way that she’d never admit makes her feel a little bit weak at the knees. That will almost certainly have her agreeing to spending an hour at a café, making small talk with Jack’s third favourite member of the ER’s nursing staff.
He winks at her, as if sensing vulnerability to his questionable charm. Despite her better judgment, she smiles. Looks him up and down. He’s in camouflage today. A ridiculous uniform for Pittsburgh’s emergency response unit, really, but the boys in blue have always liked playing at soldiers. She’d gone to war with Jack once herself– packed bullet wounds, played soccer in army camps and tried to make sense of a world gone entirely mad. The red cross stuck on his shoulder now is the same as it was back then; the same colour as the blood he’d come to her operating table covered in. The first time she held his life in her hands.
She takes a breath. Recentres. Nothing about her worry for him has ever been irrational, but there is a time and a place. “What nonsense are you getting up to today?” she asks him, trying to sound disdainful and mostly succeeding. Not scheduled for a shift until Monday and already aching for the barely controlled chaos of Pittsburgh’s second busiest emergency room; the steady calm of her own operating theatre. A little jealous of his cowboy shit, if she’s honest.
“Just a training thing,” he responds, swinging his rucksack over his shoulder and checking his watch. He should have left five minutes ago really, but here he is, still in the kitchen, talking to her. Music playing in the background and acting like he hasn’t a care in the world. God help her, she thinks, she loves him. All the stupid, charming parts of him. The recklessness she’s built her life around.
There’s nothing to do but smirk, really. Lean forward towards him so he can stamp a goodbye kiss on her lips and feeling the delicious scrape of stubble across her cheek, as she says, “try not to get shot, yeah?”
He’s laughing as he walks away from her, the sounds echoing back through the house as he repeats, “It’s just training.” A casual half wave over his shoulder dismissing her concern. It might be reassuring, if she didn’t know him quite so well.
Alone then, in the room with her baby daughter and the whirring coffee machine and Hanna’s Spanish homework forgotten at the table, she shakes her head; hears the front door slam. If she loved him less, she might be able to articulate her worry. To see that it is at once unwarranted and utterly necessary when it comes to the million selfless, self-destructive choices he makes every single day.
“It’s never just anything with you, Abbot.”