Chapter Text
Jack has spent so much of his life living out of a suitcase that he has packing down to a science. He gets up on Thursday morning, goes for a run, showers, and then puts his battered carry-on suitcase on the bed and unzips the cover. He has everything neatly packed for the week ahead inside of fifteen minutes. After that, it’s a matter of doing one last round of his apartment to make sure all the lights and appliances are turned off and he’s out the door.
According to the directions on his phone, it’s only an hour from Pawtucket up to Logan Airport but it’s a weekday and Jack’s stupidly chosen to drive north with all the Boston commuters headed into the city for what will probably -- for many of them -- be their last day of work before the long weekend. When he merges onto I-93 toward Boston the traffic slows to a crawl and Jack has plenty of time with his own thoughts as he creeps up through Quincy and Dorchester.
He realizes, drumming his fingers on the wheel and listening to a story about the Greek debt crisis, that this is the first time he’s gone on a trip simply because he wanted to. Jack’s led a well-traveled life -- sometimes, he thinks, exhaustingly so. The reading he’s been doing the last few weeks, about landscape design and urban planning and architecture, is making him remember what he said to Bitty back in May -- that he’s never really lived in any specific place that felt like home.
He knows his mother feels most at home in Wellfleet, the summer home of her childhood, and Jack’s inherited some of that nostalgia from her. It’s also -- to be the summer home of his own childhood, a place where he continues to feel welcome and at peace. He feels like a native in Montréal -- the city continues to be his measure of what a city ought to be -- but his parents have owned several residences there, over the last three decades, and none of those has ever felt like a place Jack would call home. For one thing, he probably lived longer in the apartment they rented in Pittsburgh, when his father was still playing for the Penguins, than he has any of the houses they owned in Montréal -- even if he doesn’t remember it much because he was only seven when his father retired. After that, his parents had indulged their wanderlust and it had been rare for them to spend more than a month or two at home before coming up with an excuse to go somewhere new or return to a favorite locale.
Everything had felt anxiously impermanent to Jack as a child -- he remembers waking up in the middle of the night in a strange hotel room, disoriented, already halfway through taking inventory of the things he needed to keep track of. It wasn’t that his parents needed looking after -- they were efficient, practiced travelers who were as meticulous about details as they were willing to roll with last-minutes changes.
But where Alicia and Bob thrived on novelty, Jack craved familiarity and routine. He’d found it, in part, in hockey -- because regardless of where he was, when he stepped on the ice he knew the rules he was playing by. And he’d found it, eventually, at Samwell where he’d been able to return each fall to the same spaces, the rhythm of coursework, the Haus with its chaotic and colorful inhabitants who -- nonetheless -- gave him the feeling he was one of them, no matter that they never knew quite what to make of him.
Jack’s been so grateful, amidst all of this, for the rare stretches of time when he gets to stay that he’s never felt any particular need to make excuses to travel elsewhere. He thinks about Holster and Ransom and their annual Niagara Falls reunion; he thinks about their road trip out to Yellowstone. He wonders if Bitty’s ever been abroad. Jack’s passport, last renewed in 2008, is filled with stamps and scribbled notations. He wonders what it would be like to never traveled outside the country you were born in, and whether Bitty wants to explore other parts of the world.
Jack can’t actually think of a place, right now, that he’d like to explore. He likes Massachusetts, and Pawtucket feels manageable and worn around the edges. And it’s close enough to the familiar: Samwell, Boston, the Cape. He doesn’t have to pack a suitcase or book a hotel room to find someone who remembers him in diapers.
Maybe his parents would think he’s not being ambitious enough, but to Jack that’s a comforting thought.
He wonders, as he merges onto I-90 toward South Boston and the airport, if Bitty is going to expect him to do touristy things down in Georgia. Mostly, Jack just wants to get to where Eric is and never, ever leave because already wherever Bitty is feels like home.
When Jack emerges from the T station, having parked at the airport and taken the Blue Line to State Street, the North End is bustling with foot traffic both local and gawking tourist. Jack ducks into Polcari’s on the heels of some sort of walking tour, a dozen people crowding into the shop so the tour guide can talk about olive oil and polenta, and let the proprietor give his elevator pitch for their coffee and spices. Jack edges around the cluster of tourists and bends down in search of the cat, who looks up from her nap under the bin of lentils and yawns at him. He reaches out to let her sniff his hand.
She quivers a whisker at him and then tucks her head back under her paw, a clear indication he’s less interesting than her mid-morning nap.
Jack pulls out his phone and takes a few pictures of the bins of bulk goods lining the narrow aisle and the floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the counter with their neatly-labeled glass jars of coffee beans and loose tea. There are two elderly women who’ve come in to make purchases and, as the tourists file back out in the wake of their guide, the guy behind the counter chats with them as he weighs their orders and rings them up on the massive manual register that sits at the end of the counter. They’re clearly regulars and Jack thinks again about being in a place long enough that people recognize you at the stores where you shop -- and not because they remember your dad’s Sports Illustrated spread from the third time his team won the Stanley Cup.
Or, he thinks with an inward sigh, because they’re following the Falconers and recognize you from the awkward post-game interviews.
“And what can I help you with,” the shopkeeper asks as Jack reaches the front of the line.
“I’d like -- uh -- can you show me how much four ounces of cinnamon is?” Jack realizes the spices are sold by weight and he has no conception of what is a reasonable amount of cinnamon. Particularly when it comes to anyone from the Bittle family.
“Sure thing,” the guy responds, reaching over the display to pull out the jar of ground cinnamon. It turns out there isn’t enough in the jar for four ounces and the man disappears into the back storeroom in search of more.
“They have the best cinnamon here,” the woman standing next to Jack in the informal queue offers conspiratorily.
“So I’m told,” Jack says. And then offers, entirely to his own surprise, “it’s actually for my boyfriend’s mother. I’m visiting them in Georgia this weekend.”
The woman nods, unfazed, and pats him on the arm. “That’s a good boy, taking a hostess gift. Is she a baker?”
They’re interrupted by the reemergence of the clerk from the back of the shop with a jar re-filled with the most aromatic cinnamon Jack can ever recall smelling. And that’s saying something after his year living with Eric.
“Fresh ground for ya,” the shopkeeper says, using a small brass scoop to measure out a small mound of spice on the scale. “Now that’s … just a tad over four ounces.”
“Could you make it eight?” Jack asks, and then, “...and then another eight? In a separate bag?” He’ll buy some now and keep it at his apartment for when Bitty moves up in August.
Visits. When Bitty visits in August.
Jack and Lardo meet up just after noon at the Roxie’s food truck parked at the Christian Science Plaza.
“Hey Jack!” Lardo puts out a fist in greeting and Jack bumps his knuckles to hers, taking in the asymmetrical haircut she’s sporting -- new since the weekend she and Shitty had come down to Pawtucket -- and wonders if the haircut is commentary on the tailored dress and heels she’s wearing. It’s an outfit that wouldn’t look out of place on his mother when she’s meeting with a potential event sponsor.
“How’s it going, Lardo?”
“Meh,” she wavers the hand she used to greet him, attention already wandering to the day’s menu posted on the side of the truck. “It is what it is. Maris is off to Kennebunkport tomorrow and she’s actually put me in charge of the gallery until Wednesday.” She tries to sound disaffected by the entire enterprise but Jack can tell she’s pleased.
“Congratulations!”
She rolls her eyes, but can’t hide the grin. “Yeah, thanks. Hey, tell your mom thanks again for the introduction, yeah?”
“You probably talk to her more than I do -- I hear from Bitty she hangs out with all the cool kids on Twitter.”
“Your parents on Twitter are, like, kind of hilarious Jack.”
“Which is part of the reason I will never have a Twitter account.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said two years ago when Holster told me I needed one. Ten thousand Tweets later…”
They place their order and then step off to the side and check their phones while they wait for the sandwiches to come off the grille. Food in hand, they pick their way around the other waiting customers and find a seat in the shade under the trees that ring the fountain on the near end of the long reflecting pool. Kids of all sizes -- and even a few adults -- are playing in the spray, leaping about in swimsuits and even just wet clothes.
“How was the thing with Shitty on Tuesday” Jack asks, around bites of his fontina-and-heirloom tomato-on-sourdough sandwich.
Her mouth full, Lardo nods an exaggerated, positive response before swallowing and saying, “Amanda was happy with it, yeah! They had a good crowd. She and Mark were doing a cycle of poems he accompanied on the bongo drums. It was pretty rad.”
“That’s … cool,” is all Jack really feels qualified to offer.
Lardo just laughs, “You don’t have to pretend you’re into it, Mr. Hockey. But it was pretty cool. Amanda has these letters her great-grandparents wrote, in Norwegian, when her great-grandfather first emigrated to New York and he was working in a factory trying to earn enough money to send for her -- they were already married, but only just -- like, almost a mail order bride situation? Amanda’s been translating them and, like, building a cycle of poems around them interwoven with passages from some of the Norse epics.”
“That’s called, what, found poetry?” Jack asks.
“Hey, you were listening to Nursey last year!”
Jack isn’t sure how to ask what he wants to ask, so he just dives right in and says, “So how did Shitty seem to you?”
Lardo gives him a sideways look as she inhales the last bite of her sandwich and wipes her hands on the crumpled napkin.
"You had lunch with him that day, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. He seemed … pissed off. He was trying to get a rise out of me, like he does when he’s --”
“-- in a bad headspace, yeah,” Lardo sighs. “I could tell.”
“So he didn’t…?”
“Tell me anything? When does Shitty ever fucking tell me --” she breaks off and sighs, shaking her head. “I’m not being fair. I just --” she stops, looking down at the twisted wad of napkin in her hands, and sighs again.
Jack thinks about what Marci would do in a situation like this and waits.
Lardo squints out into the sunlight of the plaza, where the glare of the sun off the water makes the air almost too bright to look at, even through sunglasses.
“When I was in Kenya we used to have these amazing conversations about art history and gender theory and law and global politics … it was ‘swawesome, you know? And I thought -- I thought -- but when I came back to Samwell in January … we were still bros and all but he stopped …” she trails off with a frown and a shrug.
Jack considers what he can and can’t tell one of his best friends about another best friend who are themselves friends. “During our frog year, Shitty used to drive me crazy. I mean, I was a different person then too but I thought, ‘Who the fuck is this kid and how the hell did he end up on my hockey team,’ because he seemed to spend all his time fucking around the Haus high or drunk or both, right?”
“Right.” Lardo slips her feet out of her shoes and kicks her toes up into the air, stretching her hamstrings.
“I think that’s Shitty trying to prove to himself that none of what he actually cares about matters,” Jack says, realizing the truth of it as he puts it into words. “Not all of it. Shits is always going to throw a good party, but -- sometimes there’s an edge to it. And there’s an edge to it when he’s trying to pretend he doesn’t care.” Jack collects their refuse and stands up to walk it over to the nearest rubbish bin. “I’ve been there. It’s … not a good feeling.”
Lardo reaches up and lets Jack pull her back to her feet so she can slip her shoes back on. They start walking up Belvidere Street toward Dalton Street where they can cut across to Newbery and get Lardo back to the gallery before the end of her lunch break.
“I can’t believe I’m asking you for relationship advice,” Lardo says, poking Jack in the ribs. “But, so, how do I get him to talk to me again?”
Jack considers. “It’s not so much about talking as it is ... “ He trails off, considering the version of Shitty he saw at the pub on Tuesday. What Shitty had told him. What Lardo had just told him. What he knows about Shits after three years of living with him. “I think he’s lonely. It’s my fault, eh? Summers are always hard for him and I should have known this was going to be harder than most. Instead I’ve been -- Bits and I have been --”
Lardo grins, “Don’t you dare apologize for being in love, Jack Zimmermann. If nothing else, you saved my ass from a whole year of living across from Bitty pining.”
Jack flushes. “He wouldn’t have --”
“He totally would have. Dude, he has it so bad for you.”
Jack grins in spite of himself. “Well,” he says. “Anyway. I should have been paying better attention. I promise to do better.”
“Hey, maybe when you get back from Madison we could come down for another weekend? Do another Sense8 marathon? Or go visit Shits in Hyannis?” She makes a face. “God, his step-mother hates me.”
Jack nudges her shoulder, “Hey, that’s probably a good thing from Shitty’s perspective, right?”
Lardo laughs, “Point. Okay. Let’s do this thing.”
“Game on?”
“Game on.”