Chapter 12
DOLL
Nobody gives me a job, and it takes me most of Tuesday morning to work out that this is the problem.
The clubhouse has changed since yesterday.
Two prospects on the roof instead of one at the door.
A pickup parked sideways behind the gate where no truck sat before.
Men cross the lot in pairs with their phones out.
Angel gave it to me straight out of church, standing in my doorway.
Glitch gets a day. The fence gets taller.
So I can see the machine working. I can’t find the part of it that needs me.
Victor never left me without instructions. That was the leash, I understand that now, but ten years of leash taught me to reach for it. Since Angel left my doorway, I’ve made my bed and come down looking for something to do. In the kitchen I start scrubbing a pan that was clean when I picked it up.
“That pan’s been through enough.” Phoenix takes it out of my hands and hangs it on the rack. “Sit. Lunch is happening whether you help or not.”
“I can help.”
“I know you can. That’s not the question anybody’s asking.” She points at the long table with her chin. “Sit.”
I sit. My hand goes to my chest, flat over my shirt, and finds the ring through the cotton.
The women arrive all at once and from three directions. Nobody called them that I heard.
Birdie comes in through the side door with a casserole dish and no free hands, so she opens the door with her hip, practiced.
Behind her comes a girl about my age with a yellow highlighter shoved behind one ear, and I know her face before I place it.
Victor’s gala, three weeks ago. She came in on the arm of the man who wouldn’t shake Victor’s hand, and I stood at Victor’s elbow with a tablet, biting my cheek to keep from smiling. That man was Cash.
A third girl deals a stack of mismatched plates out like cards and puts a fork in my hand mid-sentence, no eye contact, still talking to Birdie about a truck battery. Like arming me.
At the center of the table, Phoenix sets down a pot that could feed an army, then another one. There is too much food and more keeps coming. Every time the door bangs shut it opens again on another cut.
At Halcyon, every table had a seating order and the seating order was the org chart.
I once spent a full dinner on whether I ranked above or below the man who did Victor’s title searches.
Here I can’t find the chart at all. It looks like Phoenix outranks everyone and yet she serves everyone.
Birdie teases Sweetheart, Sweetheart teases back harder, and Birdie fills my water without asking.
None of it would have happened in Victor’s dining room.
The door opens once more and a woman comes in slow, her white hair pinned neat, and the women shift around her without anyone standing up. Chairs scoot. A plate appears at the empty spot before she reaches it.
“Darling Wick,” she says to me, and sits. “My mother did that to me. The club thinks they gave me a road name. Since they’re still proud of it. I let them.”
“Sloane.”
“Nah. I know exactly who you are, and it’s Doll now.”
Of course she knows. Everyone at this table knows exactly where I come from, and not one of them has asked me a single question about it.
That’s what I can’t get over. Nobody asks. Nobody leans in with soft eyes and says how you holding up. The whole table already runs on the answer, and they’ve decided my rent here is not my story. My rent is passing the potatoes.
I pass the potatoes.
Sweetheart points her knife at me, friendly. “Charcoal suit. Tablet. You stood at Victor’s elbow at that gala and almost smiled when Cash left his hand hanging.”
“I bit my cheek.”
“I saw.” She loads her fork. “Twenty-four hours before that party I was crawling under a chain-link fence in the rain with twenty-two dollars, a protein bar, and my driver’s license.”
“You were way ahead of me. I only had the license when Angel pulled me out of the dumpster.”
“He did what?”
Laughter goes around the table and includes me without requiring anything from me. I eat more than I’ve eaten in a week. Phoenix refills my plate before it’s empty, which I suspect is policy.
“Anyway, Cash married her at the courthouse four days after the fence,” Birdie says. “And this woman wore his ring two and a half weeks as a Mrs. before he stood up in the yard on Sunday and claimed her in front of everybody.”
“I was busy,” Sweetheart says. “I had a stepfather to bury in paperwork.”
Claimed. Victor never used that one. He used mine and ours and family, but they’re all the same knife in my memory. My fork stops moving.
Darling catches it. She sets her water down and speaks to the table, not to me, which is its own kindness.
“Around here a man doesn’t claim a woman quiet,” she says.
“He stands up in the yard in front of every armed idiot he calls a brother and tells them her problems are his problems now. Then he waits. Sometimes he waits a long time, and the whole club watches him sweat. It doesn’t count until she says it back. ”
“The prospects have pools going on which Sunday one man will stand up for his woman,” Phoenix says, chin toward the plate dealer.
“They do not,” Bandit says.
“I know a brother who put forty dollars in his pool himself,” Darling says. “It’s already club legend.”
I laugh, and it comes out steadier than I expect. Under my shirt the ring sits warm against my sternum where my hand has drifted again.
Sweetheart has her phone out before the laughter dies.
“Opening a new book,” she announces to the table. “Which Sunday. I’m taking a date range and a buy-in.”
“On who?” I ask, and every woman at this table looks at me with the patience you’d show a slow child.
“Eat,” Phoenix says pointing at my plate.
Angel fills the kitchen doorway.
He doesn’t come in. He stops at the frame with a mug in one hand and looks at Phoenix, one beat, asking if the table is open. She tips her head half an inch. Permission granted, or maybe just measured.
He crosses to me, sets the coffee next to my plate.
“No word yet,” he says. “You’ll hear it when I do.”
Then he’s gone, back across the lot, and the screen door claps shut behind him.
The table is silent for exactly as long as it takes his boots to clear the porch.
“Huh,” Birdie says.
“Well,” Darling says to her bread. “That was something.”
“He asked first,” Sweetheart says. “Did everyone catch that?”
“Eat,” Phoenix says. The table obeys, and everyone is smiling at their food.
I don’t know where to put this warm feeling I have, so it sits in my chest next to the ring. Two weights, both new, both mine. I drink the coffee, which is exactly how I take it, which means at some point he learned that without me telling him.
Ifind him at dusk on the back steps with a clipboard of gate rotations, because apparently vice presidents have homework.
I hand him a mug. His coffee, black, one sugar, which I learned the same way he learned mine. He looks at the cup, then at me, and takes it. He moves over a few inches on the step. An invitation. I sit.
“They feed you?”
“Twice. Phoenix considers a clean plate a personal insult.” I wrap both hands around my own cup. “Sweetheart threatened what’s left of my uncle’s company at lunch. I think it was a bonding gesture.”
“It was. She’s been waiting years for Halcyon to bleed.” He sets the clipboard down. “You holding up?”
“That’s the first time anyone here has asked me that.” Past the fence line the light’s gone soft, no teeth in the dark tonight. “I kept waiting for the interrogation. It never came. They handed me a fork instead.”
I pull the shoelace out from under my collar so the ring hangs in the open, small and bright against my shirt. His eyes go to it, then back to my face, and he says nothing about it. That nothing is the whole reason I can leave it out.
“Darling explained claimed to me,” I say.
He goes quiet. His thumb finds the seam of the mug and stays there. “That so.”
“She says it doesn’t count until the woman says it back. That there’s a waiting period. That the club bets on it.”
“The club bets on everything. Two prospects have money on which day Glitch shaves and on what day Cash irons his shirts.”
“Angel.” He turns his head. In the last light, the line of his jaw is hard, and it has never once been hard with me. “Yesterday, when I wanted you to stay, I was afraid of the dark and you were the biggest thing between me and it. That’s not what tonight is.”
He nods slow, eyes on the ring.
“Ten years of being told what I was. A day and a half of being free. I know what I like best. Tonight I’m not afraid. I’m asking anyway. Please come to my room when you’re done with the fence.”
He picks up the clipboard, writes one line, and hands the rotation schedule to the prospect at the gate on his way past us. Then he’s standing, holding out his hand, done with the fence.
“Asked and answered, Doll.”
I take his hand.