12. Rowe
ROWE
She smelled like hay and my cum when I walked her to her car.
She'd cleaned up in my tiny bathroom, buttoned her blouse crooked and fixed it laughing at herself, and we'd talked for another hour about nothing—Brutus's dental chart, the octopus documentary she keeps threatening to make me watch, the laundry chair.
And then she said she had work at seven, and I walked her across the dark lot with ten inches between us, and at her car door she turned and looked up at me with her glasses catching the midway lights.
I wanted to kiss her so badly my throat hurt.
I stood there with my hands fisted in my pockets and my whole body leaning toward hers like a plant starved for sun, and I couldn't. Couldn't bridge ten inches of night air.
She saw it. I know she saw it, because she pressed two fingers to her own lips, held them up in the space between us, and got in her car.
I stood in the gravel until her taillights disappeared.
Now it's two in the morning, and I'm in the van with a duffel bag of spray cans between my boots, and Logan won't shut up.
“So.” He steers us down a street lined with sleeping craftsman houses, headlights off, running on moonlight and memory of the route Silas drilled into us. “The pretty veterinarian stayed late.”
“Drive.”
“I am driving. I'm driving and talking. I contain multitudes.” He takes the corner slowly, engine barely above idle. “Her car was still in the lot at midnight. I know because I walked past it. Twice.”
“Stalker.”
“Concerned brother.” His grin is all teeth. “Concerned, supportive brother who noticed your trailer light was on and your curtain was shut, which in twenty years has meant exactly nothing until tonight.”
Cole leans forward from the back seat, chin nearly on Logan's shoulder. “Wait. The doc was in his trailer?”
“Don't,” I say.
“In the trailer trailer? The sacred trailer? The no-humans-allowed—”
“Cole.”
“I'm proud of you is all.” He drops back into his seat and spins a can of paint in his palm like one of his knives. “Genuinely. Warms my cold dead heart. Did you—”
“Finish that sentence and I'll feed you to Caesar.”
“Caesar loves me.”
“Caesar tolerates you because you smell like jerky.”
Logan rolls us to a stop under a dying maple and cuts the engine.
The street is completely quiet, the silence of people who lock their doors against nothing because nothing has ever come for them. Porch lights every third house. An American flag hanging limp off a bracket. Somewhere a dog barks twice and gives up.
And there it is.
The craftsman with the wraparound porch. Green front door. The wreath from the photo, dried flowers and a little wooden cross wired into the center of it.
Samuel Harlan is asleep inside that house.
My lungs stop working.
I stare at the dark windows, and my thumb finds my left forearm through my sleeve, and for a second, I'm eleven years old and the smell of lemon polish is in my nose and a voice like razorblades is telling me to be still, be quiet, be good—
A can of paint lands in my lap.
“Hey.” Logan's twisted around in the driver's seat, gray eyes steady on mine. Not smirking now. “You're here. You're thirty-five. You have a lion and a bear and a girl who blushes when you look at her. He's an old man who's about to have a very bad week.”
I breathe.
“The very worst week,” Cole adds cheerfully, already easing his door open. “Historically bad. Biblically bad, if you will.”
“I will,” Silas says, materializing out of the dark with a magician’s timing. He must have already finished with Harlan’s hardware store. He nods at me in confirmation.
We move like we have a dozen times. Cole ghosts up the porch steps without making one of them creak, testing sightlines.
Silas peels off toward the side of the house, the wall facing the neighbor's bay window.
Logan shakes his can, the rattle of the mixing ball obscene in the quiet, and grins at me over the fence rail.
“Porch is yours and mine, brother. You want the door or the boards?”
“The door.”
“Attaboy.”
The green door has a brass knocker shaped like a pineapple. I stand in front of it with the can cold in my fist and my heart going like Peanut's after the accident, too fast, too small, and then I think about Wren's voice. The register she uses on frightened animals. Come on, Rowe. Let me see.
I shake the can and start writing.
BE SURE YOUR SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT.
The paint hisses. White letters on green, dripping at the edges, and something in my chest unclenches with every line.
He loved verses. Recited them while he worked me over.
Numbers 32:23 was one of his favorites, delivered soft as a lullaby, and now it's four feet tall across his front door where the casserole women will read it on Sunday.
Logan's working the porch boards at my feet, sweeping strokes, tongue between his teeth like a kid with a coloring book.
ASH IS WHAT REMAINS WHEN SIN IS BURNED AWAY.
“Subtle,” I murmur.
“I'm known for it.”
I can hear the soft hiss of Silas's can, and I know without looking what it says because it always says the same thing. Confession is mercy. Resistance is punishment. Blue paint, neat letters, his mother's memory in every stroke.
Cole materializes beside me and adds his contribution under the porch light in dripping red:
BETTER A MILLSTONE WERE HANGED ABOUT HIS NECK, AND HE CAST INTO THE SEA.
He glances at me, and for once the flippancy is gone off his face entirely.
“For the record,” he says quietly, “I've been waiting to do this one for a long time. All of us have.”
I can't answer. I nod.
We finish the porch. Silas rounds the corner wiping blue off his thumb, surveys the whole of it with his cold blue eyes, and takes a single photo with a burner phone—for the anonymous tip, for Marlene Pickett, for the machinery he's already set grinding.
“Move,” he says.
But I don't. Not yet.
I stand at the bottom of the porch steps and look at the house.
The wreath. The verses screaming off the wood in white and red and blue, as patriotic as the flag next door.
Behind one of those dark windows, Samuel Harlan is sleeping the sleep of a man who reads the second lesson on the first Sunday of the month.
Tomorrow, he wakes up and walks out his green door into the first day of the end of his life.
He doesn't know yet.
I know. I know for both of us.
I soak it in—the paint fumes, the crickets, the weight lifting off my heart one ounce at a time—and then Logan's hand closes on my shoulder and steers me back to the truck.
We roll two streets over with the lights still off, and Logan slows to a crawl in the alley behind the main square without me asking.
Where Silas did the store, before he joined us.
The back wall of Harlan Hardware fills the passenger window, cinder block painted tan, and across the whole of it in blue:
CONFESSION IS MERCY.
RESISTANCE IS PUNISHMENT
And beneath it, smaller:
Ask Samuel about the scholarship boys.
“He'll see it at seven,” Silas says from the back seat, “when he opens. The diner crowd will see it by eight. Marlene Pickett will hear about it by nine, and the paper gets its envelope tomorrow.”
Cole whistles. “It's beautiful when a plan comes together.”
“It hasn't come together. It's started.” But there's something almost warm in Silas's voice. He looks at me in the rearview. “Good enough, brother?”
I watch the wall slide past. Twenty years of night terrors, and his name is on his own building now, in paint that won't come off cinder block without a sandblaster.
“Good enough for tonight,” I say.
Logan takes us home.
The Idaho stain is looking back at me from my ceiling.
I lie in my bed in the dark, boots off, paint on my knuckles, and wait for it.
The downward spiral. It always comes after anything to do with him—the smell of lemon polish crawling up out of memory, the weight on the edge of a bed that isn't there, the scars itching like they want to open.
I've done this enough times to know the shape of the night ahead.
I keep a lamp within reach for these occasions.
It doesn't come.
I lie there braced against a wave that never lands, and what floats up instead is Wren on the bench with her blouse buttoned crooked, laughing at a story about Brutus. Wren pressing two fingers to her lips in the parking lot. Wren with my name on her lips as she shatters while I watch.
Twelve days.
Twelve days and the trucks roll, and I don't know what happens then, but that's not the thought keeping me awake. Instead, I wonder how do I give her more?
Not the watching. The watching we've solved—solved it better than I ever dreamed, her keening my name while I painted her skin without us touching once.
My body still hums from it. But there's a whole country between watching and having, and I keep walking its border in my head, looking for crossings.
Her hair. Could I stand her hair? Not skin—hair.
If she leaned back against my chest with a shirt between us and her hair spilled over my collarbone, is hair skin?
A blanket between us on the bench, her weight against my side through wool.
Gloves. There are gloves. I wear gloves with Brutus's ointment; would her hand in mine feel like a hand if there was leather in between, or would it just feel like leather?
Her hand over my jeans. My palm over her shirt.
The glory hole she offered, blushing so hard she glowed—and even that, even that thought, isn't what's making my chest ache right now.
What's making my chest ache is stupider and softer.
I want to fall asleep with her breathing in the same room.
I want her toothbrush next to mine. I want to learn what she looks like at six in the morning, cranky and unglamorous, reaching past me for coffee without touching me because she knows, because she never once has to be told twice.
She never once had to be told twice.
I roll onto my side and look at the bench where she sat. There's a ring on the floor where her beer bottle stood, still damp from condensation.
Marek said killing Harlan doesn't open the lock. It just frees up the hand.
I flex my free hand in the dark, open, closed, open.
Soon, we take him. After that, we leave.
But tomorrow she comes back for Peanut.
I fall asleep without touching my scars, and I don't dream of the Sanctum at all.