Chapter 3
ROMAN
A FEW HOURS LATER
The rain drapes itself over the lodge in soft threads, the air inside thick with woodsmoke and the faint sweetness of all the desserts that we’ve eaten today.
Marisa is at the kitchen table, chin tipped just enough to tell me she’s weighing her answer.
I want to push, but not so hard she bolts.
The back door bangs open. “Uh—bosses?” A prospect stands there dripping, cut sliding off one shoulder. “We got a situation.”
Deacon doesn’t even look up from his coffee. “What kind?”
“The kind where the drunkest groomsman decided the bourbon barrels were lonely. He’s trying to tap one with a butter knife.”
Cruz grins. “Well, hell. Can’t let him romance the whiskey unsupervised.”
I glance at Marisa, hoping she’ll smirk, maybe tell me to stay put and send the others instead so she can tell me what I want to hear. Her lips don’t move.
We step outside expecting a five-minute rescue.
It turns into a circus.
The butter knife snaps.
The guy starts bawling about losing the love of his life. Another barrel works loose and rolls halfway toward the creek, and it takes all three of us to keep it from going for a swim.
By the time we’ve wrangled the mess back under control, most of an hour’s gone.
The lodge is quieter when we get back, shadows pooling in the corners.
My boots track rain toward the kitchen, and I know before I even open the door.
She’s gone.
No tray. No crumbs. Not even something that’ll allow me the mercy of pretending she only stepped out for air.
The kitchen holds the ghosts she left behind—an abandoned piping bag on its side, a spoon in the sink with her thumbprint faint on the handle, an apron folded with careful corners.
The kind of care you give when you’re leaving without a note and you want the room to forgive you.
I set a palm on the back of the chair and listen to the rain. Vanilla lingers in the air, a memory more than a scent.
There is heat under it from the oven bricks, there is smoke from the hearth, there is my own leather and iron and stubbornness, and under all that there is her, a trace I can taste on the back of my tongue if I stand in one place and do not blink.
I did not expect her to stay. I wanted her to.
That is not the same thing.
Want is the first sin and the last comfort, my grandmother used to say, then she would press a rosary into my palm and tell me to walk it off.
I want her to walk back in and tell me I misread the room, that she left a pan in the oven and needs an excuse to return.
The door gives me nothing.
The night gives me the lodge I built to hold a world that does not ask for permission to be cruel.
Cruz pads in with two plates that rattle just enough to be human.
He sets them near the sink and leans his hip on the counter where she stood.
His curls are wet at the ends, and he smells like cedar soap and smoke.
“She left,” he says, not asking, not accusing, just laying truth on the table like a knife you mean to sharpen later.
“She did,” I agree.
Deacon steps in behind him with the toolbox already closed.
His sleeves are rolled, his forearms smudged, his order restored to a temper that makes sense.
He looks at the empty chair and the apron and then at me. He is good at reading structures, including men.
“No note,” he says.
“No note,” I repeat.
Cruz looks like a man about to speak kindness.
Deacon looks like a man about to speak engineering.
I hold up a hand to stop both.
I do not want to be comforted, and I do not want a plan.
I want to stand in this quiet until it tells me what it takes to deserve the sound of her laugh.
“Go sleep,” I tell them. “We ride at six. I want the ridge clear before the storm turns to ice.”
Cruz flicks a glance at the apron then at me. “You want me to check the southern cameras before bed?”
“Yes. And lock the chicken run. Cleopatra was organizing.”
“She always is,” he says, a small smile cutting his tired face. “She has union leanings.”
Deacon sets the toolbox on a shelf with the kind of attention that makes you safer. “You will walk the rooms,” he states.
“I will walk the rooms,” I repeat.
They leave me to the work I am married to.
I make the rounds the way a man makes his bed after a night he should not have given away.
I tap the back door twice and feel the bolt answer.
I pass the hearth and stir the coals with the poker that belonged to a man who taught me what patience looks like on cold mornings.
I pick a bottle up and put it back.
I fold a dish towel with more care than a dish towel requires. I turn off a light that should be off.
I leave one on in the hall because people here like to wake to a small kindness.
In the pantry, I stop because the room stops me.
The memory is not a picture.
It’s a feeling, it’s accepting the truth that I saw her here first before she was trudging to the tents with all those desserts, looking like a deer caught in the rain.
Her bending here, head lowered, the string of her apron tickling the small of her back, the silver line of a knife as it slid under a candied orange slice to coax it into alignment with its brothers.
I had stood at the threshold and thought this is how a person prays when she does not believe anyone is listening, and I had turned away because my chest did not have room for that.
On the prep table a napkin waits, folded with corners so exact it translates into a language I understand.
The paper smells faintly of cinnamon.
Her name sits on the top line in the kind of handwriting that argues with its own neatness.
Beneath it a number.
No message, not even a lie about returning the pan.
A gift you give a man you do not trust, which is to say a gift you give a man you want to trust and know better than to.
I sit.
The chair creaks the way all honest chairs do.
I hold the napkin between two fingers and feel stupidly large.
I think about the saints on my ribs and the devils they wrestle.
I think about the rosary inked at my collarbone for all the men who did not make it back to hang the real one there.
I think about the way her hands did not shake when the generator coughed and the tent lights flickered.
I think about how she fed strangers and disappeared before the thank you could reach her.
I tell myself she wrote the number for Cruz and I tell myself she wrote the number for Deacon and then I tell myself the truth, which is that I do not care who she thought she wrote it for because I am sitting here with it in my palm like a sin I would commit again on a weak day.
I fold the napkin once because a man should not stare at something he cannot improve and then I tuck it into my wallet.
I close the leather over it and put the whole thing back where it belongs, close enough to hurt when I sit down too fast.
“Saint,” Deacon calls from the hall. “South is secure.”
“Good,” I answer. “Sleep.”
I sit with the scent of cinnamon and rain for long time before I finally go to bed.
When I do sleep I dream about coffee grounds and a twist of orange peel and the back of a woman’s neck.
When I wake, I unwrap the day the way a fighter unwraps his hands after a fight he did not lose and does not call a win.
The week rolls like a tire with a nail in it. It moves, it holds, it loses air at the edges.
We ride the ridge roads because snow hangs around in the shadows up there long after the valley forgets.
Cruz splits his time between the med kit and the kitchen because a man who is tender with wounds is also tender with soup.
Deacon stares down a generator that steals volts in the mornings and threatens it with a different kind of fire.
Isla, Cruz’s daughter, returns from school with a cutout snowflake that looks like a star exploded and tells me I am not allowed to tape it to the gun cabinet because her teacher says art should not be afraid.
At night I stand on the porch with a cigarette I do not light and a prayer I do not admit to.
I take the napkin out and put it back.
I type her name into my phone and let the letters sit there like wet ink. I do not hit send.
I am a patient man about most things.
About this, I pretend to be.
We go north on a parts run and run into a deputy who owes me a favor yet never says so.
We go south to check a truce with men who never learned how to keep their mouths closed during silence.
I sit with the old-timers who remember when our patch belonged to a larger charter and when I cut our ties with a funeral and a fire and a promise I would earn the respect we lost by walking straighter and biting harder.
They look at me like a son who brought them a coat in winter and set a stiff price on the sleeves.
They call me Saint and I let them.
The joke was old when they gave it to me. I am not a holy man. I am a man who keeps score.
A week slips into a month in a way I pretend not to notice.
On a Tuesday I take the long road to the overlook by Route 28 because the ridge keeps the cold late and I am a man who likes an empty place to put his thoughts down while he is still moving.
The air smells like stone dust and winter breath.
The valley looks clean enough to drink.
I pull off, kill the engine, and sit while the bike ticks heat.
I pull my phone without planning it and type her name into contacts.
When I saved it all those weeks ago, I put a small sugar emoji there because I am not above private jokes with myself.
My thumb hovers over the message field.
I write three words and kill them.
I write two and kill them.
I write one and decide it is too soft for my mouth.
A crow lands on the guardrail and cocks its head like a judge.
I put the phone away because I am not being tried today.
Back at the lodge the days are even and sharp.
We fix what men break.
We feed what hunger undoes.
I wash the old enamel stove with vinegar and think about her hand flying over the dough as if she had known this kitchen longer than an evening.
I find a sugared petal in the wrong drawer and set it on the high shelf where odd relics live.
A bolt from my first bike.
A marble Isla swears fell out of the sky.
A photograph of three men on a summer day so bright it hurts to remember how confident we were.
I look up at the petal and consider eating it just to finish the sentence.
I decide some sentences are better when you let them hang.
I am not alone in this.
Cruz makes a point of using her orange peel trick in his night coffee and then leaving the cup on the counter where I will see it and grunt.
Deacon annotates the cookbook she held with structural notes written so neat you could draft a bridge off them.
He circles a biscotti recipe and writes load bearing in the margin.
Isla asks where the lady who laughs with her belly went, and I tell her Brooklyn, because a child should always get a real place even when the truth is I do not know and do not like not knowing.
At poker night in the back room it gets thrown at me because men like to press a bruise.
Cruz deals and flicks a glance over his cards.
“You going to call the girl or start a shrine,” he asks.
The table grins like thieves.
I light a cigarette I have no intention of finishing and give him the look you give a man you will not punch because he does your laundry.
“I am not a boy,” I tell him. “I do not chase.”
Deacon lifts his beer and studies the label like a map. “You do not need to chase,” he says. “You need to open a door.”
“Same thing,” I say.
“Not if she is already standing on the other side,” he says back.
We play.
I lose a hand on purpose because men get edgy when the house wins too clean.
I win one I should not because the table forgot my dead are tattooed on me and I count in cards.
I go to bed with the napkin under my pillow like a teenager with a contraband magazine and the part of me that lived past twenty shakes his head and lets it be.
There are jokes in our world and there are rules.
The jokes keep your chest from locking shut.
The rules keep you alive.
My men know both.
No lies. No abandonment. No harm to women or children.
When a prospect mouths off in front of a woman, I run him four miles in the snow and then sit with him while he eats grits and learns how to shut his mouth with dignity.
When an old rival floats a rumor about me being soft, I send Deacon with a gift basket and a message the man hears with his bones.
When the hens decide the back stoop belongs to them, I step aside because there are fights worth having and fights you let a bird win.
I want to tell myself the ache fades with work.
It does not.
It tightens until it becomes a small bead of glass lodged under the skin.
You learn to stop picking at it on the hour.
You do not forget it exists.
On certain evenings when the snow starts again and the road shines like a blade, I taste cardamom on a ghost of a spoon and think about a girl who handled sugar like it meant something.
Tonight I set my keys on the hall table and start toward the garage because a belt on the second bike has been whispering when it should hum.
The house has gone to its late hour self, nothing loud, nothing dead, the way places get when they have been lived in so long they know how to keep you from tripping.
I pass the pantry and my shoulder lifts all on its own, that animal thing a body does when it remembers being near heat.
I look in because I am not a coward.
The space is clean.
The shelves are lined like soldiers.
The jar of cinnamon sticks is down to a handful.
There is a smudge on the prep table I did not see earlier and I find myself wiping it with the heel of my hand as if any trace of her needs to be cleaned by me and not by a cloth.
I keep walking.
The door to the garage has a ghost of cold around it.
I put my hand on the knob and feel the room wait.
The rain ticks. Somewhere a chicken shifts on her roost and grumbles about the state of the world.
Above the door frame hangs an old Saint Christopher medal, dented and stubborn.
I touch it because it is a habit I do when no one is looking and because my grandmother would knock me with a wooden spoon if she saw me ignore a blessing within reach.
Then I do the thing I have not let myself do, because sometimes it is worse to move than to sit still.
I pull my phone from my pocket without telling my mind what I am doing.
It wakes to her name like a dog who already knows the leash.
My thumb opens the message field.
The keyboard waits like a dare I am tired of ignoring.
There are a hundred things men say when they want to pretend they did not want to say anything.
There are three things men say when they mean it.
I type, and for once I do not edit the truth out of the sentence before it can breathe.