Chapter 1 #2
Ash didn't say anything. That's the thing I keep coming back to about that first hour. He didn't fill it. Most people fill it. Most people take a woman's silence as a hole they're personally responsible for.
He just sat there and let the clock go.
"There's a rule," I said, when I could.
"He told me about the rule."
I looked up.
"He told you about the rule."
"Second week he was prospecting. He was drunk, and we were sitting on the loading dock, and he pushed his sleeve up and showed me a Sharpie job he'd done himself in the bathroom.
" Ash's mouth did the short one-sided thing again, but there was nothing funny under it.
"Told me his sister wrote it on him in ballpoint when he was seven, and that in twenty years she's never once broken it, and that he'd — "
He stopped.
"That he'd what."
"That he'd never been able to figure out how to say thank you for it in a way that didn't sound small."
I put my hands flat on the table because they were doing something.
"He spelled it wrong," I said. "The original."
"I know. He told me that too."
"He wasn't supposed to know I noticed."
"He noticed you noticing," Ash said. "He was seven. He's not stupid. He's never been stupid. That's the whole problem with him."
Outside, somebody dropped something metal and somebody else said something about somebody's mother, and the ordinary noise of thirty men in a big building came back up around the closed door, and I sat in an outlaw motorcycle club's church with a stranger and tried to reassemble the last three weeks into a shape that didn't have a hole in it.
"You didn't tell me," I said. "Any of you. For nineteen days."
"He asked us not to."
"He's twenty-four."
"He's an adult who made a voluntary medical decision," Ash said. "I've had that sentence read to me over the phone by three different people in the last month and I hate all of them."
"Then why are you telling me now?"
He was quiet.
"Ash."
"Because he's not calling you," he said, "and that's not like him."
"No, it isn't."
"And because I called up there four days ago and asked to speak to him, and the woman on the phone was extremely warm, and extremely accommodating, and she said absolutely, of course, and then she put me on hold for six minutes and came back and told me Kai had declined the call."
"Declined."
"That's the word she used. She used it twice.
" He turned the paperback over again, and I noticed his thumb had worn the corner of it soft.
"Nobody up there has ever said no to me.
That's what's wrong. They've never once said no.
Everything is yes, and gentle, and voluntary, and my prospect has been up there nineteen days and I can't get a sentence out of him and everyone I talk to sounds like they're glad I called. "
"Have you been there?"
"Once. Four years ago."
"How was it?"
"Immaculate," Ash said.
I looked at him for a long time.
"That's not a good word," I said.
"No," he said. "It isn't."
"What was he like," I said. "Here. Before."
"Prospecting?"
"Yeah."
Ash looked at the ceiling for a second, and something in his face let go about a quarter of an inch.
"He's the worst prospect I've ever had," he said, "and everybody in this building would take a swing at somebody over him."
"Explain that."
"He can't take an order. Not won't — can't. You tell him to move the truck and he'll move the truck, and then he'll come back and explain to you a better place the truck could have gone, and he's right, Wren, that's the maddening part, he's right about eighty percent of the time and it doesn't matter because he's a prospect and nobody asked. "
"That's him."
"That's him. Meanwhile — " Ash shook his head.
"Two Novembers ago there's an old man out on Kettle Road, no relation to anybody, whose furnace quit.
Kai found out somehow. Kai finds out everything, he talks to everybody, he's got the world's worst discretion and the world's best address book.
And he took four guys out there on a Sunday and they had it going by dark, and he never told me.
I found out in February. From the old man. "
"Yeah," I said. "That's — yeah."
"He's got no floor and no ceiling. He'll do the finest thing anybody's done here all year and then lose a set of keys that cost us eight hundred dollars.
" He turned the paperback a quarter turn.
"The men love him. Roman doesn't know what to do with him.
And I think about half of why he can't get clean is that he's spent his whole life being the guy who's right in a room where nobody's asking. "
I sat with that.
"He got that from me," I said.
"I'd assumed."
"Not the part where people love him. The other part."
"I know," said Ash. "I'd assumed that too."
I stood up. I picked my keys off the table where I'd put them without noticing, and I got my phone out, and I did the mileage in my head, which I can do, that math I'm fine at.
"It's about nine hours," Ash said.
"Ten and a half in Delores."
"You're not going tonight."
"I'm going tonight."
"You've been driving six hours already."
"I've been driving my whole life." I zipped my jacket. "Thanks for the sentence. It had information in it. That's rarer than you'd think."
He stood up too. He was taller than the sitting had suggested, which felt like a small dishonesty on his part.
"Wren."
"What."
"I'm coming with you."
"Absolutely not."
"You don't know where it is."
"There are maps. There have been maps for some time now. Big development for the trucking industry."
"You don't know the road past Grayling in February and you don't have the number of the woman who runs the place and you're not on Kai's contact list," Ash said, "and I am, because I put myself on it, and I'm the reason he's up there in the first place."
Which stopped me with my hand on the door.
I turned around.
"Say that again."
He didn't blink.
"Sit down," Ash said, "and I'll tell you what this club does with the men it can't save. And then you can decide whether you still want me in your truck."
I stood in the doorway of a room I had no business being in, in a town I'd never wanted to see, and I thought about a bench outside that said VISITORS, and a boy waving at a house.
"There's coffee?" I said.
"There's good coffee."
"Fine," I said. "But I'm still not impressed by the bikes."