Chapter 8 #2
"It wasn't worth it," I said. "It was necessary. Those aren't the same thing and I'm not going to pretend they are so you can feel better about hitting me."
He stood there in the gravel breathing.
Then he said, "Is she here."
"She's inside."
"Is she mad at me?"
"Kai," I said. "God almighty. Go in the building."
He went in the building.
I heard it from the lot, because a foundry is one big room and they'd left the doors open — no words, just a noise a person makes, and then thirty men very loudly finding somewhere else to be.
Roman came out and stood next to me in the gravel while I got my ear back.
"You let him."
"Yeah."
"Good." He watched the doorway. "You'd have been wrong not to. That's the last free one, though. Next time he does that he's a member swinging on an officer and I'll have to do something about it, and I'd rather not, because I like him."
"Everybody likes him."
"That's his whole problem," Roman said, and then, after a while: "Nineteen out of forty-four."
"So far."
"That's not nothing."
"It's not forty-four."
"No," he said. "It isn't. Get used to that number, because you're going to be running the thing that produces it." He clapped me once on the shoulder, which from Roman is a parade. "That's what the ninety days are for, by the way. In case you thought it was a punishment."
"It felt like one."
"It was that too," said Roman. "I can do two things at once."
Which is how, at three o'clock the next morning, I came to be in the cab of a wrecker in a rest-stop lot on Route 9, hiding from a party in my own clubhouse with a woman I'd known for six weeks.
"This is undignified," I said.
"You're an officer of an outlaw motorcycle club."
"I'm not, currently. Ninety days."
"You're a civilian hiding in a truck," Wren said. "It's worse than I thought."
She'd backed Delores into the far corner under the one dead light, because she does everything like a professional, and we had the engine off and two coffees going cold in the cup holders and a blanket she keeps behind the seat that smells like diesel and cedar in a combination that I have since become unable to encounter in public.
"There are eleven beds in that building," I said. "Eleven actual beds."
"Nine of which have somebody in them and two of which are Cricket's, for reasons he explained at length."
"So."
"So," Wren agreed.
I looked at the sleeper curtain.
"How much room is back there?"
"Enough."
"Enough for—"
"Ash," she said, "I have slept in that bunk four nights a week for six years and I have never once had anybody in it, and I've been thinking about that for about nine days, so if you're asking a logistics question—"
"I'm asking a logistics question."
"—the answer is get back there."
It's a truck. That's the thing. It's a truck, and the ceiling is forty-eight inches off the mattress, and I hit my head twice and she laughed both times, and the second time she laughed so hard she had to put her face in the pillow and I lay there with one hand over my eye saying, "This is going to bruise.
I'm going to have a bruise, and Cricket is going to ask, and I'm going to have to say something. "
"Say you fell."
"Off what?"
"A truck," she said. "Technically true," and then she was kissing me and it stopped being funny, or it kept being funny, honestly, all the way through — that's the thing nobody tells you about the ones that take, that you laugh, that at some point she said watch the — no, the other — Ash, the CB, you're going to key the CB, and I said, into her shoulder, "let them hear it," and she said "absolutely not, that's channel nineteen, that's hundreds of people," and we both had to stop for a full minute.
She was different in the dark than she is anywhere else. Not softer. Slower. She held onto the back of my neck with one hand the entire time like a person holding a rail.
Afterward she said, "Nineteen hours."
"What?"
"That's how long it's been since Kai got out of that car and I haven't cried once and I keep waiting."
"It'll come."
"I know." She had her head on my chest. "Ash. He's going to prospect again. Roman said. He's going to be in this."
"Yeah."
"He's going to be awful at it."
"Spectacularly."
"He can't take an order. He's never once taken an order in his life."
"He'll get there in about nine years," I said.
"That's your number for everything."
"It's a good number."
The heater fan clicked. Somewhere out on Route 9 a truck went by and the whole cab rocked about an inch, and I felt her hand flatten out on my chest.
"Hey," she said. "How long do you come for?"
"...Is that a real question?"
"It's the family question. You get it once."
I looked at the ceiling forty-eight inches off my face, in a rest-stop lot, in a truck named Delores for reasons that have still, to this day, never been disclosed to me.
"Until," I said.
She didn't say anything for a long time.
Then: "That's the right answer, but you should know you got it for free, and Kai worked seventeen years for it."
"I'll pay it off."
"You will," Wren said, and went to sleep on me, and I lay there awake until it got light because I wanted to be the one keeping watch for once.