Chapter 4
Beckett
The first month of living with Alma Navarro-Holt taught me that competence was the most attractive quality a person could possess, and that I had apparently been mildly attracted to it my whole life without knowing.
She ran the shop like a quartermaster runs a supply depot.
By seven in the morning, when most people were still finding their socks, she had the front bay opened, the day's appointments printed, the coffee made in the percolator that had previously belonged to me but which she had taken over with such quiet authority that I'd surrendered it without complaint.
She drank her coffee black, standing at the counter, while she reviewed the work order board she had built herself from a four-by-six sheet of plywood and twenty-eight small magnetic name tags.
The board was color-coded. The colors made sense.
By eight, the first customer of the day was usually pulling in, and by the time I left for my forge I would hear her in the bay, talking to a bike in low Spanish, asking it where the problem lived.
That Spanish — under-the-breath, half-coaxing, half-scolding — was the first thing about her that I knew I was going to remember whether the contract ended or didn't. The second thing was the way she organized her tools by frequency of use.
She had a pegboard on the east wall of the second bay.
The most-used wrenches were dead-center, the ones she reached for ten times a day, set at exactly the height of her own hand at rest. From there the tools spiraled out in widening circles, from common to rare, from daily to weekly to monthly, with the truly specialized tools — the ones she might use twice a year — pegged on the outer edges.
It was the most efficient layout I had ever seen in a working shop.
I'd been working at my forge for eight years and my tool wall was still arranged by the order in which I had bought the tools.
On the third week, when I commented on her pegboard, she said, "I rearranged your forge yesterday afternoon."
I said, "You did what."
She said, "I had an hour. I went over. I rearranged your bench. I labeled the bins. I am sorry. I have impulse-control issues with disorganization. If you want, I will put it back."
I said, "No, don't put it back."
She said, "Are you sure?"
I said, "I'm going to go look at it."
I drove to the forge. I let myself in. I stood in the doorway of my own workshop for a long minute, and I felt, simultaneously, the small wounded pride of a man whose space has been entered without permission and the considerably larger relief of a man who has just had his life made twelve percent easier without having to ask.
She had not done much. She had put the hammers in a row, organized by head weight.
She had put the tongs on a single rack, sorted by jaw type.
She had labeled the bins along the back wall: MILD STEEL ROUND.
MILD STEEL FLAT. HIGH CARBON. STAINLESS.
COPPER. brASS. SCRAP — REUSABLE. SCRAP — NO.
The labels were on small white tags written in her hand, which was small and clean and the kind of writing that made you want to be a better person.
I drove back to the shop. She was at the counter doing payroll. I walked past her and said, "Don't put it back."
She did not look up. She said, "I won't."
She did not smile. I felt the not-smile from across the room.
That was the third week.
We fell into rhythms. She cooked Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays.
I cooked Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays.
On Sundays we ordered from the diner, where Sienna would deliver our food personally even when she was not technically working the shift, because Sienna's idea of friendship involved a great deal of unsolicited proximity.
Alma read mysteries — Tana French, mostly, then Louise Penny, then a stretch where she worked through every Reginald Hill novel in publication order.
She read at the kitchen table with a glass of water and a pencil for marking the parts she liked.
She did not dog-ear pages. She had opinions about people who dog-eared pages, and the opinions were not gentle.
I read poetry. I had always read poetry — my mother had read it to me as a boy, and I had never quite shaken the habit.
Mary Oliver. Ted Kooser. Wendell Berry. Some Heaney when I was feeling severe.
Alma noticed the books on my bedside table on the first night and never said anything about them, which I appreciated.
People who are not poetry readers tend to want to discuss the fact that you are one, the way people who do not drink will discuss your beer.
Alma simply absorbed the information and moved on.
She did, however, learn that I quoted poetry when I was frustrated.
This was a habit my mother had given me — when something would not work, my mother would say, Beckett, what does the poem say?
And I would have to recite some line, any line, that fit the situation.
The habit had survived. When the bearings on my power hammer went and I had to rebuild the assembly at nine on a Thursday night, Alma found me sitting on the floor of the forge with grease up to my elbows, and I was muttering, half-conscious of doing it, what we need is here, what we need is here, over and over, like a man warding off something.
She said, "Who is that?"
I said, "Berry."
She said, "He's right."
I said, "He usually is."
She handed me a cold beer and sat down on the floor next to me and did not offer to help with the bearings, because she did not know bearings, and did not pretend to.
She just sat there, drinking her own beer, while I rebuilt the assembly piece by piece.
When I was done, she said, "Better?" I said, "Better.
" She got up and went back to the apartment.
I stayed at the forge for another hour, looking at the rebuilt hammer, thinking about her sitting on the concrete floor in clean jeans because she had not wanted me to be alone while I fixed it.
That was week five.
The town believed us. I had worried, in the days before the wedding, about the town.
Ember Falls was small enough that everyone knew everyone's business, and the courthouse-marriage of the youngest Holt brother to the woman who'd inherited Tomás's shop should have been the gossip event of the season.
Instead, Sienna got to the gossip first. Sienna's version of the story was so romantic and so detailed and so emotionally exhausting that by the time it had made the rounds through the diner, the hardware store, the post office, and the front porch of every senior citizen on Ridge Road, the story had become not those two got married because of a will but those two were destined and the will was simply the catalyst, isn't that beautiful, doesn't it just make you believe in something.
Sienna was wasted on event planning. She should have been a war propagandist.
The club knew the truth. The club did not gossip.
The club had absorbed the news with the casual professionalism of an institution that has handled stranger things, and the boys had simply started treating Alma as Forge's wife, which she accepted with grace, except for the moment when Diesel called her daughter in front of everyone at a cookout and she had to excuse herself to the bathroom for what she later described as atmospheric reasons.
Gunner pulled me aside on a Tuesday in the second week.
We were at the compound. There was a security briefing, but I had been there only because Liam had asked me to consult on a small fabrication question for one of the SUVs.
The briefing ended. Most of the boys filtered out.
Gunner walked up to me on the porch with his hands in his pockets and his face arranged in the particular expression he wore when he was about to ask me something he thought I would not like being asked.
He said, "You know what you're doing?"
I said, "Helping a friend."
He said, "She's not your friend, Beck. She's your wife."
I said, "On paper."
He looked at me. He did not say anything for a long moment. He looked out at the woods that bordered the compound — the same Blue Ridge backdrop that had been the wallpaper of our entire lives — and he said, more quietly than I expected, "Paper has a way of becoming real."
I said, "Gunner."
He said, "I'm not lecturing. I'm telling you what happened to me."
He meant Celeste. He'd met her on a job, a forced-proximity assignment that had been bad in every way it could be bad and which had ended, despite everything, with him married to her two years later.
Gunner did not talk about Celeste often.
He talked about her in the same way he talked about all the most important things in his life, which was rarely and only when it counted.
He said, "I am going to tell you one thing and then I am going to stop."
I said, "Okay."
He said, "If you feel something, do not lie to her about it. Whatever the contract says. You promised her honesty, even if you didn't write it down. So if you feel something, you tell her."
I said, "I haven't felt anything."
He looked at me.
He said, "Beckett."
I said, "Yet."
He said, "Yeah. Yet."
He clapped me on the shoulder, the way he had clapped me on the shoulder when I was twelve and he was sixteen, and he walked back into the compound without waiting for a response. That was his way. He delivered the line; he did not stay for the discussion.