Chapter 21 #2
I had wanted to finish this car and take her somewhere in it, somewhere that was just ours. Just the road, her, and whatever came next.
Fuck, I still want that.
Ricky arrives just after four.
He comes in the same way he did two days ago, as if the room were expecting him and had been holding his spot.
Different suit this time. Same two men behind him.
Same unhurried walk of a man who has never once had to rush toward anything because everything he wants has always come to him eventually.
Griff ducks under the roller door last, that Zippo already in his hand, open and shut, open and shut. The sound of it crawls up my spine the way it always has.
I stand near the Chevy with my arms at my sides and my jaw locked, watching them come in. I sense every inch of what this is. My mess. My past. My debt, walking into the one place that has never asked anything of me except to show up and do the work.
Rainer comes out of his office, carrying an old canvas bag.
He doesn’t make a show of it. Just crosses the workshop and sets it on the bench with a dull, heavy thud that lands straight in my gut and stays there.
Ricky looks at the bag, then at me.
His smile never quite reaches his eyes. It never has. That smile is furniture. It means nothing except that he is comfortable. And a comfortable Ricky is its own particular kind of threat.
“One hundred and three thousand dollars like we agreed upon,” Rainer says, flat and even. “Count it.”
One of Ricky’s men steps forward, takes the bag, unzips it, and starts going through it with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this before and will do it again.
Griff stays near the roller door. Arms loose. That rotten curve still sits on his mouth.
I stand still and watch as the money is counted because I deserve to. Every second of it. I created this and I cannot avert my gaze from its consequences.
Ricky watches me rather than the money. He wants to see the shame. I give him nothing else.
When the counting is finished, the man nods once.
“It’s all there,” Rainer says, moving this along the way he moves everything, without ceremony. “He is retired now.”
Ricky’s eyes move to me.
“I’m fucking done,” I say.
Griff snorts near the roller door. “Yeah, until you need money again.”
I gaze at him.
My fist wants to hit his mouth and watch him bleed. The old instinct is already up and moving. Already calculating distance, angles, and exactly how much damage I could do before either of Ricky’s men got involved. The answer is deeply satisfying to think about.
Skylar’s text runs through my head: I need the truth, Zane.
Then Rainer’s voice, quiet and certain in the early-morning light, the engine running between us: You did good, son.
I let the instinct die and let Griff have the last word because some things are not worth the cost. I have finally, at twenty-six, started to understand the difference.
Ricky picks up the bag and holds out a piece of paper to Rainer.
Rainer takes it, looks at it once, and puts it into his pocket.
“Paid,” he says. “Don’t come back here again.”
Ricky’s gaze slides to him and for a second, something cold passes between two men who had never met before all of this and have no intention of ever meeting again.
They file out, Griff last, the Zippo flicking once as he ducks under the roller door.
Sunlight takes them away. It’s a few moments before a vehicle pulls away from the curb and the sound of it fades down the street until there is nothing left but the workshop, the hum of the overhead lights, and the soft sound of the radio.
Neither Rainer or I say a word as he stands beside me.
After a while, he pulls the folded paper from his pocket and holds it out. I take it.
Paid in full.
Zane Rivera.
Debt settled.
I stare at it until the words blur together.
“I am paying you back,” I say to Rainer.
“I know.”
“Every fucking cent, Rainer.”
“I know, son.”
I shift my stance and sense that old itch rising in my hands. That restless, useless urge to put them somewhere before they make a decision without me.
Rainer watches me with steady eyes. “Take the car out for a spin.”
I observe him. “Now?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Are you waiting for a signed invitation?”
I fold the paper, put it in my pocket, and walk to the Chevy. I get in and start her up. The engine catches on the first try this time.
The Chevy runs steadily beneath me as I pull out onto the street—the engine finding its rhythm.
I drive to Skylar’s building, knowing I owe her an explanation—a real one this time.
Not the short texts I have been sending her while shame has had its hand around my throat.
She deserves the whole truth and I am going to give it to her.
Then I am going to sit with whatever she decides to do with it, because that is what I promised her, and I am not breaking another promise to this woman.
I park on the street outside, cut the engine, and sit there with my hands still on the wheel.
I pick up my phone and type out a quick message.
Zane: Hey. Are you home?
Her message comes back immediately, as if she has been waiting for me.
Skylar: Yeah.
Zane: Come out the front.
I get out of the Chevy and wait for her at the curb.
She comes through the front door of the building and stops.
The moment she sees the car, something unguarded crosses her face. Something that belongs to who we were before everything went wrong.
For a second, she doesn’t move.
“You finished it,” she says. Her voice is quiet, and her eyes are bright.
“Yeah.”
I open the passenger door. “Come with me.”
“Where?” She asks, getting into the passenger seat.
I hold her gaze. “Somewhere neither of us has been for a while.”
“Where is that?”
“It’s a surprise.”
I shut the door and take a breath for one second before moving around to the driver’s side.
I get in.
The drive is quiet. Skylar’s hands rest in her lap as mine grip the wheel.
I am nervous. Not the kind that shows. I have spent too many years keeping my face neutral for that. I’m nervous because what I am about to tell her could change everything we just found our way back to.
Skylar sits beside me, looking out the window. She has not asked again where we are going.
The old neighborhood rises around us, piece by piece.
Cracked pavement. Sagging fences. Houses with peeling paint and curtains drawn across windows that have seen too much. Streets we used to walk with our shoulders up because we learned early that you don’t look scared in places that know how to find it.
Then Dolores’ house appears.
For one second, both of us stop breathing.
It sits back from the street, behind its dead little yard and its leaning porch. It’s smaller than memory made it, but no less ugly. Time has not improved it. Nothing ever could and, I doubt, nothing ever will.
Skylar’s voice comes out quiet. “I hate that place.”
“Me too.”
I keep driving past it, around the corner, down toward the old alley I always walked.
I park, cut the engine, and get out. Skylar is already out by the time I reach her side. I grab her hand, and she lets me take it without a word. Her fingers slide into mine like they remember the shape of this even after everything.
We walk down the lane together. It still smells the same in ways I wish it did not—damp brick, old rubbish, piss, and the kind of stale rot that clings to forgotten places.
The brick walls along the laneway are still tagged in angry colors—the graffiti faded and bleeding into the brick, worn down by years of weather.
Then the old building comes into view.
Skylar slows. “You’re taking me to the roof?”
I gaze at her standing there, the faded graffiti behind her, and for a second I see both of them at once.
The girl she was—seventeen, with defiance in her chin and fury in her bones—and the woman standing in front of me now—older and bruised in ways that don’t show on the surface but that I know are there, braver than any of us ever had the right to ask her to be.
When we reach the old building, neither of us moves for a moment.
Then Skylar looks at me. “If this roof kills us, I am haunting you first.”
I almost smile. “Fair enough.”
“I mean it, Rivera.”
I push the side door open.
It groans against the frame the same way it always did. The spray paint still covers every surface. The rusted ladder bolted to the far wall crawling up into the shadows.
I test it first with my weight on the bottom rung.
It groans.
Skylar stares at me. “Reassuring.”
I climb first, the metal biting into my palms, rust flaking beneath my fingers.
Each rung carries me back and forth at the same time, to the boy I was and to the man trying to stand in his place.
The boy who brought a girl up here because up here, nobody was watching and nobody was waiting to fuck them over.
The man who still believes that and who needs to believe it tonight more than ever.
At the top, I haul myself onto the tin roof.
It creaks. Still dented and sun-baked. It still half-collapses in places that have been doing so since before we first stood on it.
I turn and reach down.
Skylar looks up at me from the ladder, her face caught between shadow and the last of the evening light. The sight of her from here, reaching up, trusting me with her hand, does the same thing to me it did the first time.
Fuck.
There it is again.
The moment that fucked me up the first time.
She places her hand in mine. I close my fingers around hers and pull her up.
When her boots hit the tin roof, it groans beneath us, the same hollow groan it made before.
We walk to the same place we sat years ago—both of us navigating by memory to the spot where the tin is least likely to give way and the view opens up the widest. The town spreads out beneath the bruised orange sky, rooftops, trees and tired streets.
From up here, Dolores’ house looks smaller. Just an ugly box among other ugly boxes, stripped of its size. That house used to feel endless. From up here, it now looks beatable.