Chapter 2
TWO
AUGUST
The bell over the shop door hasn’t rung once in two hours.
I don’t mind the quiet, usually. Quiet is when the work actually happens.
The real work, not the paying kind. I’ve got my sketchpad open on the station counter and I’m finishing out the dragon scene from this weekend, the one Owen and I spent approximately eleven hours defending ourselves against, from inside the blanket fort.
The fort was Owen’s idea. The dragons were mine, because I’m twenty-seven years old and apparently still operating at a solid four-year-old level when it comes to imagination.
But Owen finds it hilarious when I make the deep dragon voice and then we fight with the fake swords until he’s giggling and falling over onto the pillows. So it’s not the worst thing to have in common.
I feel like a hero when I make that kid giggle.
I sketch his face easily from memory, concentrating on the way he holds the sword I made him out of a wrapping paper tube and some duct tape. He made sure I was completely serious about the construction, because he wanted the swords to last this time. That kid does not half-ass a dragon battle.
By Sunday morning we’d built three separate defensive walls out of every throw pillow in the house, had consumed roughly our body weight in goldfish crackers, and had defeated the dragon approximately fourteen times, each death more elaborate than the last. Owen wanted it to come back every time.
More, he’d say, breathless and grinning, crawling over the pillow barricade. Again, Dad.
I gave him again every time he asked.
I had to leave for my shift before we could break the fort down completely. I’d gotten the kitchen cleaned up and the dishes done, gave Owen a bath and got him into clean clothes and handed him off to Priscilla at the door.
The living room still looked like a pillow factory had exploded.
She’s going to have feelings about that.
I probably should have stopped at twelve dragon deaths to have time to clean up everything.
It’s like, no matter how hard I try, inevitably some ball gets dropped somewhere. I get that it’s not fair Priscilla always has to pick up the balls I can’t keep in the air, though.
Only one of the reasons I’m glad for her sake that she finally shook free of me.
“Damn, August.” Mack materializes behind my shoulder with the sixth sense he has for other people’s sketchpads.
He’s the only one in the shop who can get away with looking without being told to shove off.
Mostly because he’s actually looking the way artists look, assessing the line weight, composition, and balance.
I respect his opinion more than anyone’s.
Mack’s been tattooing impressive art since before I could talk.
He lets out a low whistle.
“You inking that on someone?”
I flip the pad shut. “Just passing time.”
“Shit.” He crosses his arms, studying me with that expression he gets sometimes, the one I can’t fully read. Part respect, part something more complicated. “You know, if you could just get your act together—”
“Working on it.”
He looks at me like he’s running the math on that. Whether it’s true this time or whether it’s more of what I’ve given him before—I’m fine, everything’s fine—right up until I go sideways again and leave a gap in the schedule that someone else has to cover.
He doesn’t say it.
Mack is the kind of guy who only says the hard thing once and then waits.
He’s been waiting a while.
The thing I don’t tell him or any of these guys is that something actually has shifted the last couple of years. I don’t know if they’ve noticed and I’m sure not fucking asking.
It’s not just the meds, which took longer to get right than anybody ever warns you about. But also the Tuesday thing.
Every Tuesday at four, I drive to a beige office building in south Austin and sit across from a guy named Dr. Delaney who wears button-up shirts and the occasional cardigan and who, in my experience, has never once reacted to anything I’ve said the way I expected him to.
He asks questions that start easy and end up being about something completely different.
He tells me to keep up my regular swims and eat protein and keep a routine.
He says that makes sense a lot. Which, the first time I heard it, I thought was therapist bullshit and by month three was the most important three words anyone had ever said to me.
Lately the rollercoasters are more like kiddie coasters. Still a ride. Just—smaller ups, and more manageable downs. I can see the bottom coming now before I’m already there and put on the brakes.
The shop door bell rings.
Mack peels off toward the back.
“All yours,” he says, and the hand he drops on my shoulder on the way past is approximately forty percent encouragement and sixty percent I do not want to deal with whoever this is.
Two girls walk in. They’re in their early twenties, dressed for a night out that hasn’t started yet. One of them is already on her phone. They look around the shop like people who made a dare and are committed now.
“Hi,” I say. “Walk-ins welcome. Looking to book something today, or just browsing?”
“Today,” the taller one says. She pops her gum. “Definitely want a tattoo today.”
I pull out my portfolio and set it on the counter, flipping to the back half—the detailed blackwork florals and delicate linework I do for people who want something small and precise. I’ve learned to read a walk-in inside about thirty seconds.
“How about these?” the other one asks, already drifting toward the wall display of flash tattoos.
I keep my sigh on the inside. “Of course.”
It’s rare I get to put any of my art on folks, and it’s fine if today is more of the same. I can practice my application technique with flash.
They spend a few minutes pointing at things. I stand back and let them look. The one on her phone keeps glancing over at me in a way that I’ve gotten practiced at not directly acknowledging. I’ve made that mistake before. No hooking up with clients.
“Okay, so.” The taller one turns around holding her phone up, showing me a basic butterfly outline she’s pulled up on Pinterest. “Can you do something like this? Right here?”
She pulls up the back of her shirt and points to the small of her back.
I keep my face easy. “Absolutely. Let me draw that out and we’ll pick a size.”
It’s twenty minutes of work, tops. I get her situated and start tracing the stencil, and the other one settles into the waiting chair and starts chatting at me like I’m a bartender or a hairdresser. It’s part of the job. Just one I’m not always as good at. Depends on the day you catch me.
“You’re, like, actually really good at this,” she says.
“Thanks.”
“Like, you have such a gentle touch. Does anyone ever tell you that?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you work out?”
I can feel Mack watching from across the room.
“A little.”
“We’re going to Sixth Street later,” the girl in the chair offers, tilting her head to try to look at me. I redirect her gently.
“Hold still for me.”
“You should come.”
“I’ve got an early morning.”
“Oh come on.” The one in the chair draws it out. “What time do you get off?”
“I close up at eight.”
“That’s so early, it’s perfect. We could grab food first—”
“I’ve got a kid.” I say it the way I always say it. Easy, with no apology in it, because I’m not sorry. It’s the most efficient off-ramp I’ve found. Most people hear it and the energy shifts. “Early mornings pretty much indefinitely.”
A small pause.
“Oh,” the waiting one says. “That’s... sweet, actually.”
I focus on the butterfly and don’t say anything else, and after a minute the conversation moves on to something between the two of them, which is where it should be.
It takes me eighteen minutes. It’s clean work. I walk the taller one through aftercare, take payment, then watch them head out the door already on their phones.
I stand at the counter for a second after the bell stops ringing.
Then I look at Mack.
“You saw them coming from the window,” I say.
He doesn’t look up from the back piece he’s working on, an enormous geometric mandala that’s going to take three sessions and is already impressive. “I was busy.”
“You were standing at the window with a coffee.”
“Busy.”
I shake my head and go back to my station. The butterfly is still up on the light table. I slide it aside and open the sketchpad again, but the sketch I was working on earlier looks different now.
It’s still good, but I’m not in it anymore, the way you can be in something and then abruptly not be, and going back in just makes it look like effort.
I close it again.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
I already know before I look.
Call me when you have a minute.
Priscilla.
I text back two seconds and go out the back door into the alley. The air has that early-January edge to it, the kind that feels clean if you’re in it for a short time and miserable after that. I call her back.
She picks up on the second ring.
“Hey.” Her voice is the voice she uses when she’s keeping things measured and careful.
I know all her voices. We were together for six years and broke up a year after Owen was born.
I know the measured voice and the genuinely angry voice and the voice where she’s trying to be fair even though she doesn’t feel like being fair.
This is the measured voice, which is actually the hardest because it means she’s already processed whatever she’s about to say. “So, the living room.”
“Yeah.”
“August.”
“I know.”
“Owen’s toys were everywhere. The blankets are still—” She stops and does that thing where she’s recalibrating. “I know you cleaned the kitchen. I saw that. But the living room looked like—”
“I know what it looked like. It’s totally my bad.” I pull at a loose thread on my jeans. “I ran out of time before my shift. I was going to ask if you could—”
“I can’t be cleaning up after you every time you do a handoff. You know that. That’s not—”
“I know. You’re right. It’s not fair.”
She pauses. I don’t think she was expecting me to agree that fast. But I’m trying to get better about taking accountability.