Epilogue
Roman
Two things happen when a president's woman gets her name put on him, and the first one is that the entire club loses its mind about food.
I don't know when that started. Deacon would've known.
Somewhere back in the nineties somebody decided that the correct response to a patching is nine tables in a foundry and enough casserole to founder a horse, and it has never been questioned, and Cricket spent Saturday morning carrying folding tables in and out of a building with a hundred-foot ceiling saying "where do you want it" to men who had no idea.
The second thing is speeches, which I have banned, and which happen anyway.
We did it in the pour room. Izzy had the east wall done by then — brick back to red, the old crucible track polished up and hung with about two hundred dollars of lights she bought and then billed to the club under the line item STRUCTURAL.
"That's not structural," Ash said.
"It's holding up the mood, Ashley."
"It's Ash."
"Everybody says that," Izzy said, "and yet."
Kasimir laughed. Out loud. In a room. Three people turned around.
Birdie came in wearing a jacket.
Not the hoodie. She'd worn that thing through a bus, a storm, a fire tower, a heart attack, and a Wednesday I don't talk about, and Tobin's wife had taken it away from her in September and done something to it — cut it down, lined it, put it inside a black leather shell with the collar cut low so about an inch of red shows at the neck and the cuffs.
So when she came through that door what you saw was a woman in club leather with a red line running through it like a seam of ore.
Ash said, "Oh, that's good."
"That's Tobin's wife," I said.
"She should charge us."
"She's going to."
We did the thing itself at five, before anybody got into the beer, because a ceremony after beer is a wedding video nobody watches twice.
Eleven men in a half circle. Odile in the chair Ash got her. Izzy up on the second rung of her own scaffold because she said she wasn't tall enough and refused every other solution offered.
I've done this four times in nineteen years. There's no script. There's a thing Deacon used to say and I've never been able to say it the way he did, so I've stopped trying and I say my own now.
"Right," I said. "Everybody knows why we're here, so I'm not doing a speech."
"He's doing a speech," Ash said.
"I'm not doing a speech."
"Two minutes," said Tobin.
"Three," said Cricket.
"Cricket, you can't bet, you're a prospect."
"He can bet," said Odile. "Put me down for four."
I waited them out. They ran out eventually, they always do.
"Here's what this is," I said. "This is not us giving her anything.
She showed up in this county in October with a bus ticket and a gun in a grocery bag, and she has since then held a horse up for four hours, put nine stitches in your president, faced down a man in a kitchen for forty minutes with a loaded revolver on the table, and talked Callum Vane into silence in a hospital corridor, which nobody in this room has managed and I've had eleven months. "
Nobody was laughing anymore.
"So this isn't a gift," I said. "This is a notice.
To us, mostly. It says: she's in it now, and when she's in a room, she gets a vote in what happens to her, and any man here who ever decides something for her own good without asking her is going to answer to me and then to her, and I'll tell you now which one of those you should be worried about. "
Ash said, "Say the words, Prez."
So I said the words.
And Birdie turned around, and Tobin's wife stepped up and set the rocker on, and eleven men made a noise in a hundred-year-old iron building that went up a hundred feet and came back down again like the place had joined in.
Odile Bly stood up out of her chair to see it. She wasn't supposed to be standing that fast. Nobody told her.
The rocker across the back says PROPERTY OF, which is a phrase I have hated my entire adult life and which Birdie insisted on keeping, on the grounds — her words, at volume, in a room — that "it's funny, Roman, it's funny, nobody on this earth thinks I'm anybody's property, it's like putting FRAGILE on a brick. "
So it says PROPERTY OF. And under it, where the name goes:
BIRDIE
Not Scarlett. She was very clear.
Odile arrived at four-fifteen on the back of Kasimir Vukovi?'s motorcycle.
I want to describe this properly.
Seventy-nine years old, six weeks out of a cardiac unit, in a helmet that Cricket had spent an hour adjusting and that still sat on her head like a mushroom on a fence post, with a nine-by-thirteen casserole dish strapped into a milk crate bungeed to the sissy bar because she had refused — refused — to send it ahead in a car.
The negotiation over this had taken four days.
"I'll drive you," Birdie said.
"No."
"Ash'll drive you."
"Ashley rides the brake."
"Cricket will drive you."
"Cricket," said Odile, "is a lovely boy who cannot reverse a vehicle, and I have watched him try it twice, and I'd rather walk."
"Then Kasimir'll drive you—"
"Kasimir doesn't have a car."
"He can borrow—"
"Scarlett Ann," said Odile, "I have been in a hospital bed for nine days, and I have had a machine tell me about my own heart, and I would like, one time, before I am finished, to go up a road fast enough that I have to hold onto somebody."
Nobody had an answer for that. The doctor did, and the doctor was not consulted.
Kasimir got her down off it like a man handling ordnance.
"Ma'am."
"That was wonderful."
"Ma'am."
"I want to go again."
"After," Kasimir said.
"That's a promise, Kasimir."
"Yes."
"He's a man of few words," Odile announced to the room. "It's very restful. Roman, why aren't you like this?"
"I've been asking that for years," Ash said.
"Ashley, get me a chair."
"It's Ash—"
"Get me a chair."
He got her a chair.
She held court in it for five hours. She got the head of the table without anybody deciding to give it to her.
She told Izzy her lintel work was crooked, which it was, and Izzy went and looked and came back furious.
She asked Tobin about his wrist and then about his marriage and got answers to both.
She told Cricket he was too thin and then made him eat in front of her, and when he tried to show her his tattoo she said, "Absolutely not, it's not finished," and he said "how did you know," and she said, "Son, I can see the outline through your shirt, you look like a coloring book. "
The fiddle situation requires explanation.
There's a man named Dez who rides with the Beaver Falls charter and has, for eleven years, brought a fiddle to every function we've had, and for eleven years nobody has been able to establish whether he is good at it.
He plays four songs. Two of them are the same song.
The third one has words that change depending on who's in the room, and the fourth one is, as far as anyone can determine, about a dog.
Odile listened to all four with the attention of a woman at a symphony.
Then she said, "Young man."
"Ma'am."
"That's a lovely instrument."
"Thank you, ma'am."
"You're playing it very close to your chin."
"...Ma'am?"
"My husband played," she said. "Badly. But he played it out here." She held her hand out from her collarbone. "You've got it tucked in like you're hiding it. Sound's got nowhere to go."
Dez, forty-six years old, six foot four, two hundred and sixty pounds, moved his fiddle out four inches and played the dog song again.
It was better. Noticeably. The whole room went ohhh.
"There," said Odile.
"Ma'am, that's — how did you—"
"I've been listening to men do things wrong since 1963," she said. "It's not a gift. It's exposure."
Around seven Birdie got her a plate she hadn't asked for and got told off for it, and then got told to sit down, and the two of them sat there with their heads together for twenty minutes doing something I've never been able to do with anybody, which is talk without either one finishing.
I watched from across the room like a man watching weather from indoors.
Kasimir came and stood next to me with a coffee.
"She's staying," he said.
"That's the plan."
"No. Not the girl." He nodded at Odile. "Her. She's staying. Look."
And I looked, and I saw what he'd seen, which is that at some point in the evening someone had put a chair against the wall by the door — the fifth chair, off Odile's own kitchen wall, which Birdie had brought down in the truck for reasons she has never adequately explained — and Odile Bly kept glancing at it, the way you check on a coat you've hung up somewhere strange.
"She brought her chair," I said.
"Birdie brought her chair."
"That's worse."
"That's better," said Kasimir, and walked off.
At some point in the evening I found her alone at the end of the table with a plate she wasn't eating off, looking up at the crucible track and Izzy's two hundred dollars of lights.
I sat down.
"They're pretty," she said.
"They're structural."
"So I hear."
We sat there a while. Down the room somebody was arguing about whether a fiddle counts as an instrument or an event.
"Roman."
"Ma'am."
"I want you to bring her out Sunday."
"We come out every Sunday."
"I know you do. I'm saying it anyway, because I'm going to keep saying it, because I said it exactly once in 1998 and then I didn't say it again for twenty-eight years." She turned her plate a quarter turn. "So now I'm going to say it every week until I'm dead. Sunday. Both of you. There's food."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Don't cry in front of your men."
"I'm not."
"You're a little bit," Odile said, and ate a deviled egg.
Then she said, "Roman. One more."
"Ma'am."
"Deacon's cut."
I'd been waiting for it for six weeks.
"It's in a box in my office."
"That's not an answer, that's a location."
"I don't know what to do with it," I said. "I can't put it back in the ground. I can't hang it on a wall because then every man in this club has to walk past it for the next thirty years and think about a kitchen. And I can't burn it, Odile, I can't, I've had it out on the desk twice."
She was quiet a second.
"Give it to Marla," she said.
"Marla Ross?"
"It's her husband's coat."
"It's — Odile, it's evidence of about four things—"
"It's a coat," said Odile Bly, "that a woman sewed a rocker onto at my kitchen table in 1999 while her husband stood there being useless, and it has been out of her house for fifteen years, and she is fifty-eight years old and gets four hundred dollars a month from a fund you paid out of your own pocket in August, which you thought I didn't know about. "
I put my hand over my eyes.
"Who told you."
"Ashley."
"That's it. He's out."
"He's not out," she said comfortably. "Give her the coat, Roman. Let her decide what a thing is. That's the whole lesson of this entire autumn and you're the last one in the building to learn it."
Here's the last thing, and I've thought about whether to put it in, and I'm putting it in because I have learned what it costs to sit on a thing.
Around eight, I stepped out the loading door for air.
Ash was already out there. Cigarette going, back against the brick, looking across Furnace Street at nothing.
Except it wasn't nothing.
There was a woman on the far sidewalk. White coat — the medical kind, not the fashion kind, and that's a strange thing to see at eight at night on Furnace Street.
Fair hair pulled back hard. She was standing beside a car with the door open, and she was photographing the foundry.
Phone up, unhurried, three or four frames.
The building. The door. The bikes along the wall.
She wasn't hiding it. That's what got me.
"Ash."
He didn't answer.
"Ash. There's a woman—"
"I see her."
The way he said it.
Not who's that. Not huh. He said I see her the way you say it about weather you've been expecting since March.
She lowered the phone. She looked across at us — at him, straight across two lanes of empty street, no expression I could read at that distance — and then she got in the car and pulled out and went north.
North is Erie. North is the lake. North is the charter we don't talk about.
I'd seen her for maybe ninety seconds, total, across two lanes of street in October dark, and here's everything I got:
Forties. Tall. The coat was the real kind — the pocket sat heavy, and there was a lanyard she'd tucked in rather than taken off, which is a thing you do when you're between one place and another and expect to be back.
She hadn't looked at the bikes when she photographed the bikes. She'd looked at the door.
And she'd known Ash was there. That's the part. She'd come around that car and set up her shot on a building with two men standing in a lit loading bay, and she had not hesitated for one second, because she had already known one of them would be him.
Ash smoked.
"Well?" I said.
"Nothing."
"Ash."
"It's nothing, Prez."
And Ash Delacroix — who has never once in nineteen years let me get away with a single thing, who sat at my own table and said there's a girl out loud in front of eleven men because he thought I didn't know my own mind — put his cigarette out on a brick wall and went back inside.
I stood in the loading door a while.
Behind me the fiddle started up again, and somebody cheered, and a seventy-nine-year-old woman's voice cut through the whole building saying that is not how you hold a fork, and my wife-in-every-way-but-paper laughed at something with her whole chest in a room full of men who would go into the ground for her.
In front of me, an empty street going north.
I didn't say anything to anybody.
I want that on the record too, because a man who's spent a whole year learning what it costs to sit on a thing looked out at Furnace Street in October, watched his best friend lie to his face, and decided it could keep till spring.
It couldn't.