Chapter 6
Ghost
I don't leave.
That's what I did with my great heroic morning. I bought trim.
"Here's what I've worked out," he says. "People don't leave because of the boat."
"No?"
"No. People leave because you let them practice.
" He takes a corner too fast, the way men do when they're making a point.
"Every time she said I could go, and I said sure, go ahead, she got a little better at it.
By the end she was very good at it. I coached her, Ghost. I coached her for four years and then I acted surprised when she qualified. "
I didn't say anything for about two miles.
"Anyway," Ray says. "Trim's on aisle six."
By nine that night the rain's come in properly, the kind that arrives sideways off the Ochocos and turns the plate glass into something you can't see out of, and Georgia's got the chairs up on the tables and I've got the trim clamped along the wall under the front windows and the room smells like wood glue and coffee.
She flips the sign.
"You're still here," she says.
"Yeah."
"Huh."
"That's it? Huh?"
"I'm playing it cool, Ghost, don't ruin it for me."
She goes and puts a quarter in the jukebox, which is an act of aggression, and the man on the train starts up. 1961. Fiddle, brushes on a snare, a voice like a man apologizing to a room.
"No," I say.
"Yes."
"Georgia, that machine has one song."
"Then it's a themed evening."
"It's a hostage situation."
"Dance with me."
And I say, "I don't dance," which is the most predictable sentence a man has ever produced, and she says, "Nobody dances, Ghost, that's not what it's for," and she takes the clamp out of my hand and sets it on a table and puts my hand on her waist like she's placing a tool where it goes.
Here is what I have not done in some time.
Touched anyone. On purpose. Not the way brothers do — Bear's forehead against mine on a highway, a hand on the back of a neck — that's a different circuit entirely, that's plumbing, that's maintenance.
This.
Her waist under my palm, damp at the small of the back from a fourteen-hour day, and her hair smelling like fryer oil and rain and something underneath that's just hers, and my whole body reporting in at once like a town coming back on after a storm.
"You're shaking," she says.
"I know."
"Should I —"
"No."
"Okay."
We move about six inches in each direction. That's the dance. That's the entire dance. Two people in a closed diner turning slowly under a light I rewired, on a floor I didn't fix because it doesn't need fixing, and the rain hitting the glass hard enough to sound like applause.
"You're doing math," she says, into my collarbone.
"I'm not."
"You are. I can feel it. There's a — there's an activity going on in there."
"I'm counting."
"Counting what?"
"Days." I turn us another six inches. "Thirty-three. That's how long I've been in Cold Fork. Longest I've stayed anywhere voluntarily since I was seventeen."
"What was the record before?"
"Twenty-two days. Bakersfield. And that was a court thing."
Georgia laughs against my shirt and I feel it go all the way through.
"So I've beaten Bakersfield."
"You've destroyed Bakersfield."
"I want that on a plaque," she says. "Over the register. BETTER THAN BAKERSFIELD, EST. AUGUST."
Her forehead comes down against my chest.
"You didn't go," she says.
"No."
"Are you going to?"
"Ask me tomorrow."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the most honest one I've got. I can do today. I've never once been able to do tomorrow, and I'm not going to lie to you about the size of what I can carry."
She's quiet against my shirt.
"That's better than Sunday," she says.
"What?"
"He said Sunday. You said today. Today's better."
And something in my chest comes apart, quietly, the way a knot does when you finally pull the right end.
I put my hand in her hair.
She looks up, and there's about a second where either of us could still be sensible, and neither of us takes it.
Kissing Georgia Boone is not smooth.
We get it wrong twice. Our noses collide.
She laughs into my mouth and says sorry, sorry and I say don't be sorry, don't ever be sorry, and the third time is the one — her hands fisted in the front of my shirt, up on her toes, my arm all the way around her back because she's five-four and I've had to fold myself in half and neither of us cares.
She tastes like coffee. Of course she does. She's been drinking it since four-thirty in the morning; there's probably not a night in nineteen years she hasn't.
"Okay," she breathes. "Okay. Okay."
"Georgia —"
"I'm processing, Ghost, give me a —" and then she pulls me back down.
We end up in the booth.
My booth, the corner one, back to the wall — she gets there first and sits and pulls me down after her, and I go, and the table's in the way, and the seat is a 1962 Naugahyde bench that is apparently historically significant, and I say so.
She laughs so hard she has to put her forehead on my shoulder.
"Don't you dare."
"Elin said forty examples west of the Rockies."
"Kjell Amundsen —"
"There'd be paperwork."
"You are the least romantic —" and she's laughing and she's crying a little, both, the way people do when something's been dammed a long time, and I take her face in both hands and hold it and she goes still.
"Hey," I say.
"Hi."
"You okay?"
"I'm going to say something and you have to let me get through it.
" She's got both hands flat on my chest. "I've been married.
I was married for eleven years to a man I loved, and I want to be able to say that out loud in this room, tonight, without it being a — without it being a thing that has to be managed. "
"It's not a thing that has to be managed."
"Most men —"
"Georgia." I put my hand over one of hers. "I've got thirty-nine dead men in my head and a beach I can't stop walking on. You think I need you to be uncomplicated?"
She lets out a breath she's clearly been holding since about 2021.
"Okay."
"Say it whenever you want. Tonight, next week, in the middle of something. I'm not going to flinch."
"You might flinch."
"I might flinch," I admit. "I'll flinch and then I'll get over it, and that's a different arrangement than you asking me not to."
"You want to stop, we stop."
"I don't want to stop."
"You want to stop later, we stop later. Any point. There's no —" I've got no word for it. "There's no meter running."
Georgia looks at me for a long moment in the light of a diner with one lamp on.
"Four years," she says. "That's how long since anybody touched me."
"Four years since I liked it," I say. "It's been longer than four years."
"Ghost."
"Yeah."
"The booth's got a table in it."
"It does."
"There's an office," she says. "It's got a desk and a mug and the world's saddest spreadsheet, and I want to be clear I'm not offering you ambiance —"
I pick her up.
She makes a sound of genuine outrage — "Put me —" — and then her arms go around my neck anyway, and I carry her the eighteen feet down the back hall while she informs me, at length, that she is a grown woman who runs a business, and I say I know, and she says I own property, and I say I know, and she says, quieter, right against my ear, don't put me down yet, and I don't.
The office door doesn't latch. It hasn't latched in years. I've been meaning to fix it.
I don't fix it.
What I remember afterward isn't a sequence. It's a set of small facts I'll be carrying for the rest of this life and probably the next one.
Her hands, which are burned in eleven places from nineteen years of flat-tops, flat on my chest, and the way she stopped there — just stopped, palm over the sternum, like she was checking for something.
"You're warm," she said, surprised. "I thought you'd be cold. You look cold."
"That's the beard."
"It's not the beard, it's the whole — arrangement."
The scar on her shoulder from a stockpot in 2011, and me kissing it, and her saying oh, don't, that one's ugly, and me saying ma'am, that one's a résumé.
Her laughing. Twice, three times. Her laughing right in the middle, out loud, the door-slamming laugh, and how it didn't break anything — how it did the opposite — how a thing I'd always understood to be solemn turned out to work better with a woman laughing into my neck.
Me saying her name. Just that. Over and over like a man who's found one word that works and won't risk another.
Her going quiet at one point, absolutely still, hands stopped, and me pulling back to look at her because I thought I'd done something wrong, and finding her eyes full and her jaw set.
"Georgia."
"I'm fine."
"You're not."
"I'm fine, it's just —" and she pressed the heel of her hand against one eye, furious with herself. "I forgot. That's all. I forgot what it — I had actually forgotten, Ghost, like a phone number."
And I didn't say anything, because there wasn't anything, so I just put my forehead down against hers and stayed there until she pulled me back.
Her stopping, once, halfway through — actually stopping, hand up, palm out — to say, "Wait. Wait. Did you lock the front?"
"Yes."
"Did you actually lock the front, or —"
"Georgia, I have counted the exits in this building four hundred times. I locked the front."
"Okay." A beat. "That was weirdly reassuring."
"That's the most romantic thing I've ever done for anybody."
"It genuinely might be," she said, and pulled me back down.
Slow, after that. Unhurried, which is a word I'd never had a use for. The rain on the one window. The hum of a compressor I fixed with an ice machine part.
At some point the jukebox, out front, unprompted, at nobody's request, started the man on the train again.
"That machine is haunted," she said, into my shoulder.
"That machine is broken."
"Same thing. That's the personality."
We end up on the office floor with her coat under us, which is undignified, and a filing cabinet's corner about four inches from my head, which is dangerous.
"There's a bed," she says, eventually, into my sternum. "At my house. Nine minutes away. A whole functional bed with a frame."
"Noted."
"I'm not saying we should go there. I'm saying it exists. I want you to know I own one."
"Georgia, I've slept in a ditch outside Winnemucca."
"That's not the flex you think it is."
"It's not a flex. It's context. It's so you understand that this floor is, by a considerable margin, the nicest place I've ever been."
She's quiet for a second.
"That's going to make me cry again."
"Then don't think about it."
"You can't just say a thing like that and then instruct me not to think about it, that's not how the equipment works —"
She's got her cheek on my chest. My hand's in her hair.
"Ghost."
"Mm."
"When you said today."
"Yeah."
"Is it still today?"
The clock on the wall says 12:20.
"No," I say.
She's quiet.
"But I'm still here," I say.
And Georgia Boone, forty-one, widow, owner of a historically significant diner on a road nobody drives, breathes out against my ribs and says:
"Okay. Good. That's — okay."
And then, thirty seconds later, half asleep:
"You're going to have to fix that door, though. It doesn't latch."
"I know."
"Verse could've walked right in."
"Verse is in Ash Harbor."
"Verse," Georgia says, with total conviction, "is always about to walk in. That's what he is. That's his whole thing."
She's not wrong.
I lie there a while after she goes under.
Thirty-three days. A rectangle of light under a door that doesn't latch. Rain letting up, then not.
And the thing I keep coming back to isn't the office floor or the booth or any of it. It's that at some point tonight, in the middle of a bad dance to a song about a man on a train, I stopped listening for the highway.
Thirty-four years. I have never once been in a room where part of me wasn't out at the road.
I don't know what to do with a man who isn't listening for the highway. I've got no manual for him. He's not a road captain and he's not the fastest rider in Ash Harbor and he's not, particularly, useful.
He's just some guy on a floor with his hand in a woman's hair.
I decide I can live with him for one more day.