Chapter 3
Ruth
By the second week of the shelter project, I've learned three things about Gabriel Mercer.
The first is that the reputation is half performance.
He plays it up for Diesel, for the other brothers, for anyone watching — the grin, the swagger, the easy joke that deflects before you can ask a real question.
But underneath it, when nobody's performing for anybody, he's sharp.
Sharper than most people give him credit for.
The second is that he notices things. Small things. The way I hesitate before I answer a question honestly. The way I go quiet whenever my father's name comes up. The way I flinch, just slightly, when someone calls me "good" like it's the only interesting thing about me.
The third is that I am in serious, unauthorized trouble.
"You're staring again," Nadia says, handing me a shingle from the pile without looking up. She's one of the Iron Thorn women, dark-eyed and sharp-tongued, and she's been eyeing me with open amusement since Monday.
"I'm not staring."
"You're staring at Saint's shoulders like they're a stained-glass window."
"I am cataloguing the roofing materials."
"Sure you are, Reverend."
I feel my face go hot and busy myself with the shingles, and Nadia laughs and doesn't push it, which I appreciate more than I let on.
"You know," she says, a moment later, conversational, like she's commenting on the weather, "he's never once brought a woman coffee. In ten years. I keep count. It's a hobby."
"I don't know what you're implying."
"I'm not implying anything. I'm reporting. There's a difference." She grins at me, unrepentant, and goes back to sorting shingles, leaving me to sit with that particular piece of information a great deal longer than I mean to.
It happens on Wednesday, during the lunch break, sitting on the same overturned bucket that's apparently become mine by unspoken agreement. Gabriel drops down beside me with two sodas, hands me one, and doesn't say anything for a while, which is unusual for him.
"You're quiet," I say.
"Thinking."
"About?"
He looks at me sideways, weighing something. "You said you paint. Places you've never been."
My stomach drops. I regret every word of that conversation immediately, the way I regret most moments of honesty, on the rare occasions I allow myself one.
"I did say that."
"Can I see?"
"See what?"
"The paintings, Ruth. Can I see them."
Nobody has ever asked me that. Not my father, who's seen the closet door and never once opened it.
Not the church women, who compliment my needlepoint and my Sunday announcements and have never once wondered what I do at two in the morning.
Nobody has ever, in twenty-five years, asked to see the thing I actually make.
"Why?" I ask, and it comes out smaller than I mean it to.
"Because you said it like it mattered," he says. "And I want to know what matters to you. Not the version everybody else already decided on. The real one."
I don't know what to do with a sentence like that. I turn my soda can over in my hands and consider, for one wild moment, telling him no, going home, locking the closet, going back to being the girl the whole town already agreed on.
"Saturday," I say instead. "My father has a deacons' meeting until four. You could — if you wanted — you could come by."
His grin is different this time. Not the performance. The real one.
"I wouldn't miss it," he says.
Diesel wanders over as I'm packing up my clipboard, wiping his hands on a rag that's seen better decades.
"He's been insufferable all week," Diesel informs me, entirely unprompted. "Reorganized the parts shelf twice. Nobody asked him to. Nobody wanted him to. It was already organized."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Sure you don't." Diesel grins, gap-toothed and entirely unbothered by subtlety. "Just — go easy on him, yeah? He acts like nothing gets to him. Most of it doesn't. But every once in a while something does, and he's real bad at admitting it when it happens."
I don't know what to say to that, so I don't say anything, and Diesel seems satisfied with the silence, nodding once like I've passed some kind of test, and wanders off toward the cooler, leaving me standing there turning his words over for the rest of the drive home.
Saturday, he shows up on his bike instead of the club truck, parks it two streets over so my neighbors won't see it in front of the parsonage, which I notice and don't mention, and I let him in through the side door like we're smuggling contraband, which, in a way, we are.
"This feels very illicit," he says, wiping his boots on the mat with exaggerated care, like a man determined to be on his very best behavior. "Should I be whispering?"
"You could try."
"I don't think I know how," he whispers, anyway, badly, and I have to bite back a laugh, hand pressed over my mouth, glancing nervously toward the stairs like my father might materialize out of thin air on a Saturday afternoon he's guaranteed to be miles away.
My studio is really just a closet with the door taken off its hinges and a lamp clamped to a shelf, canvases stacked three deep against every wall. I've never let anyone in here. My hands are shaking as I flip on the light.
Gabriel doesn't say anything at first. He walks the length of the small space slowly, looking at each canvas like it's the only thing in the room, and I stand in the doorway with my arms crossed, bracing for — I don't know what.
Politeness. Pity. The kind of vague, well-meaning compliment people give things they don't actually understand.
He stops in front of the largest one — a mountain range at dawn, purple and gold, a place I built entirely out of a library book and my own longing — and is quiet for so long I start to panic.
"Say something," I say.
"These aren't a hobby, Ruthie," he says finally, and his voice has none of the teasing in it now. "These are a cry for help."
I burst into tears. Right there in my own closet, in front of a man I've known for two weeks, I cry harder than I have in years, because nobody has ever looked at what I make and understood, in one sentence, exactly what it costs me to make it.
"I'm sorry," I say, wiping my face, mortified. "I don't know why I'm—"
"Don't apologize," he says, and there's something fierce in it. "Don't you dare apologize for that."
He doesn't try to touch me, doesn't try to comfort me the way I half expect, half fear. He just stands there, steady, letting me have the moment without trying to fix it or rush it or make it smaller than it is, and somehow that's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for me.
"How long have you been doing this?" he asks, once I've collected myself.
"Since I was twelve. I found an old set of my mother's paints in the attic. My father doesn't know I still use them."
"He doesn't know you paint at all?"
"He knows I paint. He doesn't know I'm serious about it.
There's a difference." I gesture at the canvases, all of them, years of secret, unauthorized longing stacked against the walls.
"If I told him this was more than a hobby, he'd worry.
He'd think I was unhappy. And then he'd try to fix it, and the fixing would be worse than the unhappiness. "
"Are you? Unhappy?"
Nobody has ever asked me that directly either.
"I don't know," I say, honestly, for possibly the first time in my adult life. "I have a good life. A safe life. A life my father worked very hard to build for me. I don't have the right to be unhappy in it."
"That's not how unhappy works," Gabriel says quietly. "It doesn't check whether you've got the right first."
He picks up a smaller canvas, propped against the wall — an ocean I've never seen, all cold blues and white foam, painted from a postcard a missionary once sent my father from a trip to the coast.
"This one's good," he says. "Really good. You ever think about doing something with these? Showing them somewhere?"
"Who would want to see them?"
"Anybody with eyes, Ruthie."
"You're biased."
"I'm extremely biased," he agrees, grinning. "Doesn't make me wrong."
We fall into a rhythm after that, stolen and small — coffee after the crew leaves each evening, conversations on the shelter's back steps that stretch far longer than either of us intends.
He tells me about the club, about Knox, about Diesel's terrible cooking and Harper's good cooking and a hundred small, warm details of a life I didn't know I was curious about.
I tell him about hymns and choir practice and the particular loneliness of being the one everybody in a room turns to for comfort, never the one anyone thinks to comfort.
"You ever notice," I say one evening, "that nobody ever asks the person leading the prayer circle how they're doing? Everybody assumes if you're the one comforting, you don't need any comforting yourself."
"That's a lonely way to live."
"It's the only way I know."
"Not anymore," he says, and doesn't elaborate, and I don't ask him to, because I already understand exactly what he means, and it terrifies me a little, how much I want it to be true.
He asks me to dream out loud, which nobody has ever asked, and slowly, haltingly, I do.
I tell him about the art program I read about once in a magazine at the dentist's office, a summer intensive in the city, and how I've thought about it for two years and never once let myself say it aloud to another living person.
"Apply," he says, simply, like it's that easy.
"It's not that easy."
"Why not?"
"Because my whole life is here. Because my father needs me. Because—"
"Because you're scared," he says, not unkindly. "That's allowed, Ruthie. Being scared doesn't mean you're wrong to want it."