Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Njal
I'm thinking about her when I shouldn't be.
It's the first thing in my head when I wake up Saturday, before I go take my medications, before my run, before anything—the woman next door with the wine, the dog, and the thing behind her eyes she wasn't telling me.
I don't have her name.
I've got a holey-hemmed memory of her standing in my yard apologizing for a dog that had no intention of being sorry, and a way she had of going quiet that wasn't shy, that was something closer to bracing.
I know that quiet. Hell, I do it myself.
I lie there and look at the ceiling and tell myself the truth about it, because lying to myself is how I ended up where I ended up.
The truth is I've got no business wanting anything out here.
I came to this town to get level and stay on track—the meds, the work, the long road back to have the opportunity to get patched in.
There's no time for a woman I met over a fence.
But she's the only person in this town who's looked at me like a man and not a problem.
Bodul does it, Meghan does it, but they knew me before.
Out here, I'm a stranger with a bike and scarred hands, and the smart thing for everybody is for me to stay away.
She didn't look at me like I was something to be leery of. She looked at me like I was human.
I'm allowed to be curious about that. That's all this is. A man can be curious.
I get up, take my pills with two eggs, and go run before the heat turns mean.
The neighbor's dog barks at me once from behind the house the way he does, and I lift two fingers off my side without thinking about it, like we've got an understanding now.
At least, if anything, there’s some sense of normalcy from all this.
* * *
The week works me hard, which is the point of all this, I guess.
Thursday and Friday we get a lot done. Drywall, then the long boring stretch of waiting on an inspector who doesn't show, because, Meghan tells us, somebody downtown still hasn't gotten what he wants, and Tor's still working on it.
Bodul and I hang a hood vent that fights us for three hours, and somewhere in the second hour, he stops, screw gun idle in his hand, and squints at me.
"You're somewhere else," Bodul says.
"I'm right here holding this vent you're not screwing in."
"No, you've been somewhere else all day. You've got a look." He points the gun at me, grinning, scenting blood. "That's a woman look. I know that look. I invented that damn look."
"You don't know anything."
"I know there's a look." He sinks the screw at last and reaches for the next one. "I'm not gonna make you say it. I'm just gonna sit here being right and enjoy myself while it eats you up inside."
I let him be right. It's easier than arguing, and arguing will just tell him more than being quiet would.
On Saturday, I'm back and showered with my coffee half gone when a car turns into my drive that I'd know anywhere.
My chest pulls toward it—and then tightens, because the one person who can see straight through me just parked in my yard.
My mother.
I go out onto the porch as she's getting out of the car.
She's already got the back door open and pulling out containers, stacked three high, a grocery bag hanging off her wrist, because the woman has never once in her life arrived anywhere empty-handed, and she's not going to start at my rental in the middle of nowhere.
"Don't just stand there," Magnolia says. "Come carry something. You think I drove an hour to watch you lean on a post?"
"You could've called."
"I could've." She hands me the containers and reaches back in for more. "Then you'd have told me not to come, and I'd have come anyway, and we'd both have wasted a phone call."
She comes up the steps and stops in front of me and looks at me the way only she looks at me. Weighing whether I'm about to come apart.
She looks at me straight on, full in the face, like she's checking the work.
My eyes. My color. Whether I've slept. Whether I'm here, all the way here, or whether the medication is dulling me.
Whatever she finds, her shoulders come down an inch.
"You look all right." She lets a breath go when she says it, slowly, like she's been holding it since she pulled in the drive.
"I'm all right, Mom."
"I know you are." She pats my cheek once, hard, almost a slap, the way she's done since I was a boy. "Now give me a fresh cup of coffee. I've been in that car since seven, and you know what I’m like without enough caffeine in my system."
A total bitch, but I don’t tell her that.
While I make a fresh pot of coffee and help her with the rest of the stuff from her car, she unpacks half her kitchen into my fridge.
A pan of something, a stack of something else, a Tupperware of the cornbread she knows I'd crawl over glass for. She talks the entire time, the way Bodul talks, filling the air so I don't have to.
"Your father's knee is acting up again and he won't see anybody about it.
Stubborn old goat. You'd think I married a mule.
" She stacks the cornbread where I'll see it.
"Everly and Regnor are bringing the baby around to Sunday dinners now.
You should see those grown men, Njal, the whole clubhouse goes to pieces every time that child so much as yawns. "
She straightens, pins me with a look.
"And Runes asked about you. Don't make that face—he did. He asks every week."
I lean against the counter and let all the information settle in, and it's good. It's so simple and good to have her in the room that my throat goes tight with it, and I have to look down at my coffee.
"And your brother," she says, and her voice changes, just slightly, the way it always does on Bjorn now.
"How is he?"
"He's getting there." She turns a container a quarter turn on the counter so the label faces out, busywork, the thing her hands do when her heart's involved.
"He's not where you are. He won't do the program.
Says he doesn't need it." She looks up at me.
"He needs it. You… you both needed it, way earlier, and I should have realized it. "
"He'll get there when he gets there. I can't do it for him."
"I know that." She says it sharply, then softer. "I know. I just hate watching one of you find the road and the other one still standing in the trees."
I don't have anything to say about that.
I came out of the same dark Bjorn's still in, and the only reason I found the road is I hit a bottom so far down there was nowhere left to go but up. I wouldn't wish that on anybody, least of all my own twin.
"He'll get there," I say again, because it's the only thing I've got that doesn't hurt her worse.
She reaches up and brushes my hair back off my forehead, like I’m eight years old again.
Her eyes are wet, but she's not going to let them spill, because my mother has never cried in front of us, if she can help it.
That's when the dog hits the side door.
There's a thump against the side of the house, the scrabble of claws on the porch boards, and then a heavy paw and a wet nose start working at the screen of the side door like he lives here.
Mom starts, then laughs. "Lord—whose dog is that?"
"Neighbor's." I cross over and open the screen, and Hoagie comes in like he's been invited, tags jingling, and goes straight for my mother because dogs always know the softest person in the room. "He does this. He's got a hole in the fence and no shame about it."
"Well, aren't you a handsome fella." She's already crouched down, scratching him under the chin, gone to mush. "What's his name?"
"Hoagie."
"Hoagie." She laughs again, delighted, both hands on the dog's big dumb head. "Who names a dog Hoagie?"
"Didn't ask. Wasn't my dog to name."
She looks up at me with the dog's jowls in her hands, and there's a question forming behind her face—I can see it coming, the whose dog, exactly, and how often does he come over, and what's the neighbor like—and I head it off by taking Hoagie's collar and steering him back toward the door.
"Come on. Your mom's probably looking for you."
I walk him out and point him at the gap in the fence, and he goes, reluctant, looking back at me twice like I've disappointed him.
When I come back in, my mother's watching me with an expression I don't love.
"What?" I ask.
"Nothing." She holds my eye a second past being comfortable, then lets it go and brushes dog hair off her knees.
She doesn't say anything else about it. She doesn't have to. I know that look.
I've spent twenty-eight years on the other end of it.
She stays another hour and then she has to get back.
At the door, she takes my face in both hands like she did when I was small, and she looks at me one more time, the full inventory.
"Call me on Sunday," she says. "Not a damn text. I want to hear your voice."
"I will, Mom."
"And eat the cornbread before it goes hard. I didn't drive an hour for you to let it sit."
"I will."
She kisses my cheek and goes down the steps, and at the car, she turns back. "I'm proud of you, Njal. You know that."
And I can't answer her, because pride is heavier than blame ever was, and she knows it.
She gets in the car before I have to try.
I watch her drive out until the dust settles back down on the road.
* * *
I'm on the porch again that evening, and I'm not going to pretend I'm not listening for it.
The light goes down soft and orange through the pines, and I tell myself I'm just out here for the cool of the evening.
The same as any night, and then her fire catches over in her yard, her voice carries low across the still air, talking to that dog, and I stop pretending.
I don't have to wait long.
Hoagie comes through the gap like he's running an errand he's run a hundred times, trots straight up onto my porch, and sits at my feet with his whole body wagging, looking up at me like well, are you coming or not.
"You're a setup," I tell him. "You know that."
He thumps his tail.
I walk him back. It's the third time, and we both know it, and I'm starting to think the dog's smarter than either of his people.
She's at the fire in the second-chair setup again, and she stands when she sees me coming.