Chapter 20
Humbug
Her eyes flick to the ornament tied to her knob.
Then Carol stares up at me, her lip quivering. “Sugar tell you?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Then you don’t even know what you’re offering.”
“I know enough,” I say, quiet, like a man loading a gun inside his own chest. “I know I’m not askin’ you for anything back.”
A car rolls by, bass thudding. Somewhere a door slams. Somewhere a dog yells at a train. She looks tired and brave and twenty some and a hundred all at once.
“It’s yours, Jack.”
“I know.”
“Our lie,” she whispers.
“Don’t,” I say, my voice breaking.
“I’m not yours,” she says, her voice firmer.
“Okay.”
“I’ll never be.”
“Okay.”
“You need to go.”
Stepping back, I nod. The air between us feels like glass that survived a bomb.
She’s the one who cuts it first. “Don’t come to the window again, Jack.”
“I won’t,” I say, and it’s the first lie I’ve told in months.
Taking the corner, I lean on brick until my knees remember their job.
Then I ride. Not far. Motel far. I listen to the radiators clank and the neighbors argue about something stupid and holy, like money and love and whose turn it is to suffer.
I stare at the ceiling and see her hand on her belly and don’t breathe until it hurts.
Day five starts wrong. I wake before the alarm in that sliver of gray where men make bad decisions because silence feels like pressure. I don’t go to the bakery. I go to a store that sells things I don’t understand and say, “I need something that means I’ll stop lying and start building.”
The clerk blinks.
I end up with a blank leather journal and a copper gingerbread cookie cutter that looks like it could be hers. Don’t ask me why. It makes sense in my head. Carol has changed. She didn’t respond to the sparkly trinket. Words I’ll earn, and a shape that fits her new world but doesn’t forget her past.
Midday, I sit in a laundromat that’s hot as sin and write the first pages like penance, everything true and nothing pretty.
Where I met her. Why I lied. What broke in me the first time she hummed and didn’t know I’d already decided to burn for the sound.
I’m not good at writing. Good at bleeding, though. Paper doesn’t flinch.
I leave the journal by her back door with no note. I slide the cutter under the string. I walk away before the door opens.
Evening, I post up at the corner of Main where I can see her lock up without being a shadow on her shoes. I pocket both hands to keep from reaching as she goes back inside to close the store down.
Rain shifts to mist. The city blinks slow. A cruiser rolls by and doesn’t care about me. For once I’m grateful that the patch on my back is black-on-black tonight.
Then I smell it.
Smoke. Not winter smoke. Not someone’s dinner. This is dirty, chemical, quick. A wrong kind of heat.
My head snaps toward the far end of the block. Orange kisses the clouds, small at first, then licking up like a tongue that found something sweet.
The bakery.
It doesn’t make sense all at once. First comes the body, I’m already moving, already eating pavement, already gunning the bike from the curb before my brain can say words like wait or smart or help.
The engine roars down empty lanes. My helmet hits my back.
The wind is a fist trying to keep me from a door I’ll die to open.
By the time I get there, the back windows are coughing flame. Smoke muscles out of the vent hood like a monster finally allowed a face. Two volunteers are on scene, hoses snaking, yelling codes that don’t fix anything yet. Somebody’s shouting accelerant.
I don’t ask permission. I shoulder past a kid with a badge who tries to stop me and I’m inside, straight into hell’s mouth. Heat shoves me. The room breathes in and out like a beast. Glass cries. Metal pops.
“Humbug!” she screams, the sound punching through the bright roar.
I find her by voice, by gravity, by the string I’ve been pulling since Evervale.
She’s near the counter, coughing, eyes streaming, a towel over her mouth, small and stubborn and alive.
A rack goes over and claws for her ankles with hot teeth.
I kick it off the path and wrap an arm under her, strong and careful.
She fights me, reaching for something on the wall, a photo, a clipped recipe, I don’t even see, because that’s who she is. I take the burn for it and drag us through the door anyway.
Outside, her knees go out. I go down with her, hands braced, body a wall. She shakes like I wired her to a battery.
“It’s gone,” she whispers. “Everything’s gone.”
“Not everything,” I say, and I mean it like a vow men carve into bone.
Behind us, the flames talk to the sky, real friendly. Sirens snowball into the block. Somebody throws a blanket over her shoulders, and somebody else tries to steer me away. I snarl because I am not leaving the only two pieces I have left right here on this curb.
She’s crying. My hands find her face, and I feel the ash grind under my thumbs. Her lashes clump. Her lips go blue and then red again.
“Breathe,” I tell her, low. “That’s your job now. You breathe.”
She nods like a soldier. Does it.
I lift my head and scan the crowd. A woman stands half a block off, hair too bright for the night, mouth a hard line. She watches the bakery burn the way some people watch a parade. My stomach goes cold and mean.
Trina.
She clocks me the same second. She smiles, small, satisfied, and melts into the dark like she never learned to walk, only slither. My hand flexes. The old part of me that bites first and thinks later bares its teeth.
Not tonight.
Tonight is triage.
I pull my cut off and wrap it around Carol because the blanket ain’t enough. The leather swallows her shoulders, swallows the tremor, swallows me whole along with it. She leans into me like gravity made a new rule.
By morning, the trucks are gone, and the bakery is a rib cage picked clean. The sky tries to do mercy with pink and fails. Carol sits in the hospital wrapped in my cut, her hair smelling like smoke and sugar that got mean.
They check her out good. Got pictures of the baby and all. I breathe a sigh of relief when the nurse says all is right as rain.
“I can’t stay here,” Carol says, voice sanded raw.
“I know.”
“I have nowhere to go. My apartment. It burned up too.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You do.”
She turns her face up, eyes tired, bright under the ash. “Where?”
“Home,” I tell her. “Back to Evervale.”
She stares at me long enough to weigh past against future, love against pride, fear against the kid, we both just seen inside her.
“You’ll be safe at the club,” I say. “I’ll make damn sure of it. Frost will clear a room. Roof. Heat. People who won’t let you carry weight alone.”
She leans on the seat, eyes half-closed, one hand resting where my mind can finally admit it, our kid. I lay my palm over hers without asking and she doesn’t move away.
“Family?” she echoes, soft like a dare.
“Mine,” I say. “Ours.”
Her throat works. She doesn’t speak. Picking up the one thing she saved from the bakery, the journal with the cookie cutter attached, I shove it in my jacket pocket. I walk her outside, offer her a seat on my Harley. She takes it. I start the engine. She doesn’t tell me to stop.
We roll out under a sky the color of steel. I can breathe easy for the first time in ages. I head toward Evervale. I don’t look in the mirrors. I know what’s back there.
Fire.
A woman with a matchbook heart.
A promise I plan to keep even if I must carve the words into my own hide.
I’m taking Carol home.
And I’m not letting go.