Chapter 3 #2
"Everyone always does. At least you asked."
"Does it ever tell you when?"
"No. Never. I get the room and the light and what's in your hand, and I can guess an age off the face, and that's it. I've been wrong about how far off by as much as nine years."
"So a man could work out he's got a while."
"A man could work out he's probably got a while."
"That's better odds than the average man gets," Emmett said. "The average man gets nothing and assumes forever. You just handed me a green tank and a ball game and I'll take that over forever, because forever's a lie and mine's got a radio in it."
I looked at the floor.
"Most people scream," I said.
"Most people haven't spent forty years under machines that'll kill you if you're careless," he said. "You get used to standing next to it. It's not a bad way to live, actually. Keeps a man from being petty."
Rafferty hadn't moved off the workbench. When I finally looked over at him, he was watching me with an expression I couldn't read at all, and I had the distinct sense that I was being reassembled in his head from scratch.
"Everybody," he said.
"What?"
"You see that. For everybody."
"For everybody I look at. Yes."
"How long?"
"Since I was twelve."
"That's why you don't look at people," he said slowly.
"You didn't look at me once in that office.
Not the whole time I was signing. You looked at the counter, the clipboard, my hands, my — " he touched his own chin, working it out in real time, and I watched a man understand my entire life in about four seconds, which nobody had ever managed before, "—you looked around me. Like I was a lamp."
"That's the technique, yes."
"And then you looked up."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you laughed," I said, "and I wanted to know what kind of face does that."
The heater in that garage clicked on. Emmett, God bless him, became extremely interested in his sandwich.
"And what'd you get?" Rafferty said.
Here is where I lied, for the first of several times, and I knew I was doing it while I did it.
"A scar," I said. "From a cabinet door."
He looked at me. He knew. I could see him knowing — it went right across his face and settled in — and he didn't push, and he didn't push, and he didn't push, and I have thought about that too.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Okay, you're somebody who knows something." He pushed off the bench. "You're still not coming on the road."
"What—"
"Not tonight," he said, "because tonight I've got to sit in a room and explain you to eleven men who are going to take it real well, and because you've got thirty-one crosses out there and I want to hear about every single one first, and because—" he stopped.
"Because what?"
"Because I don't know what that road does to somebody like you," Rafferty said, "and I'd rather find out on paper."
Emmett said, from his crate, "That's the smartest thing you've said since the cabinet door."
"You be quiet, you're going to be fine until you're ninety."
"She never said ninety."
"You're going to be fine," Rafferty said, and I noticed that his voice had gone rough at the edge and that he was not looking at Emmett when he said it.
I got a ride home at midnight in a borrowed truck with the heat pointed at my side of the cab.
"Can I ask you one," Rafferty said, somewhere around the county line.
"You've earned about four."
"Emmett."
"What about him."
"Was that real, or did you do a thing?"
I turned and looked at the side of his face, which I could do, and which I was already starting to treat as a luxury I had no right to.
"You think I did a cold read on a mechanic in his own garage."
"I think you're smart," Rafferty said, "and I think a smart person in that room gets the bike in the back and the paint and maybe even the wrench, because that's a garage and that's what's in it. What a smart person doesn't get is the beard."
"The beard."
"You said it was bad."
"It's a terrible beard."
"Emmett's been clean-shaven every day I've known him," he said, "twenty years, no exceptions, because his wife hated it and she's been gone eleven years and he still does it. There's not one photograph in that building of that man with a beard. There's no way to guess it and no reason to."
I looked out the windshield.
"So it was real," he said.
"It was real."
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"What do you want me to do, argue you into being fake?
" He shifted gears. "I've spent a year around people who do impossible things.
You want to know the actual test, it's not the details.
It's what a person does after. Fakers get big.
They want the room. You sat down on a bench and asked a man if he was happy. "
I did not say anything for about four miles, because my throat wasn't working.
At my door he said, "Tomorrow. Bring the map."
"The whole wall?"
"Whatever comes off it."
"Rafferty."
"Yeah."
I stood on my step with my keys in my hand and made myself say it, because I'd already decided in the truck that if I was going to lie about one thing I had to be honest about everything else, which is the kind of accounting that only makes sense at midnight.
"You should know that I've never told anybody," I said. "Ever. About any of it. Not one person in eighteen years."
He thought about that.
"Then why me?"
Because when I look at you there's nothing there. Because for one second in a cinderblock room I got to be a normal woman looking at a man's face, and I would burn down a great deal to have that second again.
"You were convenient," I said.
Rafferty Doyle grinned at me from the cab of that truck like he'd caught something and was going to let it swim off anyway.
"Sure," he said. "Night, Sunday."