Chapter 4 #2
"Tonight I bought one ticket with a found dollar and won a lifetime supply of meat," she said. "So the economy's fine."
I laughed.
"There it is," she said, satisfied. "Eleven days. I've been working on that."
"On what?"
"On getting a noise out of you." She propped her chin on her forearms. "You do this thing where the corner of your mouth moves about two millimeters and I'm expected to accept it as payment. I've been out here eleven days doing full material and getting two millimeters."
"That's not fair. I said 'ninety-four dollars' on day six."
"You said it under your breath, Gideon, that's not a laugh, that's a citation."
"It was extremely funny."
"I know it was extremely funny, I wrote it." She was grinning at the dark. "You know what the actual difference is? Between here and there?"
"Tell me."
"There, when I say something, I watch the room to see what it costs.
Every time. Nine years, every single time, before the sentence is even out.
And I've done it maybe twice all night and both times it was reflex and both times there was nothing to check.
" She shook her head. "It's exhausting. Not doing it, I mean.
Not doing it is exhausting in a completely different way, like using a muscle you didn't know was there. "
"That goes away."
"Does it."
"I don't know," I admitted. "I've never had to find out. But people tell me things go away and I've decided to start passing that on."
"That's the least reassuring thing anyone's ever—"
"There it is," I said.
"There what is?"
"That's the first thing you've said to me tonight that wasn't a joke with armor on it."
She went quiet. Then she bumped her shoulder into my arm again, harder, and said, "You've been saving that one for eleven days, haven't you," and I said, "Nine," and she said, "Liar," and we stood at the fence a while longer without saying anything at all.
At six in the morning the sky went grey at the bottom, and she looked at it, and everything in her face changed at once.
"What time is it."
"Just after six."
"What time is it, exactly."
"Six-ten."
She was already moving. Off the tailgate, across the gravel, weaving through the wreckage of a party — sleeping bags, a cooler on its side, two men asleep in a horse trailer.
"Elodie."
"He gets back at one."
"It's six in the morning, that's seven hours—"
"He gets back at one, from Kingman, on Saturday.
" She was walking fast and talking faster and not looking at me.
"It's Sunday. Sunday he's home. Sunday he's been home since three yesterday afternoon and he's got up at six-thirty every day of his life and if the lights aren't on in the shop by seven there's a conversation, and I can't do the conversation, Gideon, I've done nine years of the conversation—"
"I'll ride you back."
"You've had four beers."
"I had two beers before ten and I've been on coffee since. Elodie."
She stopped. Turned. And the woman who'd danced in her socks four hours ago was gone, and the one in front of me had her jaw set and both hands in fists and was doing sums.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. Yes. Thank you. Go get it started."
She was on the back of my bike in ninety seconds and we were on the 40 by twenty past, and I had her at the mouth of that lot at eight minutes to seven with the sun not properly up.
She got off. Handed me the helmet. Pulled the borrowed jacket off and folded it over her arm.
"Don't come in," she said.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were absolutely going to."
"I was going to sit in the lot."
"Which is worse—"
"Elodie." I caught the sleeve of her tee, barely, two fingers, and she stopped. "Last night."
"Yeah."
"That's all. Just — last night."
She stood there in the cold with her hair coming apart and forty pounds of jerky in a saddlebag on my pillion that she'd forgotten completely, and she said:
"Best night of my adult life. Absolutely humiliating. Goodbye."
And ran.
I did not sit in the lot. I want credit.
I got back to Ash Fork at nine, and slept until two, and got up and went out to the yard where Bear and Tuck were dismantling the trailer, and Cricket was sitting on an upturned bucket holding something.
"Where'd that come from?"
"Flatbed apron," said Cricket. "It was under the edge. Somebody's going to be walking around with one boot."
It was a work boot. Left. Size eight, steel toe, resoled twice — once well and once by somebody in a hurry with the wrong glue — and the tread worn flat on the outside edge the way it goes on a person who spends her life pivoting off one foot at a bench.
There was a wad of paper stuffed in the toe to take up space, because it had belonged to a bigger foot first.
"Give it here," I said.
"Do you know whose it is?"
"Yes."
"Great, what's her last name?"
And I stood there in the yard with a boot in my hand and realized that in eleven days I had learned that woman's opinion on thread pitch, her father's name, the sound of a wasp in a vent line and the exact economy of a found dollar, and that when I'd asked what to put on the invoice she had said put Cinder, everybody does, and laughed, and I had let her.
"I don't have one," I said.
Cricket looked at me for a long moment.
"Boss," she said, "I want you to understand that I'm going to tell this story at your funeral."
"Cricket."
"I'm going to tell it badly. I'm going to make it much worse than it was. In my version you're holding the boot up to the light."
"Cricket, I need you to think, because you talk to more people in a week than I do in a year.
" I turned the boot over. Resoled twice — once by somebody who knew what they were doing, and once by somebody in a hurry with the wrong glue, which is the entire biography of that woman's last four years in a single half-inch of rubber. "Where would she buy parts?"
Cricket sat up straight on the bucket.
"Oh, that's good."
"Is it?"
"That's very good, actually, that's not the stupid version at all, I'm annoyed.
" She counted on her fingers. "She's rebuilding two top ends and she called a machinist in Kingman, so she's got a supplier who carries NOS.
There's maybe a dozen of those between here and the state line, and half of them are a man in a shed. "
"How long to call all of them?"
"Depends how many answer the phone." Cricket stood and dusted off. "Two days. Maybe three."
"Do it."
"You do it," said Cricket. "You're the one who's going to be standing there when they say her name, and I want you to have to hear it from a stranger, because I'm not made of stone but I am made of something."