Chapter 5 #2
That afterward we lay half on and half off a wheeled trolley designed to carry one mechanic and no romance whatsoever, and I was cold on one shoulder and too hot everywhere else, and he had one arm over his eyes and was breathing like a man who'd ridden a hundred miles.
"That thing's got a weight limit," I said.
"Now you tell me."
"It's four hundred pounds."
"We're fine."
"It's four hundred pounds static."
"Elodie."
"I'm just saying that dynamically we may have—"
"I will get up and walk into the highway," said Gideon.
We ended up on the floor eventually, on his jacket and a moving blanket, with our backs against the tire stack and the stove door open so we could see the coals.
He'd found a bottle of something in the parts room that had been there since my father, and it was terrible, and we drank it out of two coffee mugs, one of which said WORLD'S OKAYEST GOLFER.
"So who's Cinder," he said.
"That's Marty."
"Marty named you?"
"Marty shortened me." I turned the mug. "There was a winter — the second one after, when I was doing my own supply runs because Gerald decided the accounts should go through him and then didn't pay anybody.
And I was banking the stove all day to keep the shop above freezing so the customers' cars didn't seize, and I'd walk into Marty's counter every Tuesday looking like I'd come out of a chimney.
And Marty said, 'Here comes Cinderella,' and I said something to Marty, and after that he said 'Here comes Cinder,' because Cinder was shorter and he'd learned something about me. "
Gideon didn't laugh.
"Then everybody said it," I said. "And I let them, because it's a good shop name, and because when they say Cinder they're not saying Vasquez, and if they said Vasquez I'd have to explain about the sign."
"And you don't correct them."
"What would I correct them to?" I pulled his shirt straighter around me.
"Hi, I'm Elodie Vasquez, that's my father's name on the building, I don't own the building, I don't own the tools, I don't own the name on the invoice — no.
Cinder's cleaner. Cinder's a woman who works here. It doesn't come with a form attached."
"It comes with a wood stove attached."
"Everything comes with something attached, Gideon, that's what a name is."
"Mine came with a dead man attached," he said.
I turned my head.
"Ollie Pratt." He was watching the coals.
"Everybody in Ash Fork's got a version of me that isn't me, and it's very kind, and it's called holding the fort.
Fourteen years. I've been told I'm doing a hell of a job holding it by so many people at so many barbecues that I've started to hear it as one word. "
"So we're both a nickname."
"We're both a nickname."
"Which is either extremely romantic or a very bad sign."
"Elodie."
"Fine. It's romantic. Put it on the invoice." I passed him the mug. "Your turn. Say the thing you've been sitting on since day three, because you've had a whole face on for two hours and I'm too tired to enjoy watching you carry it."
He put his mug down.
"Tell me about the sign," he said.
And I did.
All of it. The orange peel on the heater grille, and find the beat under the beat, and metric freezing first, which he did not correct, which I noticed.
The folder from Mercy General with the beds in it.
The chair by the window, and the magazine, and the sentence — I did not get up — which I have never said to another human being in eleven years and which came out of me at four in the morning in a cold garage sitting on a moving blanket in a man's shirt.
He didn't say it wasn't your fault. I want that carved somewhere. He didn't say it, and every single person who has ever heard even a quarter of it has said it, and it is the most useless combination of four words in the English language.
He said: "How much is the debt now?"
"Sixty-one thousand, four hundred."
"How much was it when you were nineteen?"
"Twenty-two."
"And what's it grow at?"
"He calls it eight."
"What is it actually?"
"Around nineteen, effective, once you count the room-and-board reset every January." I said it flatly. It's a number. It's just a number. "I did the math when I was twenty-three. I stopped doing the math when I was twenty-four."
Gideon was quiet for a long time.
"Say something," I said. "You've got the face."
"I'm going to fix this," he said.
And I want you to understand that I have been offered rescue before. I've had two boyfriends and one very sincere pastor and a woman from a legal aid clinic all promise me some version of that sentence, and it has always, without exception, been the beginning of the part where they leave.
But he wasn't looking at me when he said it. He was looking at the stove, and his jaw was doing something, and he said it the way a man says a number into a phone.
"You can't," I said.
"I'm going to need about nine days," said Gideon.
"That's insulting," I said. "I could do it in six."
He didn't laugh. He put his hand flat on the concrete between us — not on me, on the floor, which I understood about four seconds later was him touching the building.
"One condition," he said.
"There it is."
"Not that kind." He looked over at me. "Whatever I come back with, you get to say no to it. Out loud, no explanation, and I go away and it changes nothing between us. I want that agreed now, in the cheap seats, at four in the morning, before there's a number in the room."
"Why?"
"Because in about three weeks somebody's going to hand you a very large thing," said Gideon, "and I need you to have practiced."
I have gone back over that sentence a hundred times since. He didn't know. He couldn't have known — there was no Vane in the room yet, no folder, no long black car. He was talking about himself.
But he was right, and I did practice, and it was the single most useful thing anybody has ever given me.
"Agreed," I said.
Then I put my head on his chest and slept for two hours on a concrete floor, which is the best sleep of my entire life, and which my back has never forgiven.