Chapter 7 #2
That's it. That's the whole crime. I thought about it, properly, the way I'd think about a rebuild — laying out every part on the bench and looking at all of them at once.
I thought: he only wants what a man with binoculars could get.
I thought: I could tell Gideon everything I told Vane. Every week. Same day. Turn it into nothing.
I thought: the building has my father's name on it and I have never in eleven years been able to make a single sentence come out of my mouth in that room without the word no in it, and here is a man handing me the room.
I thought: nineteen percent, for nine years, and a wood stove, and the stove's smoking again, and a chair by a window at Mercy General with a magazine in my hands, and I did not get up — and if I don't take this, then what was all of it for?
And at four in the morning, on the mattress in the loft under the hole in the roof, I got as far as: what if I said yes for one year.
I want to be clear that I never got further than that. Not one inch. And I want to be equally clear that getting that far is the worst thing I have ever done.
Because here's what one year actually is.
One year is twelve months of writing down which bikes came in. And the first month is nothing — it's Dutch's shovel and a kid's Sportster and a tow-in from Seligman, and you hand it over and nothing happens, and you feel foolish for having agonized.
And the fourth month there's a run to California with three bikes loaded heavy, and you write that down too, because you've already written down eleven other things and the eleven make the twelfth feel like bookkeeping.
And the ninth month somebody doesn't come home, and you will never, for the rest of your life, be able to prove it wasn't the line you wrote in a notebook, and you will also never be able to prove it was, and you will die at ninety-one still doing that arithmetic at four in the morning.
I worked that out at about half past three, sitting up on a mattress under a hole in a roof, in a building my father's name was on.
And then I thought the thing that actually settled it, which was not noble at all:
He's not offering me the shop. He's offering me the shop back.
Because that's the tell. That's the whole tell, and it took me nine hours to see it.
Nobody gives you a thing. They give you a thing back — and a thing given back has a history, and a history has a debt in it, and I have had exactly one relationship with a man who structured his generosity as a return, and I lived in his parts loft for nine years.
Gerald Thorne gave me a roof.
Callum Vane was offering me a building.
Same sentence. Different font.
I got up and put my boots on and stood in the bay until it got light.
Gideon came back at eight.
He'd slept in the lot. He had that face on. He came in with two coffees and set one down and said, "Well?"
And I said, "I need to say something out loud first, because if I don't say it now I'll never say it, and it'll sit in the middle of the next forty years like a wasp in a vent line."
He went very still.
"Say it."
"I thought about it," I said.
The compressor kicked in. Ran twenty seconds. Kicked out.
"For how long?"
"All night."
"Elodie—"
"And at four in the morning I got as far as what if I said yes for a year, and then I got up and put my boots on and stood in the bay until it got light, and the answer is no, the answer was always going to be no, I have never for one second been genuinely—"
"Stop."
"Gideon—"
"You said all night." He set the coffee down very carefully, and that was worse than anything he could have done with it.
"I've spent three weeks telling every man I know that you're the straightest person in this state.
I stood in front of Roman Kade and lost a vote on it.
I lost my own table eight to three on it.
And the whole time — the whole time, Elodie — the thing I was selling was that you'd never—"
"That's not fair."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't. It's just true. Both things can be there. You taught me that, about torque and heat, on day four."
"Don't."
"He offered you a building and eyes on my club," said Gideon, "and you took twenty-four hours."
"He offered me my father," I said.
And that landed, because it was true, and because he had no answer to it, and because true things with no answers are exactly what break people.
He stood there.
"Say the no to me," he said. "Out loud. The way you did in this room three weeks ago at two in the morning."
"No."
"Say it to him."
"I'm going to."
"Say it to him in front of both charters," said Gideon Marsh.
"Because eleven men voted on you, and Roman Kade said no to me on money and yes to me on you, and if you say it in a parking lot to a man in a coat, then for the rest of your life somebody in Pennsylvania is going to say yeah, but she thought about it, and I will be the one standing there not able to say a single word. "
"That's cruel."
"It's the job," he said, and his voice cracked straight down the middle on the word job.
And then — because he is not a man who gets to walk out of a room cleanly, ever, that's the whole tragedy of him — he stopped in the doorway with his back to me.
"For the record," he said. "Two things, and then I'm going.
"One. If you'd said yes, I'd have gone to Roman with it and I'd have argued your side. Badly, and I'd have lost, and I'd have done it anyway. I want you to know that, because you're about to spend a week deciding I never really—"
"Gideon."
"Two." His hand was on the frame and I could see his knuckles from twelve feet away. "The condition. On the floor, at four in the morning, three weeks ago. I said whatever I came back with, you get to say no, out loud, no explanation, and it changes nothing."
"You did."
"That was mine to give and I gave it and I meant it.
" He turned around. He looked about a hundred years old.
"And when Vane came back with something forty times the size of anything I had, I stood in your shop and I did not extend you the same thing.
Not for one hour. I gave you twenty-four and then I came in here at eight in the morning and asked you how you'd spent them. "
I couldn't say anything at all.
"So I want it in the room before I go," said Gideon Marsh, "that this is not you failing a test. It's me writing one, after I'd promised you there wouldn't be one.
And it's still true that you have to say it in front of both charters, and I'm still right about that, and I'm going to be sick about how I said it for a long time. "
Then he turned around and walked out into the lot.
I heard the bike start.
I heard it not leave for a long, long time.
And then I heard it leave.