Chapter 8 #2
"Young man," she said, "I understand it perfectly. If she defaults, you have to come and take my house, and I have to be dead first, and I'm going to make that as inconvenient for you as I possibly can. It's the funniest thing that's happened to me in a decade. Where do I sign?"
She signed. Then she made him take a photograph of the three of them.
The sign went up on a Thursday.
Not the old one. The old one is in Vane's building and Vane's building sits on the 40 with the D still flaking off it.
Izzy made the new one, welded steel, letters cut with a plasma torch and ground by hand and it is not, technically, good. There's a wobble in the S. Izzy knows about the wobble in the S and has feelings.
It says:
VASQUEZ & DAUGHTER
Under it, smaller:
Est. 1984. Moved once.
Elodie read that second line for about a minute and a half without saying anything and then went and stood behind the building for a while and came back with her face washed.
The first night, there was nothing in the shop.
I want to be precise, because it matters.
There was a lift, a bench, a compressor, a rolling toolbox, forty-one thousand dollars of tooling still in boxes, an extension cord, a work light, and a mattress that Bear had carried in on his own initiative and set in the corner without comment, which is the single most tactful thing that man has ever done.
And a sign on the wall with her name on it, unhung, propped, because we'd run out of Thursday.
She stood in the middle of it at ten at night with a beer she hadn't opened.
"It's empty," she said.
"It's day one."
"No — I mean it's empty and it's fine. That's what I'm — Gideon, I keep waiting for the part where it costs something.
" She turned all the way around, slowly.
"Eleven years. Everything I've ever been given came with a number under it in small print, every single thing, and I've read every one of them, and this one hasn't got one, and my whole body's just standing here waiting for the second half of the sentence. "
"There isn't one."
"I know. That's what's making me insane."
I put my beer down.
"Elodie."
"Don't be nice to me right now, I'll come apart."
"I'm not going to be nice to you." I crossed the concrete. "I'm going to apologize, which is different, and then I'm going to shut up about it forever, which is the important half.
"I said a cruel thing in your garage. Not a wrong thing.
A cruel one, and I chose it, because I was frightened and because I'd spent three weeks telling everybody you were something and then found out you were a person, and I punished you for the size of the thing he offered you.
That's the whole confession. You thought about it for twenty-four hours and you were entitled to a week. "
She looked at the floor. Then up.
"You're apologizing for being right."
"I'm apologizing for being right cheaply. There's a way to be right that costs you something and I took the free version." I stopped an arm's length off. "You said we'd be sorry properly later, when you had somewhere to be sorry in."
She looked around the empty shop. At the lift. At the sign propped against the wall.
"Well," said Elodie Vasquez. "Here we are."
I'd like to say something dignified happened next.
What actually happened is that she put the unopened beer down on the concrete very deliberately, walked over, took two fistfuls of my shirt, and said, "There is one mattress in this building and I have thought about your hands every single night for nineteen days and I want you to know that I have been keeping a count —" and I got a hand behind her head and stopped the sentence somewhere in the middle.
The rest of it, as much as I'm telling:
That the shop had no interior walls yet, so the whole space was one volume, and every sound went up into the roof and came back — every laugh, every breath, the click of the compressor cycling in the corner like a metronome none of us asked for.
That she got my shirt off and stopped dead, one hand flat on my chest, and said, "Wait, wait — turn around," and I said "What?
" and she said "Turn around," and turned me by the shoulder to face the wall, and I understood: she wanted the sign in her eyeline.
VASQUEZ & DAUGHTER, propped, unhung, lit by a work light hanging off a joist. She wanted to be able to see it over my shoulder.
"You are a deeply strange woman," I said.
"I'm sentimental, there's a difference—"
"There isn't."
"There is, and you're going to be very glad about it in about ninety seconds," she said, and she was correct.
That there was no furniture at all, so there was nothing to lean on, nothing to brace against, nothing to knock over.
Just a mattress on a concrete floor in a forty-foot room, and a woman with grease permanently in the whorls of her fingertips, and no soot on her at all, and nowhere in the world she had to be at seven.
That she cried once, briefly, in the middle, and then laughed at herself for it and put her forearm over her eyes and said, "Ignore that entirely, keep going, keep going—"
That she said my name and I said hers and neither of us said Cinder.
That afterward we lay on our backs on a mattress in an empty building looking up at the underside of a roof Izzy had cut a light-well in, and there were stars in it, actual stars, framed in raw steel, and neither of us said anything about that because some things you leave alone.
That she said, at some point in the middle, with her mouth against my ear, "I've never done this in a building that was mine," and that I said, "Neither have I," and she laughed and said, "It's my building, Gideon, you're a guest," and that is the truest sentence ever spoken in that shop and she has never once let me forget it.
That the compressor kicked in. Ran twenty seconds. Kicked out.That she said, into the dark, "It's got a leak somewhere."
"Elodie."
"It shouldn't cycle at rest, Gideon, that's a leak, it's on the line or it's the tank drain and if it's the tank drain then Izzy owes me an apology—"
"It's one in the morning."
"I know." She was already sitting up, reaching for the work light, and I have never seen anything more beautiful in my life than that woman going after a compressor leak, naked, in her own building, at one in the morning, on the first night. "I know. Give me nine days."
"Six," I said.
She looked back over her shoulder at me, and grinned, and the sign was behind her with the wobble in the S.
"Six," she agreed.