Chapter 2
Ash
There's a thing that happens in a club when a man stops being useful.
Nobody says it out loud. Nobody votes on it. He just starts getting left off runs, and then he starts getting left off texts, and then one day he's not at the table and nobody remembers deciding that. It's not cruelty. It's drift. A club is a body and a body sheds.
That's the polite version, and the polite version is what I told myself for about six years.
The impolite version is that in 2011 a man named Petey Coyne got left off enough things that he went and sat in his truck behind the Dairy Freez with the engine running, and I was the one who found him, and I was the one who had to call his mother, and she said — and I have this word for word, because I've had it for fifteen years — she said, I thought you people looked after each other.
So.
That's the thing sitting under the four years I was about to explain to a woman I'd met ninety minutes earlier in a room she wasn't supposed to be in.
She came back and sat down and didn't take her jacket off, which I read correctly as a threat.
"Coffee," she said.
"You said you didn't want coffee."
"I've reversed my position. I'm a flexible person."
I got up and got the pot from the corner and poured two. She watched me do it like I was going to try something.
"That's the good coffee?" she said.
"That's it."
"It's in a Bunn from 1994."
"Yes."
"That's a diner machine. Where'd you get a diner machine?"
"There was a diner," I said. "It closed."
"Did you buy it or did it fall off something."
"Wren."
"I'm just building a picture," she said, and took the cup, and drank, and her eyebrows went up about a millimeter, which I'd learn over the next four days was the largest facial expression she owned.
"Good?"
"It's fine."
"It's better than fine."
"It's fine," she said. "Talk."
So I talked.
"Four years ago," I said, "we had a brother named Denny Fowler. Full patch. Twelve years in. Good with a wiring harness, bad with everything else."
"Bad how."
"Pills. Then the thing after pills." I turned my cup around on the table.
"And a club has two ways of handling that, historically.
One is you carry him. You cover his shifts, you keep him off runs where he'd get somebody killed, you tell yourself he's got it under control, and you carry him until he does something that can't be carried. "
"And two?"
"Two is you cut him loose."
"That doesn't sound like a way of handling it."
"It isn't," I said. "It's a way of not handling it that has a ceremony attached, which is worse, because the ceremony makes it feel like a decision."
She didn't say anything. She's very good at not saying anything. I've spent my whole adult life in a room where everyone talks over everyone and I had genuinely forgotten what it was like to be listened at.
"I didn't want to do either one," I said. "So I found a third one."
"The facility."
"Lakeview Restoration. Up past Gaylord. I found it in a magazine, if you can believe that. In a waiting room. Dentist's office in Beaver Falls."
"You found your brother a rehab in a dentist's magazine."
"There was an article. It had photographs of men chopping wood."
"Men chopping wood."
"They looked well," I said, and heard how it sounded, and kept going anyway, because I'd been hearing how it sounded for four years.
"They looked like men who'd been given something to do with their hands in a place where nobody knew what they'd done.
And I called the number and a woman answered on the second ring and talked to me for fifty minutes. "
"Fifty."
"I timed it after. I looked at the phone when I hung up and thought, that's fifty minutes. Nobody had given me fifty minutes about Denny. Not his mother, not his old lady, not one person at this table."
Wren set her cup down.
"What's her name," she said.
"Dr. Sylvie Marchand."
"And Denny went."
"Denny went. Denny came back at four months clean and stayed clean and he's in Erie now with a wife and a boat he can't afford, and he calls me every Christmas and it takes eight minutes and I hate every second of it because he's so goddamn grateful."
"Why do you hate it?"
"Because it worked," I said. "That's why. Because it worked the first time and that's how you get a habit."
"Tell me about driving him up," she said.
"Denny?"
"The first one. You said you found the place in a magazine and made a phone call. That's the easy half. Tell me the drive."
Nobody had ever asked me that either.
"He didn't know where we were going until Cleveland," I said.
"Ash."
"I know."
"You kidnapped a man to rehab."
"I told him we were picking up a transmission in Toledo. Which — there was a transmission. I did actually buy a transmission. It's still in the shop, it's for a truck nobody owns."
Wren put her face in her hands, briefly, and I could not tell if she was laughing.
"And when he figured it out?"
"He asked me to pull over. Twice. Second time he asked nicely and I did.
" I turned the cup again. "Rest stop outside Norwalk, two in the afternoon, and he got out and walked about forty feet toward the tree line and stopped, and stood there for eleven minutes.
I counted. And I sat in that truck and I decided that if he went into those trees I was not going to chase him, because chasing him would have made it the other thing. "
"What other thing?"
"The thing where a club decides what happens to a man."
"And?"
"He came back. He got in. He said, four months? I said four months. He said, who's paying. I said don't worry about it. He said, Ash, who's paying, and I said me, and he cried for about a mile and a half and then we talked about a carburetor for six hours."
Wren nodded slowly.
"That's the best version of this," she said.
"It's the only good one."
"No — I mean that's the story you've told yourself for four years. That's the one on top." She tipped her head. "Every single time you doubted this, you went and got Denny out of the drawer and looked at him. Right?"
"...Yes."
"How many times?"
"I don't know."
"Guess."
"Hundreds," I said.
She got it faster than I wanted her to.
"How many," she said.
"How many what."
"How many men, Ash."
"Kai's the sixth."
"In four years."
"In four years."
"And who pays for it?"
And there it was, the actual question, arriving about four steps earlier than I'd budgeted for.
"I do," I said.
She looked at me.
"Out of my cut," I said. "Every month. There's an account. It's not club money and it's never been club money and nobody at this table has ever seen the number."
"Nobody at this table knows."
"No."
"Not your president."
"Not Roman."
"You've been running a private program out of your own pocket for four years and you haven't told the man who—"
"Yes."
"—who, from what I understand, is the entire—"
"Yes, Wren."
She sat back. She took a slow breath through her nose. And then she said the thing, and she said it flat and without any particular cruelty, which is how the worst things arrive.
"That's not generosity," she said. "That's a secret."
"They're not exclusive."
"They kind of are, though." She turned her cup around, the way I had, and I noted that and filed it. "Generosity you can hand somebody. A secret you have to keep holding. So which one have you been doing for four years — handing, or holding?"
"You've been in the building two hours."
"Yeah, well. I've been in this conversation my whole life," she said.
"I've had this conversation with case workers, with a landlord, with an ex, with a fleet manager, and with two separate people from the county.
It's always the same shape. Somebody did something good in private and now they need me to admire it in private too. "
"That's not—"
"Why didn't you tell him?"
I opened my mouth.
Here's the part I'd like on the record: I had an answer ready.
I'd had it ready for four years, polished up like a stone in a pocket.
It went: because Roman would have made it a club program, and a club program has a vote, and a vote has men in it who think a man who can't get clean should be left where he falls, and I wasn't going to put Denny Fowler's life up for a vote.
It's a good answer. It's even mostly true.
But I was tired, and she'd driven six hours, and she was looking at me the way a mechanic looks at an engine that's making a noise.
"Because the first year," I said, "it felt like I was doing something the club should have been doing.
And the second year it felt like I was doing something the club couldn't be trusted to do.
And I don't know when it turned over. I know that at some point it stopped being a rescue and started being — "
"An opinion."
I looked up.
"Yeah," I said. "An opinion. About them."
"Well," Wren said. "There it is."
"Do the others know about each other?" she said.
"No."
"None of them?"
"Denny knows about Denny. Bobby thinks he's the only one. Guy Ferris told me in the parking lot the day he left that he'd never been the first person anybody did anything for and I let him keep that, because it was doing him more good than the truth would have."
"So six men, and every one of them thinks he's the exception."
"Yes."
"Ash." She said it almost gently, which is how I learned that Wren gentle is worse than Wren flat. "That's not six rescues. That's six men who each owe you something they can't ever pay, and none of them can talk to each other about it, and the only person who can see the whole shape of it is you."
"That's not what it—"
"It's what it is," she said. "Not what it's for. I believe you about what it's for."
The impact gun out in the shop went again. Stopped.
"You've done this before," I said. "This thing you're doing."
"What thing?"
"Where you take something apart in front of the guy who built it."
"I tow cars for a living," Wren said. "Nine times out of ten there's a man standing next to me explaining that the noise started yesterday. It never started yesterday. It started in March and he's been turning the radio up."
The clock did about a minute of work.