Chapter 2 #2
"Tell me about the fifth one," she said.
"What?"
"You said Kai's the sixth. You've told me about the first. Tell me about the fifth."
I have thought a lot about why I answered that. The best I've got is that I wanted to. Four years of holding, and then a stranger reaches out and puts a hand on the exact spot.
"Marcus Trill," I said. "Prospect. Twenty-two. Sweet kid. Went up in March of last year."
"And?"
"And he graduated."
"Graduated."
"That's their word. There's a certificate. There's a phone call from Marchand where she tells you how proud she is." I put my hands flat. "He completed the program in July. They told me he'd taken a placement."
"A job."
"Vocational placement. Part of aftercare. It's in the brochure."
"Where?"
"Ohio, I think. Somewhere near Youngstown."
"You think."
"He didn't come back to Hollow Ash," I said. "That's — Wren, that's not unusual. That's actually what you hope for. You hope they don't come back. Half the reason a man's using is this town."
"When did you last speak to him?"
"Last July."
"And when did you stop asking about him?"
And I want to be honest about the pause, because she noticed it. She noticed everything. I'd known her two hours and I already understood that being around her was going to be like living next to a very quiet, very accurate scale.
"Around September," I said.
"Why?"
"Because Marchand had already told me twice that he was doing well, and the third time I asked I could hear myself. I sounded like a man checking up on a woman who'd done nothing but help me."
"So you stopped."
"I stopped."
"Say the whole thing," Wren said.
"What?"
"Say the whole thing out loud. Not the version with the reasons in it. The other one."
"Wren—"
"You've been carrying it for a year and you've never once had to hear it in a room. So say it. I'll sit here."
The light had gone off the west windows. Somebody was running an impact gun out in the shop and it stopped and started, stopped and started, like something breathing badly.
"I sent a twenty-two-year-old to a place nine hours away," I said. "He never came home. I don't know where he lives, I don't know who he works for, I have never once spoken to him since, and I stopped asking eleven months ago because asking made me feel rude."
Wren nodded slowly.
"Okay," she said.
"That's it? Okay?"
"What did you want, applause?" She stood up and pulled her keys out. "You've had four years of thinking that quietly and it did nothing. You said it out loud and now it's two of us. That's the whole improvement available. Let's go."
"It's nine at night."
"It's nine hours."
"Ten and a half in Delores," I said.
She stopped at the door.
"You listen," she said. It didn't sound like a compliment. It sounded like a finding.
"Occasionally."
"Get your stuff. And Ash — "
"Yeah."
"Whatever you were going to tell Roman about where you're going this week." She pushed the door open with her shoulder. "Don't."
"Why not?"
"Because you're going to have to tell him the real thing eventually," Wren said, "and I'd rather you didn't use up your lying on something small."
Roman was in the shop when I came through with my bag, standing over Cricket's bike with a light, and he straightened up when he saw me and I had about four steps to decide.
"North," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Yeah."
"How long?"
"Week, maybe."
He looked at me. Roman's got a thing he does where he waits precisely long enough for you to fill it, and if you don't, he lets you go, and you spend the drive wishing you'd filled it.
"Take Cricket," he said.
"I've got a ride."
"With her."
"With her."
He wiped his hands on a rag he did not need to wipe his hands on.
"Ash."
"Yeah."
"That kid's been gone three weeks and you knew where he was for all three." Still looking at the bike. "I'd like you to think, on the drive, about why I had to hear about that from a woman who kicked in my church door."
"It wasn't kicked."
"Ash."
"I'll think about it," I said.
"Do," said Roman, and put the light back down on the tank, and that was the closest I came to telling him five days early, and I've thought about that four seconds more than is healthy.
I packed in eleven minutes. On the way out Cricket was on the visitors bench with a Red Bull, which as far as I know makes him the only person ever to use it.
"VP. Where you going?"
"North."
"Cold up north."
"That's the reputation."
He looked past me at Delores, idling in the gravel with her running lights on, thirty feet of brown steel with a woman's silhouette in the cab and a boom over her shoulder like a folded wing.
"That's a truck," Cricket said, reverently.
"Don't tell her that," I said. "She'll get insufferable."
I climbed up. It's a long way up. She had a road atlas open on the wheel — a paper one, from a truck stop, with a spiral binding and a coffee ring on Michigan — and she didn't look over when I shut the door.
"Seatbelt," Wren said.
"I ride a motorcycle for a living."
"And I drive a truck for a living, and in this cab we wear seatbelts, because I've cut eleven people out of vehicles and I'd like to tell you what all eleven had in common."
I put my seatbelt on.
She put Delores in gear, and Hollow Ash slid backward out of the mirrors — the pink Dairy Freez sign, the church, the long stretch of nothing that a town that size has no right to — and for the first time in four years I was going up there with somebody who hadn't agreed to be grateful.