Chapter 4
Rhett
I make a decision in the last week of May. I will say it plainly because the kindest thing I can do for myself, the kind of clean honesty I have learned from her without her ever once asking me to, is to put a thing in language and look at it.
The decision is this: I am going to stop.
I am going to stop going to the library.
I am going to stop reading the books she chooses for me.
I am going to stop sitting in the reading nook with my knees up to my chest like a man trying to fit his life into a chair it does not belong in.
I am going to put the Neruda and the Berry and the small green hardcover with the line on page thirty-three into a drawer at the clubhouse and I am going to put my time and my body back into the things they have always done — the road, the brothers, the work, the long quiet circles you ride out past the orchards when you cannot sit with yourself indoors.
I am going to do this because she deserves it.
That is the reason. I want to be honest about the reason.
The reason is not that I am scared. The reason is not that I do not want this.
The reason is that I have spent twelve years cataloging myself with the kind of cold accuracy you learn from being your own warden, and the catalog is clear: I am the wrong man for her.
I am the wrong man for her in a way that is not negotiable.
She is soft and quiet and deliberate. She is a woman who built a children's reading hour and a senior book club and a garden of roses on a trellis.
She is a woman whose calligraphy looks like the handwriting on the front of a christening card.
I am a man with twelve police reports in three states, two of which involved unconscious men, and a switch behind my sternum that I cannot turn off, and a stepfather I put through a wall when I was sixteen years old who I am still not certain — and this is the part I do not say out loud to anyone — I am still not certain I would not have killed if my mother had not screamed my name.
She deserves a man without that catalog.
So I make the decision on a Sunday night.
I make it in my room above the clubhouse, with the small green Neruda closed on my nightstand and the lamp off and the moon on the floor in a long pale rectangle, and I say it to myself out loud — I am going to stop — and I say it the way you would say a vow.
I do not stop.
It is Monday. By Tuesday afternoon I am at the back door of the library with a roll of butcher paper under my arm because she had mentioned, last Thursday, that the children's reading hour was going to need a new banner for the summer kickoff and that the butcher shop on Cherry would sell her a yard of paper if she had time to walk down and ask, and I had nodded, and I had thought I will pick it up on the way, and apparently somewhere between Sunday's vow and Tuesday's afternoon my body had been making other arrangements without consulting me.
I leave the butcher paper at the back door.
I do not go inside. I ride home. I tell myself this is the same as stopping.
Wednesday I take a fourteen-hour run with Boone up to the Pennsylvania line and back.
I do not have a phone signal for most of the day.
I do not think about her for most of the day either, which is to say I think about her continuously but I have managed, by mile two hundred, to stop noticing that I am thinking about her.
I get back to the clubhouse at ten p.m. with road grit in my teeth and the particular muscle-deep exhaustion you can only get from a long fast straight ride, and I shower and I lie down on my back on the bed and I look at the green book on the nightstand and I think good. Good. Tomorrow will be easier.
Thursday is not easier.
Thursday I almost ride to the library three separate times.
The first time I get out to the bike before I turn around and walk back inside.
The second time I get the bike started before I turn it off again.
The third time I get a block down Main before I take the long way around and ride out to the river instead and sit on my turnout, like I did the day she gave me the green book, and I read a copy of the Wendell Berry I have not yet returned to her, and I tell myself I am being disciplined, and the truth I am not yet ready to say is that I am being a coward.
Friday Knox finds me in the garage.
He has a way of finding me. He has had it for six years.
The man does not knock. He does not announce.
He simply appears in your peripheral vision at the exact moment you would have most preferred to be alone, and he stands there with his hands in his back pockets and his shoulders against whatever doorframe is closest, and he waits.
You learn, eventually, that the only way to make him leave is to talk.
I am under a 1996 Sportster that belongs to Diesel's cousin's college roommate, doing a favor for a favor for a favor, because Diesel asked, and Diesel is owed.
The bike is up on the lift and I am on my back on the creeper with a wrench in my left hand and grease up to my elbow, and I hear Knox's boots come into the garage and stop ten feet away.
I do not roll out from under the bike. I keep working.
Knox says nothing for a full minute.
Then he says, "How long are you going to do this."
I say, "Do what."
"Whatever you're doing, brother. Whatever this is. The fourteen-hour rides. The not sleeping. The look on your face for the last week. Whatever you're fighting, stop. You're no good to the club when your head's somewhere else."
I work the wrench. I do not answer.
He says, "Hawk says you've stopped going to the library."
I close my eyes for a second under the bike.
I say, "It's not — Knox, it's not —"
"Brother. Get out from under that bike."
I roll out.
I sit up on the creeper. I wipe my hands.
He is standing where I expected him to be standing — by the workbench, hands in his back pockets, head tilted slightly to the side.
Knox is a man of average height and unaverage presence.
He fills a room the way furniture does, in the way that you do not notice he is there until you try to walk through where he is and find you cannot.
He is fifty-one years old, and he has buried two brothers in his time leading the Iron Thorn, and he is the closest thing I have had to a father since I was sixteen years old, and he is looking at me right now with the same patient expression he had the night he picked me up out of the parking lot in Lexington with a plate of eggs and a question.
I say, "She's not for me, Knox."
He does not say anything for a long second.
He says, finally, "Who told you that."
"I told me that."
"Yeah." He nods slowly. "Yeah, I figured."
"Knox —"
"Brother."
"She is — she is a librarian. She has ink on her thumb. She is the softest person I have ever stood within twenty feet of, and I —"
"Rhett."
He uses my real name. He does this maybe three times a year. It works the way it is meant to work. I stop.
He says, "You don't get to make that call."
I look at him.
He says it again, slower. "You don't get to make that call.
Whether you are for her. Whether you deserve her.
Whether she gets to look at the man you are and decide for herself whether she wants him.
You do not get to make that call for her.
You make it for yourself, and then you have made yourself into a coward who took a decision out of her hands that was hers, not yours.
And brother, with respect, I did not pull you out of that parking lot in Lexington six years ago so I could watch you turn into a coward over a woman in a cardigan. "
He stops. He waits.
I do not say anything.
He says, more quietly, "I have watched you for six years.
I have watched you ride yourself into the ground because you have nothing else to point yourself at.
I have watched you take every fight, every long run, every bad night-shift the club has had, because you cannot stand to be in your own head when the lights are off.
And then in the last month I have watched you walk around this clubhouse with a book under your arm and a different look in your face, and I have watched you sleep, brother.
You have been sleeping. You think I do not notice that?
You think I do not see what is happening to you? "
I say, in a voice that does not entirely belong to me, "I do not know how to be the man she needs."
Knox looks at me.
He says, "Yes, you do. You have been being him for a month.
You sat with her at her desk and you helped her shelve books in the 800s last Wednesday and Hawk's wife saw you do it and reported back, and what I heard her say was that you carried Mrs. Halloran's grandsons out to her car in the rain after reading hour because the little one was crying and Mrs. Halloran's hands were full.
You think a weapon does that, brother? Be honest. You think a weapon shelves books and carries crying children? "
I do not answer him.
He says, "She is not asking you to be a different man. She has been spending an hour a day for a month with the man you already are. She knows. Whatever you think she does not know, she knows. Women like that one know."
He puts his hand on my shoulder. He squeezes it once.
He says, "Go to the library, brother. Stop hiding."
He walks out of the garage.
I sit on the creeper with my hands black with grease and my chest going in a way it has not gone in twelve years, and I look at the wall across from me for a long time.
—
I do not go to the library on Friday. I am not, yet, ready.