Chapter 16 Doubling Down
BIRDIE spent the following Tuesday buying a level I did not need in order to have a reason to keep my back to the front window of my own store, and if that is not a portrait of a woman in complete command of her situation, I don’t know what is.
Here is the thing about feeling a net close on you.
It doesn’t feel like a net. A net would be simple.
It feels like the temperature of a room you can’t leave going up one degree an hour, so slowly that if you complain about it you sound crazy, so steadily that by afternoon you’re sitting in your own life sweating and pretending it’s fine.
Wes Calder had started coming into Hollis Hardware.
Not for hardware. Oh, he bought hardware.
He bought a box of wood screws he clearly did not need on Monday and a single furnace filter on Wednesday and on Friday he stood in front of the fasteners for eleven minutes, and I know it was eleven because I counted them the same reflexive way I count everything, and then he bought a tube of caulk and asked Earl about the weather and left.
A man does not come to a hardware store to make small talk about the weather with Earl Hollis.
Earl’s small talk about the weather is a documented cure for insomnia.
Wes came to look at me looking scared, and I gave it to him, I gave him the full show, I dropped a pack of picture hooks and yelped and apologized to the pegboard, and the entire time some cold clean part of me was standing in the back of my own skull with its arms folded, going: he’s not buying it, he’s cataloguing it, that’s a man building a file.
So I doubled down. God help me, I doubled down.
If the town thought I was jumpy, I would be a legend.
I called Marcy over to open a jar of pickles at lunch because I “couldn’t get the grip.
” I asked Earl to please, please check the back room before I went in for stock because I’d “heard a noise,” and the noise was the ice maker, and I knew it was the ice maker, and I made him go look anyway while I stood in the doorway with my hand pressed to my sternum doing the breathing you do when you want to be seen doing breathing.
I told a customer I couldn’t sell him lighter fluid because “it makes me too nervous to even ring it up,” which I heard leave my mouth and thought, Birdie, you absolute maniac, you sell propane, and he just patted my hand and said bless your heart and bought it off Marcy instead.
It was working the way a fever works. Which is to say it was making the underlying problem worse.
Because the underlying problem was that the fires were not stopping, and the box behind Ren’s building had not been the last thing, it had been a warning shot with my name written invisibly all over it, and I could not stop patrolling.
That’s the word. I’d stopped calling it “getting my steps” even to myself.
I walked the block at 5:40 in the morning and again after dark, and I did the thing I retired, the reading of the parked cars and the gone cars and the wrong shadows, and I found, twice, small stupid awful things that I made safe and told no one about, quiet as breathing, and then went home and lay in the dark furious at my own hands for still knowing how.
A junction where a wire had been persuaded to fray near a downspout.
A stack of pallets moved eighteen inches too close to the Sokols’ propane.
Small fires waiting to be born. Somebody was rehearsing on my street.
And the worst of it, the part that had me buying levels to hide behind windows, was Theo.
Ren works nights at the regional hospital, three and four to a stretch, and on those nights her boy is mine, dinner and homework and lights-out, which is the best part of my week and lately the most dangerous. Because I could not stop teaching him things.
“Why do we always look at the reflection in the parked cars,” Theo said Thursday night, walking home from the rec center, because Theo is twelve and notices everything, which is a trait I love in him and am terrified of in equal measure.
“Because it’s polite to check your hair,” I said.
“You don’t care about your hair.”
“That’s very hurtful.”
“You do it at the corner of Larch and Delaney every single time and you look at the whole street, not your hair.” He kicked a bottlecap the length of a square of sidewalk, expertly, and looked up at me with those flat interested eyes that miss nothing.
“You made me learn which way the wind goes. From the flag at the Legion. You said it was a game.”
“It is a game.”
“It’s a weird game.”
“I’m a weird lady,” I said, and it came out truer than I meant it to, and Theo, mercifully, twelve, let it go.