Chapter 18 The Test
WES did not plan to test her at the safety meeting.
I want that on the record, because of how it went.
I planned to run a boring, useful, twenty-minute community talk about extension cords and space heaters in the basement of First Methodist, the kind of thing I do four times a year to the same nine people and a plate of church cookies, and I planned to watch the room, because the arsonist lived in this town and sometimes people who set fires like to sit in the folding chairs and hear the marshal be a step behind. That was the plan.
Then more than nine people came.
Word had gotten around about the Flats. Fear does what fear does, and half of Dutchtown was in the basement of First Methodist on a Tuesday night, on folding chairs, with the church coffee going and Pastor Dave’s terrible cookies, and I stood up front with my extension cords and looked out at a room that was actually scared, actually mine to steady, and I saw Birdie Vance in the third row between Ren Alvarez and the boy, wearing the face.
She’d worn it in on purpose. I could see the effort in it now that I was looking, which I hadn’t been able to a month ago. It’s a good face. It’s a lot of small true things assembled into one big false one, and I’d stopped being able to un-see the assembly.
I got through the space heaters. I did the bit about the surge strip daisy-chain that always gets a knowing groan out of anybody who’s ever run a window unit off an extension cord, and I did the bit about the smoke detector nine-volts, and I watched the room, which I always do, though not for the faces that are scared, because the scared faces are honest, but for the one face that’s a beat behind the others, the one taking notes on how far behind me I am.
I didn’t find it. Whoever was setting these wasn’t in the folding chairs tonight, which told me something too.
He wasn’t the type who needed to watch. He already knew he was ahead.
And then a man in a Carhartt named, I would learn, Denny asked a real question, a scared one, about what you’re actually supposed to do if you smell gas in an old house with old lines, and the room leaned in, because that was the question under all the other questions, and I opened my mouth to give the standard answer, get out, get everyone out, don’t touch a switch, call from outside, and I don’t fully know why I did what I did next except that she was sitting right there being a coward on purpose and I wanted, once, to make her flinch in the other direction.
“That’s a good one for an expert,” I said. “Birdie, you’re at the hardware store. You sell to half the plumbers in the county. What do you tell folks?”
The room turned to her, warm, expectant, because they love her, and it was, I’ll admit it, a slightly cruel thing to do to a woman who has built a public identity around not being able to answer questions, and I did it anyway, and then I got to watch something I have not stopped thinking about.
She started to answer.
For a fraction of a breath she started to give the real answer, and the real answer began to come out, clean, fast, ordered.
“Don’t —” she said, and her voice on that one word was a different voice, low and level, the front edge of a set of instructions that were going to be exactly right and in exactly the right order, get low, no, that’s smoke, gas you don’t get low, gas you get out and up and away, kill nothing, spark nothing, and I watched her hear herself, watched her catch her own competence halfway out of her mouth like a woman grabbing a plate off the edge of a table, and haul it back.
“— ask me,” she finished, in the flutter, a full second late, “I’d faint, honestly, I’d be no help at all, you want Earl, Earl knows all that, I just work the register.” Laugh. Hand to chest. “I’m hopeless.”
The room laughed with her, fond, and moved on, and Denny in the Carhartt looked genuinely disappointed, because for one second he’d heard the front of a real answer too and he’d wanted the rest of it, and he was right to.
I have interviewed a lot of people who were lying.
Lying is mostly addition. People put things in.
The good ones are calm, the bad ones sweat, but they all add.
What Birdie Vance did in that church basement was subtraction, live, in front of me, and it is the hardest thing there is to do and I have almost never seen it done well and she did it beautifully and it made me want to put my head down on the folding table.
She hadn’t hidden a fact. She’d hidden a capacity.
She’d had the right answer fully loaded and she had physically stopped herself from being useful to a frightened room full of her own neighbors, and it had cost her, I could see it cost her, and she’d paid it without blinking.