Chapter 20 Tox
BIRDIE drove two hours north on a Sunday under the excuse of getting a part for a customer’s log splitter that could absolutely have been ordered online, and somewhere past the third exit the flutter came off me like a wet coat, and by the time I hit Tox’s gravel road I was just Roberta again, or the closest thing to her that’s left, and it was such a relief I had to pull over for a second and put my forehead on the wheel.
He was on the porch when I got out, in the wheelchair on the good days and the sticks on the bad ones, and today was sticks, which meant a good day, and one of the shepherds, Biscuit, came off the porch like a brown missile and hit me in the chest and I went down in the gravel laughing, actually laughing, the ugly honest kind, and Tox looked down at both of us and said, “She likes you better than me and she lives here. Says a lot about you and nothing good about her.”
“Hi, Tox.”
“Sergeant.” He only calls me that when he means it.
He put a hand down, the good arm, and hauled me up, and looked at me the way a team leader looks at his people, top to bottom, checking the gear, and I let him, because he’s the only living person I let.
“You look like hell warmed over and served to a dog.”
“I’ve missed you too.”
Nobody in Halford would recognize me on Tox’s porch.
That’s the truth of it, and it’s a lonely truth to keep.
In Halford I have a walk, a pitch of voice, a repertoire of little jumps, a whole choreography I put on with my shoes.
Out here I set it down at the county line and I stand up straight and I use my real voice, the low flat one, and I know things out loud, and the only witness is a man who watched me be that person under conditions that would’ve broken most people, so there’s nothing to hide it from.
I hadn’t realized how much the disguise weighs until I got two hours away from where I have to wear it.
My jaw ached from a month of holding a scared face. I hadn’t noticed until it stopped.
We did the things we do. Coffee that could resole a boot.
The dogs, all six, each of whom I know by name and nose.
He walked me out to the runs on the sticks, slow, and told me about a bird dog he was retraining and a divorce that wasn’t his and a VA appointment that went the way they go, and I told him about the store and about Theo and about Marcy’s engagement drama, all the small warm true things, and for an hour I was a person with a whole life and not a costume, and it was the best hour I’d had in months, which is exactly why I’d stayed away.
Because Tox knows me. Tox was there.
He waited until we were back on the porch with the second coffee, dusk coming down purple over his fields, before he said, “So what’s on fire in Halford.”
I didn’t answer right away. Biscuit put her head on my knee.
“Birdie.”
“How do you know anything’s on fire.”
“Because you drove two hours to sit on my porch and pet my dogs, which you do when you can’t sit still and you don’t want to know why.
” He said it gently. Tox does gentle like most people do a foreign language, carefully, with the accent still on.
“You’ve got the two-thumbs thing going.” I looked down.
I was running both thumbs along the seam of the coffee cup, back and forth, the thing I do at the start of a job, a habit older than Halford.
I stopped. He watched me stop. “Yeah,” he said. “That.”
So I told him. Not all of it. But more than I’d told any living soul in three years, because he’s the one it’s safe with, because he already knows the worst thing about me, the thing under all the other things, and stayed anyway.
I told him about the pour pattern at Larch and Delaney and the box behind Ren’s building and the pallets and the frayed junction.
I told him about the escalation, though I didn’t call it that out loud until he did.
I told him, and my voice went flat and clean like it does, all the flutter gone, laying it out like a briefing, because with Tox I don’t have to pretend I can’t.