Chapter One #2
He nodded once, went and got his tools from the garage, and came back to do the work without making conversation out of it, which she was grateful for, because she didn't have a version of small talk with him that didn't feel like walking on a floor she wasn't sure would hold her weight.
She stayed behind the bar and did not watch him work, mostly, and when he was done he wiped his hands on a rag from his back pocket and told her the compressor would hold through the weekend and probably another six months past that, and then he left the way he'd come, without asking for anything, without letting the visit turn into more than what it had been.
She watched him walk back across the lot. He didn't look back either. That was new too, in its own way, and she genuinely couldn't decide if it made things easier or worse.
Her phone buzzed against the bar top around eleven, Deb's name on the screen, and Rowan picked it up grateful for the interruption even before she knew what it was.
"Tell me you're bringing me lunch," Rowan said instead of hello.
"I'm bringing you a chicken salad sandwich and unsolicited opinions about the string lights I can already see from the diner parking lot," Deb said. "Amber's the right call, by the way, if that's what you're deciding up there."
"That's what I told Jonas."
"Smart girl. How's the Run prep?"
"Manageable. Kegs are in, lights are going up, Metro's delivering the tables at two." Rowan flipped the invoice over and started on the next one, cradling the phone against her shoulder. "Manageable is my favorite word this week."
"Manageable's a good word for a Tuesday. It's a weird word for the seven-month anniversary of a day you shouldn't have to remember the date of."
Rowan closed her eyes for a second. Deb had run the diner two lots down from the mill district for eleven years, had known Rowan since before Ironvow, before the Yard, before any of it, and she was the one person who'd never once told Rowan to get over it or move on or any of the other phrases people reached for when they didn't know what else to say to a woman whose husband, functionally, if not on paper, had cheated on her in her own office.
"I'm not commemorating it," Rowan said. "I'm running a business. Some days the business happens to fall on a Tuesday I could otherwise do without."
"Fair. I'll bring extra pickles, it's medicinal." A pause, the particular pause Deb did right before she was about to say something Rowan wasn't going to want to hear. "You good otherwise? Nothing weird going on?"
"Define weird."
"Nothing. Forget I said it. I'll see you at noon."
Deb hung up before Rowan could push, which was its own kind of answer, and Rowan stood there with the phone in her hand for a second longer than the moment warranted, some old instinct telling her that Deb didn't do vague check-ins for no reason.
She set the phone down and went back to work, because that was the other thing nobody warned you about, the way a good, structured, manageable day could hold a small stone in its shoe the entire time and you wouldn't know exactly where it was until you stepped wrong.
The afternoon went the way Saturdays-before-the-Run always went.
Tables arrived at two, four minutes late, which she let go because four minutes wasn't forty.
Jonas got the CO2 lines squared away and only mildly complained about it.
Preacher came by around three to walk the property with her for the club's own insurance walkthrough, the two of them checking fire exits and extinguisher tags with the same brisk efficiency they brought to everything, because Mateo Alvarez was, in Rowan's estimation, one of maybe three people in this club who treated the Yard's legitimacy as something worth protecting rather than something worth tolerating.
"Walt still wants the whole lot roped for parking Saturday," Preacher said, checking a box on his clipboard. "I told him your permit only covers the north half."
"Your permit covers the north half," Rowan said. "I've told him that twice."
"I'll tell him a third time. Third time usually works on Walt." Preacher gave her the kind of look that wasn't quite a smile but did the same job. "You holding up okay? Big weekend."
"I'm always holding up okay, Mateo. It's the one skill I never had to build from scratch."
He didn't push either, which she appreciated, and they finished the walkthrough with the kind of easy, undemanding company that Rowan had learned, in the last seven months, was worth more than she used to give it credit for.
People who didn't need anything from her except competence.
People who weren't going to ask her to feel something on their schedule.
At the last extinguisher, mounted by the back exit, Preacher paused a second longer than the checklist required.
"Walt's been asking about your vendor accounts," he said, not quite looking at her. "The catering supplier, specifically. Something about a duplicate charge he wants reconciled before the Run."
"I reconcile my own accounts, Mateo. I don't need Walt auditing my books."
"It's not an audit. It's Walt being Walt, wanting to know money's not walking out of a business that's got his club's name attached to the land under it.
" Preacher clicked his pen shut. "I told him to talk to you directly instead of talking around you.
Whether he listens is between him and his own bad habits. "
"Tell him I'll pull the statement tonight if it makes him feel better."
"I'll tell him." Preacher gave her a short nod, the kind that passed for warmth from a man who didn't hand it out loosely. "For what it's worth, the place looks good, Rowan. You should be proud of what you built out here."
"I am," she said, and meant it, and let that be the whole of her answer.
By six, the light had gone long and orange across the gravel lot, and Rowan was behind the bar cashing out the afternoon's small deliveries when Deb's chicken salad sandwich, half-eaten hours ago, sat forgotten in its wax paper next to the register.
Jonas had gone home. The clubhouse across the lot had its bay doors down for the night, bikes tucked in, the particular quiet that meant most of the club had drifted off to wherever club members drifted to on a Tuesday.
Cole's bike wasn't in the row anymore. She noticed that too, and hated herself a little for noticing.
Her phone buzzed again. Deb, a second time, which was unusual, because Deb wasn't a double-texter.
Call me when you get a sec. Nothing urgent.
Rowan knew, the way you know a storm's coming from the particular color the sky goes before it breaks, that nothing urgent from Deb meant the exact opposite. She wiped her hands on the bar rag, picked up the phone, and dialed.
Deb answered on the first ring, which told her everything before a single word got said.
"Okay, don't spiral," Deb said, "because it might be nothing, and I only know because Marnie from the salon called me right after she called half of Millhaven, so by the time you hear this from someone else I want you to have already heard it from me."
"Deb."
"Vanessa's back in town. Somebody saw her getting gas out on Route 9 this afternoon, driving a car nobody recognized, and before you ask, no, I don't know why, and no, I don't think it's a coincidence that it's today."
Rowan stood very still behind her own bar, in the business she'd built with her own two hands out of a dead grain silo and eleven months of eighteen-hour days, and felt the floor under two hundred and eleven days of careful, manageable progress tilt, just slightly, toward something she wasn't ready for.
"Okay," she said, because it was the only word that came, and because saying it out loud was the only way she knew to make her hands stop shaking long enough to lock up for the night.