6. Levi
LEVI
Wednesday I spend trying to get Marley Quinn fired without saying her name.
I catch Nell at the clinic when I drop off Reyes’s blood pressure thing he keeps forgetting—she’s at the front desk charting, hair in that bun that means don’t waste my time, and Emmett’s truck is out front, him leaning on the tailgate waiting on her lunch break, and he lifts two fingers at me through the window and I lift two back, everything normal, everybody normal—and I float it casual as I can:
“Hey, this photographer deal Saturday. We really need that? It’s a clubhouse party. Paper plates. Tucker’s gonna have his shirt off by nine.”
Nell doesn’t even look up from her charting. “Deposit’s paid.”
“I’ll pay you back the deposit.”
That gets her looking up. “Why?”
And there it is. Because there’s no answer to why that isn’t the whole thing, the motel, the nine days, all of it, unspooling right there on the clinic counter next to the cotton balls. I stand there with my mouth half open like a guy who forgot his own name.
“Photographers make everything stiff,” I finally say. “People pose.”
“She does candids. Nobody’ll even see her.” Nell’s already back in her chart. “It’s a gift, Levi. From me. Say thank you.”
“Thank you,” I say, and leave before my face does something she can read. Nell reads people for a living. Sick people lie to her all day long about how much they drink and how they really got hurt, and she clocks every one of them. I need to not be in that building.
So that’s dead. Can’t push harder without pushing the why, and the why is radioactive.
Back at the shop I get back into the carburetor—same one, third day now, Tucker’s started calling it my emotional support carburetor, which is closer to the truth than he’ll ever know. Float level. Needle and seat. Hands busy, head empty. It works for almost two hours.
Then my phone buzzes on the workbench.
I look at it the way you look at a spider. Unknown number, local prefix. And I already know. Before I even flip it over I know, the same way you know a storm’s coming off the mountains by the way the air goes green.
heard congrats are in order, see you Saturday. Should be fun catching up with everyone.
I stand there and read it maybe ten times. Rusty’s whistling over at the lift. Somebody’s grinder is screaming in the back bay. The words don’t change.
Should be fun catching up with everyone.
There’s nothing in it. That’s the thing—you could read that text out loud at Sunday dinner and nobody’d blink. It’s friendly. It’s nothing. And it sits in my hand like a dropped socket you hear rolling somewhere under the car, out of sight, waiting for you to find it with your spine.
What I should do—and I know this, I know it while I’m not doing it—is answer clean. Something with a door in it, closed and locked: it was a mistake, it’s not happening again, be professional Saturday or stay home. Ten seconds of typing.
I even start. Three separate times, standing there at the bench with my thumb over the keys like the phone might bite.
Saturday’s about Josie. Whatever you’re doing, don’t. Delete. Too much. Reads like a man who’s scared, which—yeah, exactly, that’s why it’s deleted.
It was a mistake. We’re done. Be professional or cancel. Delete. Done implies there’s a thing to be done with. Three weeks of radio silence was the message; answering now un-sends it.
Fun for who? Delete, delete, Jesus, delete.
That’s the trap and I can feel it closing while I stand in it: every answer’s a thread, and she’s good with thread. Say nothing, and maybe I’m a locked door. Say anything, and I’m a conversation.
Or—the actual door, the only real one. Tell Josie.
Tonight. Sit her down at the kitchen table and take the whole beating I’ve got coming, three days before some party makes it worse, on my own terms, out of my own mouth.
Kill every card Marley’s holding in one move, because you can’t blackmail a man with a bill he already paid.
I stand there a long time with that one. Long enough that Rusty yells over asking if I’m praying.
Then I put the phone face-down on the workbench and don’t answer it at all, because I’m not brave, I’m careful, and three weeks of careful has worked fine.
And I don’t tell Josie it ever buzzed. I don’t even really let myself think the sentence you’re choosing not to tell her something, again—it goes by underneath, like a fish under ice, and I look at it for half a second and then I look back at the carburetor.
I do think about blocking the number. Get as far as the screen for it, thumb hovering.
And then I don’t do that either, and if you want to know the whole rotten truth of a man, there it is in one dumb hesitation on a Wednesday: blocking her means deciding it’s a threat.
Deciding it’s a threat means admitting there’s a live wire running under my whole life that I buried instead of capped.
Easier to leave the number sitting there unblocked and tell myself it’s nothing, it’s handled, she’ll shoot her photos and cash her check and drift back out of the valley like weather.
Easier to keep being a guy a thing happened to than a guy who’s got a situation.
Tucker comes by around four and finds me still on the carburetor and doesn’t say anything about it this time, just looks at the parts spread out on the rag, all of them clean as surgery by now, three days of cleaning parts that were clean Monday, and puts a beer on the bench next to me and walks off.
Tucker’s not dumb. Tucker just knows the price of asking.
That night I’m extra good at dinner. Do the dishes myself, both jobs, wash and dry—she tries to shoulder in at the sink and I hip-check her out of the zone, tell her go sit down, you’re off duty, and she laughs and lets me, hops up on the counter with her wine?—
—except she’s not drinking the wine, I notice without noticing, it just sits there by her hip going warm while she talks?—
—and she talks. Party stuff. She’s got forty mason jars and a plan, Dot’s got the string lights, Casey’s doing a cake with actual layers, and am I wearing the black shirt, because she has opinions about the black shirt, and her feet are swinging and knocking the cabinet door in this little rhythm and she is lit up like the Fourth of July, happiest I’ve seen her in a month, and I stand there with my hands in the dishwater saying uh-huh and you got it and whatever you want, baby, and every one of them lands clean.
Later, couch. Her feet in my lap and the TV talking to itself, and I dig my thumb into her arch the way that makes her groan and drop her head back, and she says, eyes closed, “What’s gotten into you lately, anyway?”
My thumb doesn’t stop. Fifteen years of poker at the clubhouse, my thumb doesn’t even stutter.
“Whaddaya mean?”
“You. All this.” She waves a hand around vaguely, at the clean kitchen, at her own feet in my lap, at the last month. “Flowers. Dishes. You cooked twice this week. If you’ve wrecked my car and haven’t told me, just say so now.”
She’s kidding. She’s completely kidding, eyes shut, half asleep and smiling, wiggling her toes at me to keep going—and it goes through me anyway like a blade through soft wood, and I hear myself say, easy as anything:
“Can’t a man be nice to his own old lady?”
“Mm. Suspicious.” And she burrows down into the cushions, wine still full on the coffee table, and gives me her other foot.
And I hold it in my two hands, this small warm trusting thing, and I nod along at the TV.
And I hate myself a little more for how easy it is. Being good to her when I’ve got something to hide—it’s easy. It’s the easiest thing in the world. That’s the part that should scare me worse than getting caught.