22. Levi
LEVI
She said six. I’m parked out front of the house at five-forty, and I make myself sit on the bike at the curb till five of because showing up early to your own sentencing looks like what it is.
I rode the long way here—took the Dyna out past the lake and back, twenty extra minutes of wind trying to blow my head quiet, which is what the bike’s for, what it’s always been for, and it half worked, which is the most any machine’s done for me in three weeks.
I haven’t slept worth a damn on Tucker’s couch—didn’t want the empty house, couldn’t stand the questions at the clubhouse, so I told Tucker the barest bones of it Sunday night, standing in his kitchen with my duffel still on my shoulder.
Watched him hear it. Tucker’s face doesn’t hide anything, never has—it went through surprise and then through something worse, something like watching a guy find out his brother’s got a record—and then he said, “Man. Josie,” just her name, like the whole sentence was in it, and I said, “Yeah,” and he handed me a blanket and shut up, which is the best thing anybody’s done for me in three weeks.
All day at the shop my hands wouldn’t hold a socket steady. Rusty asked was I coming down with something. Something, yeah.
Now I’m standing on my own porch like a bill collector, and my hands genuinely do not know what to do—pockets, sides, pockets again.
I knock. She opens the door all the way this time, steps back to let me in, and she looks—steadier.
Slept-on. Terrible and beautiful and fortified, hair up, sweatshirt, war footing.
The lights are on tonight. I take that to mean something, everything getting looked at straight this time, no more streetlight stripes.
And I reach for her.
I don’t decide it—three years of muscle memory decide it, walking past her into the living room, my hand just lifts and goes for hers, the smallest version, not a hug, not a kiss, just fingers, just wanting one second of her skin to stand on before the hard part?—
She pulls back so fast we both flinch.
Whole step back, hand yanked up against her chest like I’m a hot stove, and the look on her face—it isn’t even anger, it’s alarm, it’s a body doing perimeter defense before the brain votes, and watching her body do that about my hand is the worst thing I’ve felt since the drink table.
“No,” she says. Steadies herself. Says it again, level: “No. That’s—no, Levi. You don’t get to do that.”
“I wasn’t?—“
“You were. It’s what you do.” She’s got her arms crossed now, and her voice isn’t cruel, it’s worse, it’s clear.
“It’s what you’ve always done. Something’s hard, something’s broken, you can’t say it, so you fix it with your hands.
Flowers on the counter. Feet rubbed. Fucking me so sweet I forget what I was sad about.
” I flinch at that, the flat true crudeness of it, and she watches me flinch and keeps going.
“And I let you, for three years, because it felt like being loved. And maybe it even was. But you used it to skip every hard conversation we never had, and look where we are. So no. Touching me doesn’t get to stand in for the work.
Not anymore. You keep your hands in your pockets and you do this the hard way, with words, like it costs something. ”
My hands. Both of them, hanging there at my sides, and I look down at them like they belong to somebody else.
Everything I’ve ever been any good at, I’ve been good at through those two hands—engines, fights, her—and she’s just fenced them out of this entirely, and she’s right to, that’s the part that lands like a dropped block.
She’s exactly right and I hate it and it costs me something physical, actual and physical, to shove them down into my jacket pockets and leave them there. Like tying off a limb.
“Okay,” I say. “Words.”
“Sit down.”
I sit. Edge of the couch. She stays standing—smart, keeps the high ground, I’d hold the room the same way—and she pulls a breath and lays it out, and I can hear the rehearsal in it, the Dot’s-back-booth of it, and God help me some sideways part of me is proud of her even now, how squared-away she is, how ready, while I showed up with nothing but nerves and pockets.
“Three things,” she says. “One. Marley’s gone.
Out of the party photos, whatever Nell paid—I don’t care how you solve it, that’s yours to solve, but she is out of anything club, anything town, anything us.
I’m not running into her at the IGA wondering what you two know that I don’t.
Two. Any contact—any, a text, a call, she waves at you across a parking lot—I hear about it from you the same day.
Not discovered. Told. Three.” And here her voice goes quieter, and harder, both at once.
“No more secrets held back because the conversation would be uncomfortable for you. Not about her. About anything. That’s the actual disease, Levi—she’s just the symptom.
You hid a whole rough patch’s worth of thinking from me and I woke up in a minefield.
Never again. Full honesty, even when it’s ugly. Especially.”
And I sit there on the edge of my own couch taking terms like a man taking a sentencing, and here’s the thing I couldn’t have predicted: every one of them lands like relief.
That’s the word. Relief. Three weeks I’ve been freelancing my own penance—guessing at it, flowers and dishes and early nights, throwing good behavior at a wall in the dark hoping some of it was the right shape—and now there’s a spec sheet.
Marley gone: done, should’ve been done a month ago.
Same-day disclosure: done, easy, I’ll narrate my whole life like a police scanner if that’s what keeps us.
No secrets held back to save my own hide: that one—that one’s the engine rebuild, that one’s teaching a thirty-one-year-old dog to open his own mouth, and I want it anyway, I want the terms the way a drowning man wants a rope with knots in it. Something to climb.
She stops. Waits. Braced—I can see it, feet set, shoulders set, ready for the counteroffer, the yeah-but, the this-part’s-not-fair. Three years of me negotiating every damn thing, she’s got every right to expect the fight.
“Yes,” I say. “All three. Done.”
Silence.
Her arms come uncrossed an inch. She blinks at me, thrown, searching my face for the trick—and there’s no trick, there’s just a man who spent two nights on a fold-out couch understanding he’ll sign anything, but I watch my easy yes land on her wrong, watch it tip her off balance where a fight would’ve steadied her, and I get my first look at the real size of what I broke: I’ve said yes and she can’t tell if it’s worth anything.
My word’s the thing I burned. Any currency I pay her in might be counterfeit now, every coin of it, and we both just heard it clink on the table.
“Okay,” she says. Slowly. Recrossing her arms. “Okay. Good.”
It is not okay or good, and the room knows it, and we stand there in it a second, both of us, the whole shape of the next however-long sitting between us like furniture nobody ordered.
“One more thing. Not a term. Mine.” I take my hands out of my pockets for this one, because a man makes his own offers with his hands visible.
“Sunday dinners. The club table. I’m not walking into that room like normal while you sit there faking it next to me—you did that once already at the party, and watching you do it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen that I built myself.
So until you say different, I’ll take the shop shift Sundays and you go.
They’re your family too—that’s not a thing that pauses while we’re broken.
Dot’d feed you over my dead body anyway, so we might as well organize it. ”
Something moves through her face at that—surprise, and underneath the surprise something older, like a woman hearing her own citizenship read back to her. The club coming to her, not through him. “Okay,” she says, slower. “Okay.”
“The Marley thing,” I say, because terms deserve specifics and specifics are the only currency I’ve got left that might still spend.
“I’ll talk to Nell tomorrow about the photos—whatever she shot Saturday, we don’t need ’em, I’ll cover the money.
And if Marley texts, calls, shows up, anything, you hear it from me the same day. Same hour.”
“Okay.”
“And Jo—“ her eyes come up—“for what it’s worth. You didn’t have to give me terms. You could’ve handed me a box of my stuff and nobody in that clubhouse would’ve blamed you, including me.
I know what this is.” I don’t have a fancy word for it so I use the true one. “It’s a chance. I know the size of it.”
Something crosses her face—quick, complicated, gone—and she opens the door, which is how I know we’re done for tonight.
“Prove it,” she says. Not mean. Just level, and tired, and true.
And I walk past her into the dark with my hands in my pockets, where they stay all the way to the bike—and I sit there a second before I thumb the starter, because the Dyna’s loud and the second it fires this is over, and then I fire it anyway and let it carry me back to Tucker’s the long way too.
Both directions the long way, tonight. Some nights the road’s the only room a man can think in.