Epilogue
Nadia
"It auto-renews," I said.
"Sure," said Wolf.
"It auto-renews annually at a nine percent escalator."
"Okay."
"Wolf, you are paying a company in Minnesota four hundred dollars a month for a machine that has had a sticker on it since March."
"Deke likes the sticker."
"Deke applied the sticker."
"Right," Wolf said, "so he likes it."
Sunny took it better than I expected, which is to say she took it like a woman who has been waiting twenty-two years for somebody to be as annoyed as she is.
"You found the vending machine," she said.
"You knew about the vending machine?"
"I've known about the vending machine since 2021."
"Sunny."
"I've raised it at church four times." She adjusted her glasses. "The first time, Deke cried. The second time, Deke cried. The third time was in February and I got as far as 'escalator clause' before Ozzy asked if we were getting an escalator."
"And the fourth?"
"The fourth was two weeks after Bram," Sunny said, "and nobody was going to vote on anything."
She said it in the same flat voice she says everything in, and then she went back to the ledger, and I let it go, and that's the closest anybody came all summer.
I have run two hundred and nine jobs and I have never been as frustrated as I was in that first month of doing the books for eleven bikers, honestly, on purpose, with a spreadsheet, in daylight. It turns out the money I stole from them was less than they lost annually to not reading things.
I told them so at church. Repeatedly. Ozzy started calling me "the auditor" and then stopped when he found out what an audit was.
We did the wedding again in the yard behind the clubhouse on the first Saturday in July.
The real one. The one nobody sentenced us to.
Deke officiated, which was a mistake everybody made together with their eyes open. He'd gotten ordained on the internet in nine minutes and had prepared eleven pages.
"Marriage," Deke read, "is like a cinnamon roll."
"Oh no," said Wren.
"It has layers—"
"Deke."
"— and if you rush the proof, you get a dense—"
"Deke."
He also catered it. He also cried through it, from the beginning, before anything happened, exactly as he had in a county annex in May, and at one point he had to hand the pages to Ozzy and Ozzy read a paragraph in a completely inappropriate announcer voice and then handed them back.
The vows we wrote ourselves, which was Wren's idea, and which is a genuinely cruel thing to ask of two career liars.
I went first, because I always go first.
"I'm not going to promise you honesty," I said, in a yard, in front of forty people, holding the hands of a man in a borrowed jacket. "Everyone here knows what we are. If I stood up and promised that, half of you would laugh and the other half would write it down."
"I'd write it down," Wren said.
"Wren."
"Sorry. Continue."
"So here's what I've got instead." I held on tighter.
"I promise you'll be standing in the room.
Every time. Whatever I decide, whatever it costs, however bad it is — you'll see it happen and you'll see it happen first. Nobody's ever going to hear it from somebody else. I'm never going out the corridor."
The yard was quiet.
Somewhere near the back, Pepper Vance did not move at all.
Trick's turn.
He had index cards. Four of them. He had prepared, which is the funniest thing that has ever happened, because seven weeks earlier this man could have improvised an entire county into agreeing with him.
"Okay," he said. "So."
"You've got cards."
"I've got cards."
"You have never used a card in your life."
"I have never needed a card in my life," he said, "and I'd like everyone here to appreciate the arc," and the whole yard laughed, and Deke put a hand over his face.
He looked at the first card. Then he put all four of them in his pocket.
"I had a thing about a road," he said. "It was good. It had a bit in the middle where I—" he waved a hand — "it doesn't matter. Here's the real one."
He looked at me.
"For fifteen years I could make anybody believe anything," he said, "and the only person I ever wanted to convince of one true thing was you, and I couldn't. Not with any of it.
Not one word." He shrugged, helpless. "So you're going to have to just take my word for it.
Like a chump. Like everybody else who's ever loved anybody. "
"That's the vow?"
"That's the vow. I'm a chump now. That's the whole speech."
Deke made a noise like a building settling.
Sunny made a toast that was four sentences long and made two grown men leave the yard.
Wren gave me a book. Her own, unfinished, with about a third of the pages still blank.
"It's not done," she said.
"I can see that."
"That's the point," she said, and hugged me, and I let her, which is not a thing I do.
Pepper Vance came.
I didn't invite her. Wren invited her, because Wren had found her in about nine minutes on the internet and has no fear whatsoever.
She stood at the edge of the yard with a beer and did not come closer, and when I went over she said, "I'm not here for you."
"I know."
"The food smelled unbelievable from the road."
"It's a religious experience. He does a thing with a brisket."
"I heard about the brisket," Pepper said. "That's actually why I came."
She stayed three hours.
Most of it she spent with Deke, who does not know what a grudge is and who therefore assumed she was a guest and treated her like one, which is the single most effective social technique I have ever witnessed and which he came by honestly, being a man with no interior life to speak of and the largest heart in North Dakota.
At some point I looked over and she was laughing.
"He's telling her about the boat," Wren said, appearing at my elbow with two beers.
"There's a boat?"
"Ash Company's boat. Deke's got a theory."
"What's the theory?"
"That there was never a boat," Wren said, "and that eleven years ago somebody said the word 'boat' in a meeting and nobody wanted to admit they hadn't been listening, and it's been on the books ever since."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"It's almost certainly correct," Wren said. "That's how everything works. I've got a PhD."
She did not forgive me. She said, at the fence, on her way out, "Not this year," which is not nothing, and got in a truck, and drove off south.
Trick watched her go with his hands in his pockets.
"That's a door," he said.
"Yeah."
"You take a door when it opens."
"Don't quote her at me."
"I liked her," he said. "She's the only person in six months who's been completely unimpressed by me, and now everybody is, so she was ahead of the curve."
That's the other thing.
He's ordinary now.
He's got a twelfth of something, same as Wolf, same as Deke, same as a raccoon whose org-chart status remains contested. It amounts to about what a good bartender has. Gunnar got noticeably better at talking to state troopers and is deeply weird about it.
And Trick — Silas — walks around a clubhouse where every man knows exactly what he used to be, and gets believed or doesn't, on the merits, like a person.
He's bad at it. He's so bad at it. He over-explains everything. He'll take four minutes to ask for a ride to town. Twice I've watched him talk himself out of things he'd already gotten.
He got a speeding ticket in June.
Fifty-one in a forty on the county road outside Havregard, and I was in the passenger seat, and I watched fifteen years of muscle memory get in that trooper's window and die there.
"Sir, I'll be honest with you—"
"You were fifty-one in a forty."
"Right, and — see, that's my point, because forty on that stretch is—"
"Forty-one would've been fine."
"— which is arguably a signage issue—"
"License and registration."
He sat there afterward holding it with an expression I can only describe as religious.
"She wrote it," he said.
"She did."
"She wrote the whole thing. She didn't even — Nadia, she didn't hesitate."
"I know."
"That's the first citation of my adult life."
"I know, baby."
"The thing is," he said that night, still holding it, "she just — she looked at me and she made a decision. About me. Based on evidence."
"That's how it works for everyone."
"It's appalling."
"Welcome."
"How do you people get anything done?"
"We don't," I said. "Have you seen the vending machine contract?"
He framed it. It's in the clubhouse over the bar. Sunny wanted it in the office and got voted down, which was the only unanimous vote of the entire year.
And me?
I'm forty percent of a god's gift that never finished arriving and then got sold off in twelfths, which as far as I can tell means I'm now about as persuasive as a woman who grew up listening for a car in a driveway. Which is to say: extremely, and honestly, and without help.
I checked. Of course I checked. I drove to Bismarck in the second week of June and got on Aldo Renwick's shuttle at nine in the morning and rode it out to the long-term lot and back twice.
He didn't recognize me. He never has.
I could have made him. That's the thing I want on the record.
I sat in the third row and I found the soft spot in about six seconds, the way I always do, and it was right where I'd left it — everyone will find out I'm not as solid as I look — and I could have opened my mouth and put a story in there that would have made him feel better for a year.
I tipped him two hundred dollars and said the weather had been something, and got off the bus.
That's the whole thing I've got instead of absolution. I found the spot and didn't use it. Once. In June.
It's not much. Nobody's writing that down in a notebook.
Here's the part I don't tell as a story.
Bram Oakes's chair is still at the table.
I asked about it in my second week, casually, because I ask about everything. The room did a thing — not hostile, just a kind of closing, eleven people looking at slightly different points on the wall.
I asked once more, a month later, to Deke, who tells me everything.
Deke put down a mixing bowl and said, "Nadia, I'll tell you anything you want about anybody in this club," and did not finish the sentence.
So I stopped asking. I'm patient. It's a twenty-year sentence and I've got the books.
But I'll tell you what I've got in the meantime, because I can't help it.
I've got a chair nobody sits in and a word Gunnar Sloat said out loud in a forge room and got shut down for.
I've got a set of papers from 1948 that went into a safe in Wolf's office and has not come out.
I've got a man in a grey coat who does terms and schedules and only ever takes eyes, described to me on a dock by something that considers him a bad artist.
And I've got Wren, who I catch in the office some nights with the 1948 papers spread out and a legal pad, writing names down.
"Anything?" I asked her once.
"Eleven names," she said. "Nine of them are in the ground in Havregard."
"And the other two?"
Wren looked up.
"That's the question," she said.
So I stopped asking Deke and started asking Wren, which is what I should have done in the first place, because Wren Halliday-Kane will tell you absolutely anything you want to know and none of it will make you feel better.
The toast happened at nine, when it was finally getting dark.
Deke had strung lights across the yard on baling wire and about a third of them worked, which Ozzy said was a metaphor and Sunny said was a fire hazard, and they were both correct.
Wren found me by the fence.
"Last question and then I'll stop."
"You will not stop."
"I will not stop," she agreed. "Do you know what you'd have done? In the forge room. If he'd said no to the twelve shares."
I'd been waiting seven weeks for somebody to ask me that.
"No," I said.
"Really?"
"Really. I don't plan, I arrive." I watched Trick across the yard, arguing with Ozzy about the raccoon's rank for approximately the four hundredth time.
"That's the only true thing I've got about myself, and I nearly lost it, because for four days at the start of June I caught myself planning.
Sitting up at night running versions. Deciding about him in advance. "
"And?"
"And that's what he does," I said. "That's what the suit does. He runs versions. Fifteen years of them. He's been bored the entire time and he doesn't even know that's what it is."
Wren wrote that down.
"That's the thesis," she said. "That's the whole thing, right there, that's — Nadia, that's the book."
"Wren, it's my wedding."
"Yes," she said, writing.
Wolf stood up with a beer and said four words — "About time. Sit down." — which for him is an oration, and everybody laughed, and glasses went up around the yard.
And Crash walked out.
Ivar Boone, sergeant-at-arms, six-two, has walked away from eleven vehicles that other people did not walk away from, has never in the eight weeks I'd known him displayed a single facial expression above a two.
He stood up mid-toast, set his glass down on the table without looking at it, and walked out through the gap in the fence toward the far end of the yard where the light stops.
Deke saw it. Wolf saw it.
I followed, because I follow things.
He was standing at the edge of the field looking at nothing. Just grass, and the fence line, and a hundred miles of dark going east.
"Crash."
He didn't answer.
"Ivar."
"There's a woman standing at the end of the yard," he said.
I looked.
There was grass, and the fence line, and a hundred miles of dark going east.
"Where," I said carefully.
"By the post." He hadn't blinked. "She's been there about an hour. She's got her hands in her pockets."
"What's she look like?"
I asked it the way you ask a man his address after a car accident — not because you need it, but because you want to hear whether the answer comes out whole.
It came out whole.
"Dark hair. Braided back on one side. Canvas jacket, army surplus, the older cut with the two chest pockets.
" He said it flat, like a description he'd given before.
"She's got a scar through the left eyebrow that goes up into the hairline and she's standing with her weight on the right because the left knee doesn't take it. "
"Crash."
"She's forty-one now," he said. "She'd be forty-one."
"Crash."
"I put her in the ground myself," Ivar Boone said, "outside Kalispell, in November of 2011, and there wasn't a lot of her to put, and I did it alone because there wasn't anybody left to help."
Out in the yard behind us somebody laughed at something Deke had said. Glass on glass. Ordinary night.
"Crash, there's nobody—"
"I know," he said.
And then, quietly, in a voice I had not heard out of that man and have not heard since:
"She waved."
I've spent my whole life reading people. It's the one skill I've got and I got it honestly, in a bathroom at the top of a staircase, listening for a car in the driveway. Everything else about me came out of a compliment paid to somebody else fifteen years ago.
Forty seconds. That's all I need.
I didn't need forty seconds.
I have never once seen Ivar Boone afraid.
I have now.