Chapter 3
Georgia
I hire him on a Thursday, badly.
"I want to hire you," is how I open, which I have since been told is not how negotiation works.
He's under the three-bay sink at the time, so what I get back is a voice out of a cabinet.
"For what?"
"For — things. This." I gesture at the entire building, which he cannot see, from inside a cupboard. "The situation."
"You can't afford me."
"I know exactly what I can't afford, thank you, I have a spreadsheet, it's the saddest document in Oregon." I crouch down. "What do you charge?"
"For what?"
"Stop doing that."
"I don't charge anything. I don't do this."
"You are literally doing it. Right now. Your legs are in my kitchen."
There's a pause under the sink. A wrench turns twice.
"Fifty a day," he says. "Cash. No paper."
"That's a joke number."
"It's a real number."
"Ghost, a plumber from Bend charges a hundred and forty just to arrive."
"Then hire him."
"I can't hire him, that's the whole —" I sit down on the floor, because my knees are forty-one years old. "Fifty a day plus meals and I'm going to feel bad about it every single day."
"That's fine. Feeling bad's free."
"Nothing here's free."
And from under the sink, quiet, I swear to God: "Learning."
Merle Pruitt, who has been listening from a stool six feet away with his paper at half mast, delivers the ruling.
"Sixty."
"Merle."
"Sixty a day. Fifty's an insult and a hundred'd embarrass her." He turns a page. "Sixty's the number a man takes without either of you having to talk about it again."
There is a silence from under the sink.
"Sixty," Ghost says.
"Sixty," I say.
"There," says Merle. "Now somebody get me a refill and nobody mention what I just did, because I've got a reputation."
Here's what two weeks looks like.
Day one he rebuilds the door closer so the front door stops slamming, and Dot Pruitt bursts into tears about it, and then gets furious with herself, and then blames the pollen.
"It's been slamming for four years," she says, dabbing.
"It has," I say.
"Every time. Bang. Like a — like a —"
"I know, Dot."
"Like a gunshot," Merle says, from behind the Sentinel, and Dot says Merle and Merle says what, and I go into the walk-in and stand in the cold for ninety seconds and come back out and I'm fine.
Day three he levels the flat-top. I did not know a flat-top could be un-level. It's been running fat to the left since 2019 and I have been compensating by cooking everything two inches from where a normal person would cook it, and when he's done I burn four eggs in a row out of pure muscle memory.
"You broke my hands," I tell him.
"I fixed your grill."
"Same thing. I had a system."
Day five he replaces eleven feet of rotted trim under the front windows, and when he pulls it off, the whole wall is soft, and he sits back on his heels and doesn't say anything for a while.
"How bad," I say.
"You've got water coming in behind the sill."
"How bad, Ghost."
"Bad enough that in two winters you'd have had a wall problem instead of a trim problem."
"And now?"
"Now you have a trim problem."
That night I add up what he's saved me and I have to do it twice because the first total made a noise come out of me.
Day six, Kiki comes in for her weekend shift, takes one look, and calls my sister from the walk-in with the door open, which is not how privacy works.
"There's a man," I hear. "No. No, a man man. He's like nine feet — Mom, he's fixing things."
"Kiki."
"She's fine. She's — no, she's got the face."
"I do not have a face."
"She's got the face," Kiki says, and hangs up, and looks at me with the terrible clarity of a fourteen-year-old. "You've got the face."
"Go plate the special."
"There is no special."
"Then invent one, that's the job."
Day seven he doesn't come in until two in the afternoon and I spend six hours pretending that's fine, and when he does come in he's got a sunburn and a bag of hardware and says, "Ray's gutters," and I say, "You did Ray's gutters?
" and he says "They were bad," and I have to go do something in the kitchen for a minute.
Day eight he fixes the jukebox.
Sort of. He gets it to power on. It has one working setting, which plays a single 1961 country record about a man on a train, and it plays that record no matter which buttons you press, in what I can only describe as an act of aggression.
"That's worse," I say.
"That's better. It was silent before."
"It was peaceful before."
He puts a quarter in. The man on the train starts again.
"Ghost."
"Yeah."
"I will end you."
Day ten, the two regulars stage what I later learn they'd been planning since Tuesday.
"So," Dot says, apropos of nothing, at 9:15 in the morning, "how long you staying, hon?"
"Dot," I say.
"It's conversation."
"It's an ambush."
"At my age, honey, everything's an ambush, I don't have the runway for subtlety."
Ghost is up a stepladder with a light fixture in his hands. He doesn't come down. But he does say, "Don't know."
"That's not a plan," Merle observes.
"No."
"Man ought to have a plan."
"Had one."
"What happened to it?"
Ghost gets the fixture seated. Turns it a quarter turn. The bulb comes on and that corner of the diner is bright for the first time since I've owned the building.
"Ran out," he says.
Merle folds the paper. And Merle Pruitt, who was a mill foreman for thirty-two years and has said perhaps four sincere things in my presence, says: "Plans do that. Then you get a new one. Not usually as good. Usually closer to the ground." He gets his hat. "Bulb looks nice, son."
And he leaves, and Dot goes after him, and I stand in my own diner under a working light with a stranger on a ladder and I think, oh, they've adopted him.
That's how it happens in a town like this. There's no ceremony. One day someone's a stranger and then Merle Pruitt calls him son on his way out the door and it's done, it's notarized, it's in the county records.
Day twelve, I ask about the cut.
It's hanging on the hook by the office door because he takes it off to work, and I've been circling that thing for a week like it's a dog I'm not sure about. Black raven. RAVENSWORN MC. Bottom rocker says ASH HARBOR, OR.
"You're in a club," I say.
"Yes."
"A motorcycle club."
"Yes."
"The kind with a clubhouse or the kind with a lawyer?"
"Both."
"Great. Wonderful. Love that."
He's rewiring the ceiling fan and he doesn't look down. "You want me to leave, that's a fair reason."
"Did I say that?"
"No."
"Then don't hand me an exit, Ghost, I've got enough doors in this building." I lean on the counter. "Are they going to come here?"
"Eventually."
"How many?"
"However many can ride that day."
"That's not a number, Ghost —"
"Georgia, there's no number. That's what a club is.
That's the entire thing." He turns on the ladder to look down at me.
"You call, and you don't say how bad, and you don't say how many you need, and whoever hears it comes.
Nobody's ever once asked me what the trouble was first. Not in eleven years. "
I hold that for a second.
"That's beautiful," I say. "That's also terrifying."
"It's both. It's mostly both."
"What's your job? In the club."
"Road captain."
"Which means?"
"I plan the runs. I know the roads. I go first."
"You go first?"
"Somebody has to."
"And you're — what, you're the one who stays out front, is what you're telling me. You. The man who has been in my parking lot for a month because he won't set his own points."
And he stops.
Puts the pliers down on the top of the ladder. Hands on the frame. Head down.
"Yeah," he says. "That's what I'm telling you."
"Ghost —"
"They gave me the job because I'm the best rider they've got." His voice is level and terrible. "I've never once told them why I'm the best rider they've got."
"Why are you?"
"Because I've had a thousand years of practice leaving."
The fan hums. The jukebox, unprompted, at nobody's request, starts the man on the train again.
"That's a lot of years," I say carefully.
"It's a figure of speech."
"It is not a figure of speech, you said it like a date."
"Georgia."
"No, you don't get to Georgia me, I have listened to you say four words at a time for a month and now you say a thousand years like you're telling me your shoe size —"
He comes down the ladder.
And I take a step back, not because I'm afraid — I want to be clear, I have never once been afraid of him, not for a second, and that in itself is a thing I should have examined harder — but because he's coming down the ladder like a man who's decided to say something and I don't have anywhere to put it yet.
"I dream about a beach," he says.
"Okay."
"Same beach. Since I was six. There's forty men on it and I know all their faces and four of them I have since met, alive, in this life, in Oregon.
" He says it without inflection, laying it down like tile.
"One of them is my club president. His wife's an archaeologist and she dug up a stone with nine names on it last year and one of those names is the name I have in the dream. "
"Ghost."
"You asked what I'm running from. I told you I'm not running." He picks the pliers back up, and his hand isn't quite steady. "I'm not. I already ran. Everything since has been the part after."
The bell over the door goes.
It's a family from out of state, four of them, a minivan, a kid in a dinosaur costume for reasons that never get explained, and I seat them and take their order and pour four waters and put in the ticket, and my hands do all of that perfectly while my head is somewhere off the coast in the year ten-something.
When I get back to the office he's got his forearms on the desk and he's looking at the wall.
"You think I'm insane," he says.
"I think you're the sanest person who's walked in here in four years, and I'm including me, and it's not close.
" I shut the door. "Do you know what I think insane is?
Insane is a man who has spent a month fixing a building he doesn't own for fifty dollars a day and won't fix his own motorcycle.
That's insane. The Viking thing frankly explains a lot. "
He looks up.
"You believe me."
"I believe you. That's different from believing the story and I'm not going to pretend it isn't." I sit on the corner of the desk. "But here's the thing I know that you don't, so shut up for a minute."
"Okay."
"Danny used to sit in that booth. Your booth.
Back to the wall, eyes on the door, same as you.
And he'd have the same look on him some nights and he'd never once tell me what it was about, because he'd decided — he'd decided, like a man deciding to hold a door shut — that I shouldn't have to carry it. "
"That's not unreasonable."
"It's the most unreasonable thing anybody's ever done to me." My voice goes and I let it. "He died and I found out at the funeral. From his sister. Twenty-two things about him I didn't know, standing in a church basement holding a plate of ham."
"Twenty-two things," he says. "You counted."
"I counted for a year. I'd wake up at three and add to the list." I laugh, and it isn't a good laugh.
"He had a savings account, Ghost. Four thousand dollars.
In his own name. For the sign — for taking the sign down, if anything happened to him, because he knew I'd never spend ninety dollars on it.
He set that up in 2018 and never told me. "
"That's not a betrayal."
"I know it's not a betrayal, that's what makes it unbearable.
Every single one of the twenty-two things was something kind.
He wasn't hiding a woman or a debt or a criminal record.
He was hiding kindnesses. He'd built a whole second marriage out of things he was doing for me that I wasn't allowed to know about, and then he took it with him. "
I have to stop.
"So you can see," I say, "why it's for your own good isn't going to land with me the way it lands with other women."
Ghost doesn't say sorry. I've noticed he never says sorry, and after four years of an entire town saying sorry at me in the Ray's Grocery parking lot, I could kiss him for it.
"So when you tell me a thousand years," I say, "and I say okay — that's not me being nice. That's me being greedy. I'll take the beach. I'll take the nine names. I'll take the whole insane thing, and you know why?"
"Why."
"Because it's the first true thing anybody's handed me since 2021 and I am starving."
The jukebox plays the man on the train.
"That song's going to be a problem," he says, eventually.
"Everything in this building's a problem. That's the personality."
And he laughs.
It's the first time. It's short and rusty and it sounds like something that hasn't been asked to work in a long while, and I stand there in a doorway with a dish towel in my hand at forty-one years of age and think, clear as glass:
Oh, no. Oh, absolutely not. Georgia Boone, do not.