Chapter 2 #2
"I'm trying to understand it. The thing where a person's actually good at a thing and knows it." Malcolm turned his watch on his wrist, unhurried. "I spend all day around people selling something they don't believe in. It's restful, watching someone who means it. Rarer than you'd think."
"That's a bleak way to describe your whole industry."
"It's a bleak industry." He said it lightly, but there was a real thing under it, there and gone. "Twenty years. You get good at clocking who's faking, because almost everybody is. It stops being a skill and starts being a party trick."
"And what am I," Frankie said, before he could vote against it. "In your read."
Malcolm looked at him. Took his time, the way he took his time with everything.
"Still working on you," he said. "You keep changing the exhibit."
Frankie didn't have anything for that, so he did what he did with things he didn't have anything for — aimed it back at the dog.
Coat types, double coats versus single, why you never shave a husky no matter what the owner cried about shedding.
And somewhere in it he stopped narrating like a wall and started actually telling it, gesturing with the comb, and Malcolm laughed in the right places — not to flatter, Frankie could tell the difference, he'd been flattered professionally by better than this.
The four o'clock light came in low off the tracks and turned the whole shop gold, and for a while it was just easy.
That was the part that scared him. Not the flirting. Frankie could handle flirting; flirting was choreography, he knew all the steps. It was the easy that got people killed. The easy was how you woke up one day having signed your name to something.
He looked up mid-sentence and caught Malcolm watching him — not the dog, him — with an expression Frankie couldn't quite read, thoughtful, a little bit like a man doing a math problem he hadn't expected to be handed.
"What," Frankie said.
"Nothing. You just—" Malcolm stopped. Recalibrated, gently. "You light all the way up when you talk about the work. That's all. It's a good thing to watch."
And there it was. The thing under the thing. Because it wasn't a line — a line Frankie could've swatted — it was an observation, quiet and specific and seen, and it landed in a place Frankie kept very carefully locked, and his whole body went still over the dog.
For one second he had no move. No deflection loaded. Nothing.
Then he found one. "Careful," he said, cool again, comb going back to work. "You keep talking like that, I'm gonna start charging you for the compliments too. That's a premium service."
Malcolm smiled, and let him have the exit, which somehow made it worse.
He finished the treatment in something close to silence — the good kind, or a kind Frankie was choosing to call good.
Nigel fell asleep halfway through, upright, snoring, and then tipped slowly sideways into Frankie's palm like a felled tree, and Malcolm said "he does that" with such open, helpless fondness that Frankie had to look very hard at the dog for a second and not at the man.
"There." Frankie set Nigel on his feet, and the dog woke, personally offended to discover he'd been asleep. "Done. Genuinely gorgeous. No notes."
Malcolm stood, unfolding to his full irritating height, and reached for his wallet before Frankie could even ring it in.
He over-tipped again. Of course he did — Frankie caught the number on the screen and opened his mouth, and Malcolm said, "Don't.
It's for the compliments. You told me that was a premium service. "
"That is not how tips work."
"It's how mine work." He scooped up the dog, who submitted with the grave dignity of a small pompous king being carried to his litter.
He got as far as the door — and then, because apparently neither of them could leave a room clean, he stopped.
"The short screens Thursday," he said, to the middle distance, casual as a weather report. "The laundromat one. Eight-fifteen, at the Lightbox, and there's a thing after. If you ever want to see what all the fuss is about. Eleven minutes of my entire personality."
And there was the trap, fully built now, sitting open on the floor between them.
Say no. Frankie knew how to say no. He'd made a whole shop out of it — it was on the chalkboard.
"I work Thursdays," he said. Which was not no. Which was the coward's no, the door left open a crack.
"Sure." Malcolm didn't push. He never pushed; it was the single most effective thing about him. "Just putting it out there."
Then he was gone — bell, door, the shop going quiet except for the dryer cooling down in the back — and Frankie stood in the gold light having very much not said no.
Which was its own kind of answer.
Dez let it sit for exactly four seconds.
"So," she said, coming around the counter, drying a bowl she'd already dried. "Fancy American. Festival dog. One-way ticket back to — where was it."
"Atlanta."
"Atlanta." She said it like a diagnosis. "Books a fake appointment to stand in your shop. Tips like he's trying to buy the building himself. Looks at you like—"
"He does not look at me like anything."
"—like you're the good part of his day." Dez set the bowl down. "Frank. I've seen this movie. We both have. It's got a guy who shows up shiny and easy and makes you feel like the whole room got warmer, and then the festival ends, and the room gets cold again, and guess who's still standing in it."
Frankie wiped down the steel table, hard, in long even strokes. The table didn't need it. He needed something to do with his hands.
"There's no movie," he said.
"Frank."
"There's no movie, Dez. There's a guy with a dog and too much money who's bored between meetings, and in eleven days he flies home and I never think about him again, and in the meantime he books real appointments and tips like an idiot and it's good for the till, which, given the letter on that counter, I'm not in a position to turn down.
" He hung the towel up, squared it, squared it again.
"It's business. I know how to keep it business. I'm very good at keeping it business."
Dez looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked up the landlord's letter, turned it face-up, and set it down where he'd have to look at it.
"Okay," she said, gentle, which was so much worse than if she'd pushed. "Business."
She went to close out the register.
Frankie stood in his gold-lit shop that he'd built alone from the worst year of his life, and looked at the number that could take it from him, and did not think about the way a man in a gray henley had gone still and said you light all the way up.
Did not think about it at all. Kept not thinking about it with such total, deliberate, white-knuckled focus that his hands had stopped moving on the counter entirely, and he only noticed because Dez, from across the room, said —
"Eleven days, huh."
"Shut up," Frankie said.
He was smiling. He wiped it off before she turned around.