Chapter Thirteen
JANIE
Devil drives a truck. So not what I expected, though I’m not sure what I expected.
Maybe something smaller, something more in keeping with the idea of a woman who moves through the world with her particular easy grace.
The truck is enormous, dark blue, the kind with the extended cab, a tow hitch, and a dent in the rear quarter panel that nobody has gotten around to fixing.
Devil climbs into it the way she does everything, without ceremony, one hand on the roof.
Lucy is already in the back seat when I get in, legs crossed, sunglasses on, coffee in a travel cup she produced from somewhere on her person.
She looks like a woman who has done this before and found it excellent.
“Buckle up, gorgeous,” she says to me. “Devil drives like she has a personal arrangement with God.”
“I drive fine,” Devil says, and pulls out of the compound before the gate is fully open.
Rose is with Nerd. The handoff took forty-five minutes because Rose had opinions about the order in which things needed to happen before she could be left in anyone’s care.
Mr. Rabbit is positioned correctly, the specific episode of her show is to be confirmed available, and a detailed accounting of when I would be back and what I would be bringing her is provided.
The last one wasn’t a question. It was a condition.
Devil negotiated it like a diplomat.
Roam was at the workshop when we left. He looked up when I came out in a clean shirt and my hair down.
He looked at me the way he’s been looking at me since yesterday evening on the porch, the same way he looked right after the kiss, as if there’s nothing in his field of vision he’d rather have there.
It does something to my breathing even now, sitting in Devil’s truck heading north on a Jacksonville surface road with Lucy offering opinions about the coffee situation at the compound.
I look out the window until we arrive and walk in.
The mall is large, bright, and smells of air conditioning and something artificial baking from the direction of the food court.
Devil moves through it with purpose. She has a list in her head, no physical paper, the organized certainty of a woman who shops with intent.
Lucy drifts alongside her, picking up things, putting them down, maintaining a running commentary on everything she touches that is somehow both critical and affectionate.
I follow.
The clothes here are normal. Standing in the entrance of the first shop, the realization is strange. There are racks and racks of things in colors and cuts I have spent two years avoiding. Craig’s voice starts its inventory automatically. ‘Too tight. Too much. Who do you think you’re dressing for?’
With effort, I silence it and move to the racks.
My hands find something dark and oversized, a kind of tunic in a soft gray that would cover everything it needs to cover and make no claims. The fabric is good. It would wash well. It would last.
“No.”
Devil’s hand, arriving from my left, removes it from my grip with the calm authority of someone correcting a reflex rather than making a point. She puts it back on the rack without looking at it.
“Devil—”
“No.” Devil is already moving down the rail. Her fingers walk through the hangers with practiced efficiency, not browsing but searching. She knows what she’s looking for and passes over seven things before she stops.
What she pulls out is a deep-burgundy color. It’s a wrap style that ties at the side, made of soft fabric with a slight drape to it. She holds it up against me without asking, tilts her head, and decides. “Try it.”
“It’s not really my—”
“It’s exactly yours.” Devil says it the way she says things that are simply true, no argument scaffolded around it, no cushioning. “That color is your color. The cut is your cut.” She puts it over my arm. “Try it.”
Lucy materializes on my other side with a pair of dark jeans and the look of a woman who has been waiting for her cue. “Both,” she says.
The fitting rooms are at the back of the shop, a row of doors with mirrors lit from above in a particular way that is either very forgiving or very brutal, depending on the day and your starting point.
Today it is brutal.
I close the door and stand in the small space with the burgundy dress over my arm and the jeans folded over the hook, and look at myself in the mirror in my own clothes, which is probably a mistake, but unavoidable. Craig’s voice doesn’t wait.
‘You’ve let yourself go.’ The old one, the early one, the one he started using when Rose was four months old, and I was running on no sleep and the version of my body that had grown and fed a human being was not the version he had signed up for.
‘Cover that up. You think anyone else would want this?’
Not loud. It never needed to be loud. Volume was never the mechanism.
The mechanism was repetition, precision, and the particular intimacy of someone who knew exactly which words found the places you were already uncertain about and made them permanent.
My upper arms, the soft belly, and the fullness of my hips that Rose left behind in stretch marks I can’t see right now but know are there.
I know they’re there.
My hands are still.
I reach for the gray tunic out of instinct, the one I picked up off the rack before Devil took it from me.
It’s not there.
Right. Devil has it.
The burgundy dress is on my arm.
In a sense, the dress wins by default, so I put it on.
I tie the wrap, smooth the fabric, and turn toward the mirror.
Craig’s voice draws a breath. Gets ready.
And then—
Blue eyes.
Not the mirror. Not a real image, the way a thing surfaces when your mind reaches for something it didn’t know it was holding onto.
Roam’s eyes, the particular color of them, the flat patient gray-blue that goes a different shade in the afternoon light on the porch.
The way they were last night, after. The way they looked at me.
Not measuring, taking inventory, or calculating what I was against—some standard I’d already failed to meet.
The way you look at something you’re grateful to be looking at.
Craig’s voice finds the gap, tries to fill it, ‘you’re being ridiculous,’ and doesn’t make it through.
The blue eyes are still there.
I look at the mirror.
The dress is the right color. Devil was right about that.
She’s right about most things, delivered without fanfare.
The burgundy does something to my coloring I’m not accustomed to, giving it warmth.
The wrap cut is generous without being shapeless.
There’s a waist, actual curves—the things Craig told me to hide are not hidden in this dress. They are present.
My hands are still on the fabric, testing it the way you test weight-bearing things and checking whether the ground holds.
The blue eyes don’t move.
A knock at the fitting room door, three quick raps, Lucy’s voice. “Janie, tell me something good.”
I look at myself for one more second. “It fits,” I say.
A beat of silence from outside.
Then, quieter, Devil’s voice, close to the door. “Try it once. For you, love. Not for him.”
I look at the mirror.
Craig’s voice isn’t gone. It’ll have its turn later, probably tonight at three in the morning, the way it does.
The accumulated weight of four years doesn’t come down in one fitting room.
But right now, in the mean light of a mall changing room, in a dress the wrong size according to no one except the man who spent two years making sure I thought it was.
The voice is quiet.
The blue eyes are steady.
“Okay,” I say.
Devil finds two more things before we leave.
She has a gift for this, identifying the specific item on a rack of a hundred that is correct, placing it in a person’s arms, and moving on with no ceremony.
She has probably done this for every woman who has come through the compound gates and found herself reaching for the thing that covers instead of the thing that fits.
Lucy buys herself three items with the decisive energy of a woman who has a clear relationship with what she likes and no patience for anything else.
In the food court, over coffees, she tells a story about the first time Reaper walked through a mall with her.
The specific expressions on other shoppers’ faces, the way Reaper clocked each exit in every store they entered, when a teenager on a skateboard came within two feet of him, and Reaper simply watched him go past with the serene patience of a man who has decided the threat level doesn’t warrant adjustment.
Devil laughs. A real one, genuine, the laugh that changes her whole face.
Three bags at my feet, the burgundy dress in the top one, and Roam’s blue eyes still somewhere in the back of my mind, looking at me the way I’m only now learning to believe I deserve to be looked at.
“Ready?” Devil asks.
Outside, the afternoon has gotten on with itself. The truck is in the same lot, the dent in the rear quarter panel unchanged, the tow hitch catching the sun. Devil unlocks it, climbs in, and Lucy is already in the back seat before I’ve opened the passenger door.
“Buckle up,” Lucy says. “Statistically, she’s fine, but I prefer to have options.”
“I heard that,” Devil says.
I buckle up.
The truck pulls out of the lot, and I watch the mall recede in the side mirror and think about three bags and a woman who hands you the right thing off a rack and walks away without making a lesson of it.
About a voice that went quiet in a fitting room for thirty seconds.
About blue eyes.
Thirty seconds is enough to build on.