CHAPTER EIGHT #2
She came back with the pliers held out in front of her in both hands, like they might bite.
“It’s in you sideways.”
“It’s in me straight. You’re standing crooked.”
“I am not standing crooked.”
“Tell me what to do,” Victoria said.
“Hands here. And here. Lean on me.”
She came around the table and did not ask anybody whether she was allowed. She got both palms on my chest and my good shoulder and leaned, bracing me against the pull, which is exactly right, and nobody told her.
Her hands were cold. My whole arm went stupid about it. Not the hurt one. The other one, the one that was working fine, which suddenly had no idea what it was for.
“You can hold that,” I said. “Right there. Press.”
“I am pressing.”
“You’re pressing like you’re sorry about it. Press like you mean it.”
She pressed like she meant it.
Her face was a hand off mine and neither of us moved.
“Is it deep?” she said.
“It’s through. Through beats deep. Through means the thing is already done arguing.”
“Okay,” Bex said. “Okay. On three.”
“Don’t count. Counting makes it worse for everybody.”
“You just gave me a lecture on pliers and now I can’t count to three?”
“Correct.” I got my right hand around the edge of the table and held on.
“I hate you.”
“Everybody says that right before they do a really good job.”
The pliers came into my right hand and out of it into Bex’s, cold, colder than the girl was, and I set them where they had to go.
“Pliers. Straight out, don’t wiggle it. Yeah. Good.”
It came out. It made a sound I am not going to describe to anybody, ever, including myself.
Bex turned for the gauze and put her elbow into a glass on the bench, and it went off the edge and broke on the concrete.
“Shit. Sorry. Glass.”
“That’s my fault, I’m sorry—”
“Not yours,” Bex said. “Mine. I have elbows.”
Victoria had said it fast and she had said it first. Both her hands were on me. She was four feet from that glass and had nothing to do with it, and she apologized out loud, in a room full of people, without a second of thought.
Something in my chest turned over sideways and stayed that way.
I did not say a word about it. You do not hold a thing like that up to a person’s face in front of a room. You put it in your pocket and keep it, and later you find out who taught it to her, and go have a conversation.
“Trouble, if you faint on me I’m gonna be real smug about it for a year.”
“I’m not fainting. You’re bleeding on my sleeve.”
“That’s Marcus’s sleeve.”
She did not answer that one and I let it lie, because I had already decided it was not my business and I am a man who means it.
She was looking at me and I kept my eyes on the pliers.
Bex packed the hole front and back and taped it and said she was redoing it later, because I would move wrong and then lie to her about it.
Adrian came in and stopped at the end of the long table. He did not sit. Both of us had been on our feet too long, and neither of us was going to start that argument in front of her.
He looked at the hole in me. Then he looked at her, and he opened his mouth, and she got there first.
“I’m not club property. I’m not going to be one.”
She said it to Adrian, in front of Bex and me and the four guys who had come in off the picnic table and were pretending to care about a parts washer.
Her chin was up, her hands were shaking, and she had three more sentences loaded, because she had walked in expecting an argument and built one on the way.
“Good,” I said. “Don’t be.”
And I watched her set every one of those sentences back down.
She turned her head and looked at me like I had switched languages on her. Blinked twice. Opened her mouth, got nothing out of it, shut it again. Whatever she had braced for had a shape, and I was not that shape. Somebody taught her that too.
“I’m not asking you to be anything,” I said. “I got in front of that because I wanted to. That’s the whole bill. Nobody’s mailing you an invoice.”
“That is not how this works.”
“It’s how I work.”
“People don’t—” She stopped, and started over. “Men don’t.”
“Some do. You’ve had rotten luck.”
“That’s an awfully relaxed thing to say with a hole in you.”
“I’m an awfully relaxed guy.”
“He is not,” Bex said, taping. “He rebuilt a whole carburetor at four in the morning once because a guy looked at him funny.”
“That was a different thing entirely and you know it.”
And then, because I am not a saint and have never claimed to be: her saying it out loud, that she was nobody’s and would not be, it did not cool a single thing in me. It went the other way, hard, and I sat on that stool and let it. The bond in me filed her no and went on wanting.
Her hand was still flat on my chest. She had forgotten it was there.
Then she took it away to push the hair off her face, and the shoulder found me all at once, top to bottom, like a door coming open on it. That is the honest order of events. It did not hurt until she stopped touching it.
“Then I should go,” she said. “If I’m the reason he sent—”
“Victoria.” Adrian did not raise his voice. “No.”
“You’d get about a block,” I said. “Two if the light’s with you.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It isn’t about you anyway.”
“It isn’t,” Adrian said. “If he wants her, he burns this building to get her.” He said it flat, to the room, to the roof over us, to the forge and the bar and the wall with fifty-one years of names painted on it. “Everybody understand that.”
“He can’t do that,” Bex said.
“He can.”
“Then say it in front of me,” Victoria said. “All of it. Don’t hand me the clean version.”
“There is no clean version,” Adrian said.
Nobody argued past that. Nobody ever argues with him, which is not the same thing as anybody agreeing.
Bex looked at the roller door. I looked at the roller door. Out past the gate Rennick was still coiling the yellow hose onto a reel in the side of the van, unhurried, a man finishing a job in the correct order.
He wound the last of it on. He clipped the end down. He laid the gun in a molded case and shut the two latches, one and then the other.
Then he said it, loud enough to carry over the gravel and in through the open door to every one of us.
“Eleven,” he said. “Days.”
Victoria already had the prepaid in her hand.
“Corinne,” she said when the line connected. “Tell me Teddy’s inside.”
I looked at Adrian. He nodded once toward Karim, then toward the gate. Two men took their keys off the board. We were not waiting eleven days to find out whose porch Crane would choose.