CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
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VICTORIA
Six weeks later
Teddy Ashby had one finger flat on my back and was reading me like a worksheet.
“War... den. War-den. What’s a warden?”
He was nine and had climbed onto a bar stool to inspect Bex’s repaired stitching. Six weeks of wear had softened the cut. The white letters were still bright against the black.
Bex came down the bar with a rag in her fist and did not slow down for it.
“It’s her. That’s what a warden is. It’s her.”
“Wor-den,” Teddy said.
“Warden.”
“War-den.” He landed the vowel that time and knew he had landed it. “Warden. Okay.”
He said it once more, quieter, to himself, the way a person puts a small thing in a pocket.
“Is it a job?”
“It’s a job,” Bex said. “Out there they say witch.”
“Does she get paid for it, or is it like when Dad—”
“Ask her, she’s right there.”
“Do you get paid?” Teddy said to the word on my back.
“Not for that one.”
“Then it’s not a job.”
“Sit down,” Bex said, “before you fall off my stool and I have to explain it to your dad.”
He sat back down on the stool and went to work on the dinosaur.
The roll-up door was open all the way. Not a foot of it and not enough to walk a bike through. All of it, up under the header, so that daylight came across the floor in one long yellow slab and lay on the back of my neck like a hand.
Somebody had swept. The building smelled like warm brick and coffee. Under that, the three of them — wolf and panther and bear — familiar enough now that my shoulders settled before I looked up.
And butterscotch.
The dish sat on the bar by the taps. Heavy cut glass, the kind that sits in a dentist’s waiting room for forty years and outlives the dentist. It was full to the rim.
“Same brand. I buy it by the box now. Don’t make it weird,” Bex said.
“I wasn’t going to make it weird.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“This is my face.”
“Then your face has a problem with candy.” She shoved the dish an inch toward me and left it there. “It stays on the bar. It doesn’t go in a cabinet, it doesn’t go in the office, and if it gets low I know where the stores are.”
“Okay.”
“That’s it? Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
She wiped a clean place on the bar and wiped it again. I took a candy. So did she. We had stopped pretending the dish was too important to use. Corinne would have called us ridiculous for that.
Luca brought the coffee in a two-handled mug. He set it down carefully, using both hands, and waited until the base was flat before he let go.
“Black. Don’t say thanks, it’s coffee,” Luca said.
“Thanks.”
“What did I just say.”
He was already walking off before my hand got around it. Down the long table there was a worn ring in the wood where something used to stand. Nothing stood in it. Nothing had stood in it in a long time, and nobody at that table looked at the ring, including me.
The coffee was too hot. I drank it anyway. Outside, the three yard dogs slept in a patch of sun, one of them snoring loudly enough to offend Bex.
Under my sternum, the bond was quiet. Not gone. Marcus had taken an afternoon trip to Canton yesterday, and by dinner both of us had been ready for the drive home to end. We were learning the distances. Nobody pretended the price did not exist. Nobody had asked for their name back.
The dinosaur was green plastic with a chipped back foot, and Teddy had stood it up next to the candy dish facing the door, like it had a job. His inhaler lay beside it on the wood. Nobody moved either one of them all afternoon. Three patched men came to the bar for a beer and reached around them.
Luca worked at the vise with an adapted grip strapped around the file. His palms had closed, the scars thick and tight. Ordinary strength was coming back slowly. The ward-work was not. He could guide a file now; he could not feel a name answer through hot iron, and he never would again.
Pike had drilled the bracket’s holes. Luca rounded the corners so Teddy could not open a hand on them. Some jobs had become two people’s jobs. He was learning to let them be.
Teddy went over and put his chin on the bench.
“Are you making that for me or for the dinosaur?”
“Him. You get the leftovers.”
“He doesn’t have hands.”
“That’s his problem.” The file went twice more over the corner. “Hold this. Don’t squeeze it. Hold it.”
“It’s hot.”
“It’s warm. Hot is a different word and you’ll know it when you meet it.”
Teddy put his thumb on the flat of it anyway, to check.
“What is it for?”
“Your shelf.” Luca turned the bracket in the jaws a quarter turn. “So the shelf holds the thing you put on it, instead of dumping it on the floor at two in the morning and waking up the whole building.”
“That was one—”
“It was two times,” Luca said, “and I counted both.”
Teddy held the bracket. Luca let him hold it, which is the whole trick of Luca and always has been.
Then he looked up at me over the kid’s head and took his time about it.
“You’ve got grease on your jaw, trouble. Leave it. I like it there.”
My hand was already halfway to my face before the back half of the sentence landed. It stopped there. I put it down flat on the bench instead and looked at the bracket like the bracket was interesting. He went back to filing. My pulse took considerably longer to go back anywhere.
Bex watched the whole thing from behind the taps with a bottle in each hand.
“You’ve got grease on your jaw,” she said.
“I’m aware.”
“I’m just saying it’s still there.”
“It’s coming off.”
“It isn’t,” Bex said. “And you don’t want it to.”
Marcus was at the far end of the bar, sideways on a stool, his three rings back on his left hand and his phone face down on the wood. He turned it over. Looked at nothing on it. Turned it back down.
“Nobody’s called to ask what a person costs in six weeks. Best quiet I ever bought.”
“You liked being called.”
“I liked being needed. It’s a different sickness.”
He said it lightly, which is how he says everything he means.
“And the rest of it? Kadir?”
“Signed the release on the building when his own files reached the investigators. Seems a loan’s harder to collect after you sell the same collateral twice.” Marcus pushed the phone away. “Prine and Bell are charged. Holt’s talking. Sykes stopped running when they found the payments.”
He let me look at the screen. Real names. Real case numbers. Corinne’s false certificate attached as evidence, no longer allowed to stand as the account of her death.
“We put her date right,” he said.
I nodded. There was no clever thing to say to that.
“Yesterday I tried to fix a drain,” he added after a while. “Nobody has ever paid me to fix a drain.”
“Did you fix it?”
“No,” Marcus said. “I made it worse and then I paid a man who could. That is the same job I always did, and it cost me sixty dollars, and nobody had to be ruined for it.”
?
Out in the yard the light came off the concrete white and flat. Adrian had the chain-link gate swung all the way back against the fence and was running a bolt through the frame so it would stay swung back.
Karim had won the October vote. Adrian had taken road captain, by the same raised hands, and still did his turn on the gate rota. He had not got his old chair back by surviving. Some changes stayed changed.
A patched man came out with a folding chair, set it down by the gate post, and sat in it.
Adrian did not look up from the bolt.
“Gate stays open. Somebody watch it anyway.”
“On it.”
The watcher unfolded his paper beside the post. Inside, Karim called for the month’s receipts. A club doing ordinary jobs in an ordinary order. It should not have moved me as much as it did.
“You could just close it,” I said.
Adrian set the wrench on the top rail and looked at the street through the open frame for a while, the way he looks at anything he intends to be right about.
“No.”
“That’s the whole answer?”
“It stays open,” he said. “Somebody stays awake.”
He came past me for the wrench and did not go around. His shoulder took mine on the way, and neither of us moved out of it for longer than the wrench required. My arm stayed warm about it.
A white van came down Rosewood at a walking pace. The old Crane Meridian letters showed faintly beneath the panel where the name had been stripped. A kid drove it, slowing to find a number on the buildings.
It slowed at the open gate the way a car slows at a wreck.
Four of us looked back at it. Adrian with the wrench hanging off two fingers. Me with the coffee. Bex in the doorway with her arms crossed, and Teddy behind her hip with the dinosaur in his fist.
Nobody moved. Nobody said one word to it.
He found the loading bay two doors down, signaled, and turned into it. Boxes in a van. Not an order about where I was allowed to stand.
Somewhere under all of that there is a prisoner held wholly in a book with no mouth to say so, and I hope he heard the van go by. I am not sorry about that one either.
“Huh,” Bex said, from the doorway.
“Was that them?” Teddy said.
“That was a man with boxes in a van,” she said. “Go find your dad, he’s doing the tables.”
Adrian put the wrench in his back pocket. He did not say a word about it, and that was the loudest anybody said anything all afternoon.
The job board hangs on the brick by the church door, and most of what is on it is nothing. A bike for sale. A card from the shop that does chrome. A note about a guy with a flatbed and a phone number under it in pencil.
There was a ticket on it that was not nothing.
Cream stock. Engraved letterhead. A house I have carried for, sealed case, two-man escort, pickup this evening and delivery before the banks open.
I read it standing with my shoulders on the brick and the church door in the corner of my eye, and I did not have to decide to stand that way.
Three tacks. Somebody had put three tacks in a sheet of paper that needed one, which is a way of saying something without saying it.
Bex went by behind me with a case of bottles on her hip and did not stop walking.
“It came Friday,” she said. “Nobody took it down. Nobody put anything over it either, and I checked twice, because I was going to have words.”