Chapter 2
Delaney
Here is what I expected from a motorcycle clubhouse, based on a lifetime of television: low red lighting, a pool table with a felt injury, at least one man cleaning a gun on a bar for no operational reason, and a general atmosphere of imminent consequence.
Here is what I got.
I got a converted Pentecostal church with the cross taken down and the shadow of the cross still on the brick where the paint hadn't faded to match.
I got stained glass in the transom, red and gold, throwing a shape like a spilled drink across the floorboards.
I got a hand-painted sign over the door that said COPPER RIDGE KINGS MC and under it, smaller, in a completely different and much worse hand, PLEASE TAKE OFF WET BOOTS. LOOKING AT YOU DUTCH.
And I got a boy of maybe twenty-two, on his knees in the gravel lot, holding out a treat to a three-legged dog and saying, with tremendous sincerity, "Shake. Shake. Okay, buddy, I recognize this is a design problem, but you have three, you can spare one—"
The dog sat down on the treat.
"That's not shake," the boy told it.
"That's chess," I said.
He looked up. He had a face like a golden retriever's, all open, and a prospect patch, and a wrench in his back pocket that I would learn within the week was purely decorative.
"Otto," he said, standing so fast he dropped the rest of the treats. "You're the bride."
"I'm not, actually. That's kind of the headline."
"Right. No. Sorry." He shook my hand with both of his. "You're the not-bride. That's better. That's a better story. Rev never brings anybody, I want you to know that, I've been here fourteen months and he has brought back exactly one thing on that bike and it was a transmission."
"Otto," said the man behind me.
"Going," said Otto, and did not go, and then went.
Rev — that was his name, or the piece of it he was renting out — walked me in past a bar with nobody cleaning a gun on it and a pool table in genuinely tragic condition and about eleven men who looked up, clocked the wedding dress, and then, to a man, looked away again.
Not politely. Deliberately. Like a room full of people who had all separately decided, in the same half second, that whatever this was, it wasn't theirs to look at.
I have been stared at in every room I've entered since I was fourteen. I know exactly what my body does to a room. That was the first place I ever walked into where it didn't.
Margo Beaulieu came out of the diner kitchen next door with a dish towel over her shoulder, took one look, and said, "Oh, honey, no."
"It's not as bad as—"
"It is exactly as bad as it looks and you are going to eat something." She had gray hair cut like a helmet and forearms like a stevedore and she was already steering me by the elbow. "Elias, out. Go be tall somewhere else."
Rev went.
She put me in the third booth from the door, which I would later learn is the booth, the one you get put in when Margo has decided something about you.
She brought me a plate of eggs at nine at night without asking, and a glass of ice water, and a pair of her own sweatpants and a t-shirt from a 2009 poker run, and she stood guard outside the bathroom door while I cut myself out of eleven thousand dollars with a pair of kitchen shears.
It took nine minutes. I want to be clear about the ratio there. Two years of my life, four hundred place cards, a two-year post in Zurich, and nine minutes with the shears Margo uses on chicken.
She didn't ask me a single question either. It was starting to feel like a policy.
"You don't want to know?" I said finally, around the eggs, which were extraordinary in the way only diner eggs cooked in forty years of seasoned steel can be.
"I know," she said. "Ninety percent of it. You want me to say it back to you?"
"...Sure."
"He wasn't unkind. That's the thing that's got you spun. If he'd been unkind you'd have left in year one and everybody'd have clapped." She refilled my water. "It's the polite ones take the longest. Nothing to point at."
I put the fork down.
"Eat," she said, and went to yell at someone about the fryer.
The president came in a little after ten. Nobody announced him; the room just reorganized around him, the way water does around a rock. Silas Vance, fifty-eight, called Judge, with a face like something carved into a courthouse and about as forthcoming.
He didn't sit. He stood at the end of the booth with his hat in his hand.
"Ma'am."
"Delaney."
"Delaney." He nodded once, as if we'd concluded something. "There's a room over the garage. Bed's a bed. Bathroom works if you jiggle it. It's yours until you know where you're going."
I waited.
He waited.
"And?" I said.
"And what?"
"And what do you want."
Judge looked at me for what felt like a full minute. There was a clock over the pie case doing its work, and out in the lot somebody kicked a bike over and let it idle.
"Nothing," he said. "That's going to bother you for a while. I'd let it."
Then he put his hat on and left.
I lay awake in that room for four hours. It smelled like cut metal and clean laundry, and there was a window that faced the garage bay roof and past it the whole black bowl of the desert with more stars in it than I'd known were issued. And I kept waiting.
That's the part nobody tells you about leaving.
I wasn't scared of the men downstairs. I was scared of the bill.
Somebody was going to come collect — for the eggs, for the sweatpants, for the room, for the thirty-one miles — and until they did I couldn't put my shoulders down, because I had spent two years learning that everything given is a lien, and the interest gets calculated later, out loud, in front of people.
At two in the morning I gave up and went downstairs to the kitchenette off the garage bay.
There was flour. There was sugar, ancient, clumped.
There was a tin of baking powder that expired during a different presidential administration and a stick of butter and half a bag of pecans somebody had clipped shut with a binder clip, and I stood in that little strip of a kitchen in a stranger's sweatpants and I started to work, because it was the only thing I have ever known how to do with my hands when my chest is doing that.
I don't remember deciding what to make. My hands went ahead without me. Cream the butter, and the world gets narrower and better; cut the flour in, and it narrows again, down to the bowl, down to the count.
By four there were two dozen pecan shortbreads cooling on a rack made of an oven shelf balanced on two coffee cans, and my hands were flour to the elbow, and I was crying again, which was becoming tiresome.
The bay door rolled up.
Rev stood there with a thermos in one hand and his keys in the other, taking in the flour, the coffee cans, the disaster, me.
He looked at it a long moment.
Then he said, "You're in my four a.m."
"You have a four a.m.?"
"Every day." He came in, set the thermos down, and picked up a shortbread without asking, which I appreciated more than I can explain. He ate it in two bites. Chewed. Considered. Nodded once, exactly the way Judge had.
"That's the best thing that's ever happened in this building," he said, "and a man was born in here in 1991."