Chapter 4
Delaney
There was a plastic fern inside it. Somebody had put a plastic fern inside a refrigerated dessert case and closed the door, and six years of Copper Ridge had walked past that and nobody had said a word, and honestly there is no better summary of this town available.
"I want the case," I said.
Margo didn't look up from the register. "It's broke."
"It's unplugged."
"It's broke and unplugged."
"Margo."
"It has a fern in it, Delaney, I know what's in my own case." She banged the drawer shut. "What do you want with it."
And here's where it got embarrassing. Because I had a whole thing prepared.
I'd been up since four building the pitch — margins, foot traffic, the fact that the Kings put away nineteen dollars of pie a week purely out of habit and would put away sixty if the pie were good — and what came out of my mouth was:
"If it's not too much trouble, I could maybe do a couple of things in it, just a few, just to see, only if it's — I mean, obviously it's your case, so—"
"Stop."
I stopped.
Margo came around the counter, dish towel over her shoulder, and she stood in front of me and she looked at me the way you look at a bike you're deciding whether to buy.
"You want the case."
"I want the case."
"Say it like that."
"...I want the case."
"Better." She pulled the tape off the PIE SOLD OUT sign in one long peel and handed the sign to me like a diploma.
"Here's my condition, and it's the only one, so hear it.
You stop apologizing for asking. I don't want it in my kitchen.
I got a fryer that catches fire twice a year and a dishwasher that Otto has personally made worse, I don't have room for a grown woman saying sorry for wanting something. "
"That's going to be hard."
"I know what it is, honey." She said it lightly, and then she said, not lightly: "I did nineteen years of it. Different man, same case."
Then she took the fern out and threw it in the trash from six feet, and it went in, and she said "Hah," and went back to the register.
I did four things that first week. Then eleven. By the end of the second week there was a man named Dutch coming in at six a.m. to sit in front of the case and decide, which took him twenty-five minutes daily and which he described, to anyone who'd listen, as the worst part of his day.
And that was the week Rev asked me to test a rebuild.
"It needs miles on it before I hand it back," he said, from under a bike that did not, as far as I could tell, need anything. "Highway miles. Load on the back."
"Load."
"Weight distribution's part of the test."
"Elias Marchetti. Are you calling me a sandbag."
He rolled out from under it, considered the ceiling for a moment, and said, "I'm calling you a variable," and I laughed so hard I had to sit down on an oil drum.
We went out at seven, when the light goes long and gold and the whole high desert turns the color of a good crust. West out of town, past the water tower, up the grade with the Cinder Range going purple on our left and the flats running out forever on our right.
He rode differently with me on the back than he had that first night — slower, smoother, easing into the corners like there was something breakable in the bags.
He pulled off at a turnout on the ridge above town, where the road bellies out and you can see the whole grid of Copper Ridge laid out in about nine streets, the one traffic light blinking yellow at nothing.
We sat on the guardrail. He'd brought the thermos. Of course he'd brought the thermos.
"So," he said. "What do you want?"
I said, "Sorry?"
"You. What do you want." He poured coffee into the cap and handed it over. "Not what you'll take. Not what's realistic. What do you want."
And I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
I want to be honest about how humiliating that was.
Twenty-nine years old. Grown woman. Ran a station at a two-star kitchen in Bellhaven for three years, could break down a lamb, could hold four sauces in my head at once — and a man asked me what I wanted and my brain returned a blank page.
Because nobody had asked. Not my mother, who asked what I was going to do, which is different.
Not Grantham, who asked whether I was happy, which is a question with a right answer.
"Give me a second," I said.
"Take the ride back."
"No, I—" I put the cap down on the rail.
"A shop. Not a restaurant, I don't want dinner service, dinner service takes your whole life and gives you a bad back and a drinking problem.
A shop. Morning hours. Bread and viennoiserie and one thing in the case that changes every day so people have to come in to find out.
" It was coming faster now, and my hands had started doing it, describing shelves in the air.
"Marble counter, because you can't laminate on stainless in August. Big window.
West-facing, so the afternoon light comes across the floor at four when I'm cleaning up and nobody's there but me.
And a bench outside, and I don't care if people sit on it and don't buy anything. "
I stopped. My face was hot.
Rev hadn't moved.
"That's the first time you've said any of that out loud," he said. It wasn't a question.
"That's the first time it's existed," I said. "You understand? That's not a thing I've been keeping in a drawer. You asked and it — assembled."
He nodded slowly. He was looking at the town.
"The old feed store on the square is west-facing," he said.
"Elias."
"I'm making an observation about a building."
"You are absolutely not."
"Concrete floor, good bones, roof's bad." He drank from the thermos lid. "Owner's a woman in Elko who hasn't been down here since the flood."
I looked at the side of his face — the gray coming in at the temple, the nose that had been broken and set by somebody in a hurry, the mouth that gave away nothing and had, in three weeks, given away everything — and something in my chest turned over like an engine catching.
"Why are you like this," I said.
"Like what."
"Nobody asks me things and then remembers the answers, Rev, that's not — people don't do that—"
And he turned his head, and I stopped talking, and the whole desert went very quiet.
He didn't move fast. That's what undid me.
He lifted one hand and put two fingers under my jaw and turned my face up maybe an inch, and he stopped there, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him, and he waited.
Just waited. Left it entirely with me, the way he'd left the helmet in his hand on Route 6, and I felt my hand come up and take hold of the front of his shirt—
Headlights swept the turnout.
An engine. A very specific engine, badly tuned, belonging to a very specific person.
"No," I said.
"Yeah," said Rev.
Otto's bike came up over the rise, slewed into the gravel, and stopped six feet away with the light directly on us.
There was a pause of exquisite length.
"Am I interrupting?" Otto said.
Neither of us answered.
"I can go. I'm gonna go." He did not kill the engine. He did not go. "It's just, Judge said tell you the thing about the — and also I wanted to see the ridge, honestly, I've never been up here, it's beautiful—"
"Otto."
"I'm not going," Otto said, misery all over his face, "because I don't actually remember the message and if I leave without it Judge'll skin me, and also I think my clutch is doing the thing again."
Rev let go of my jaw very slowly. He got up. He walked over to Otto's bike, crouched, listened to it idle for about four seconds, and said, "Your clutch is fine. Your timing is catastrophic."
"It felt weird on the—"
"Not the bike's," Rev said.