Chapter 7
Rev
She was packing when I came up the stairs.
Not dramatically. That's what told me how bad it was.
There was no throwing. She had the duffel Margo gave her open on the mattress and she was folding a shirt, and then folding it again because the first fold hadn't been square, and her face was completely calm, and I'd have felt better if she'd been putting a fist through the drywall.
Birdie had called at six. I'd heard about a third of it through the floor — Delaney's voice going gentle and level, the voice you use on somebody standing on a ledge, and under it a nineteen-year-old crying so hard the phone couldn't keep up.
"Where," I said.
"Bellhaven." Fold. "There's a bus out of Elko at four."
"To do what."
"To fix it."
"How."
She stopped folding. She didn't look up.
"Delaney. How."
"I don't know yet," she said. "That's the honest answer.
I know there's a way, and I know he'll take it, and I'll find out what it is when I'm sitting across from him.
" She put the shirt in the bag. "It's twenty-two thousand a year for two more years.
That's not a number anybody has, Rev. It's not a number I can bake. "
"So the price is you."
"The price is a conversation—"
"The price is you," I said, "and you knew that on the stairs, because you're not stupid, and that's why you're folding a shirt three times."
She turned around then and I got the full weight of it — the flat, furious, terrified look of a woman about to do something appalling for the best reason there is.
"She's nineteen," Delaney said. "She has a chem lab and a work-study and a roommate who steals her yogurt and she has never once asked me for anything, and I let her take that money for two years without asking a single question about where it came from, because I wanted it to be true.
That's on me. That is a debt with my name on it. "
"It's not."
"Elias—"
"Sit down."
"Don't—"
"I'm not telling you what to do." I put my hands up, open.
"I have never once told you what to do and I'm not starting tonight.
If you get on that bus I'll drive you to Elko myself and I'll be at the station when you come back and I won't say one word about it, ever, for the rest of my life.
That's a promise and you can hold me to it. "
She sat down on the mattress. Hard.
"Then say the thing," she said.
"You didn't create this problem."
"I benefited from it."
"You were lied to about it. Those are different, and I need you to hold them apart in your head for about ninety seconds." I crouched down so I wasn't standing over her. "Second thing. The club has money."
She started to shake her head.
"Delaney. The club has money. We run three legitimate businesses and a storage yard and there's an emergency fund that exists for exactly this, and Judge put six thousand dollars into a stranger's transmission repair in March because the man drives a school bus route.
That's what it's for. That's the entire reason we take dues off men who don't have it. "
"I can't take twenty-two thousand dollars—"
"Then take four and a loan against the rest at whatever rate makes you feel like a person," I said.
"Take it as a business. Take it as an advance on a case that's putting three hundred dollars a week into Margo's till that wasn't there in June.
Structure it however you have to. I don't care about the mechanism.
I care that you're about to sell yourself to solve something you didn't do, and you've decided that's the only door in the room, and it isn't. It's just the only one you've ever been shown. "
"It's not the same," she said. "Asking. It's not the same as—"
She stopped.
I waited.
"Asking isn't the same as being owned," she said slowly. Like a woman reading a language she used to speak.
"No."
"He made those the same thing."
"Yeah."
"He made those the same thing for two years, Elias, and I didn't—" Her voice went. She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth and held it there a second and then took it down. "I thought that was just what a person was."
"I know."
"Everything I ever took from him had a bill."
"I know."
"What's the bill here," she said.
And there it was. Six weeks in this town and it still came out of her, automatic, the way you flinch at a raised hand years after the man who raised it is dead.
"Nothing," I said. "That's going to bother you for a while. I'd let it."
She made a sound that was half a laugh. "That's Judge's line."
"He got it off me."
She called Judge herself. I want that on the record, because it would have been easy to let me do it, and she took the phone out to the landing and stood in the dark with her arms wrapped around her middle and asked for eight thousand dollars against a promissory note at four percent — she'd worked out the four percent on the back of an invoice in the ninety seconds before she dialed — and Judge said, and I heard it through the door because Judge is deaf in one ear and compensates by shouting:
"Fine. Anything else?"
"...No."
"Then quit calling me at eight thirty at night," Judge said, and hung up.
She came back in and stood there holding the phone and looking at the wall.
"Delaney."
"He didn't even ask what it was for," she said.
We closed the diner at nine.
That was her idea, and so was everything after it, and I want to be careful how I put this down, because it was hers.
I was wiping the counter and she came out of the back with the keys and locked the front door from the inside and pulled the shade.
Then she went along the wall and shut off the overheads one bank at a time until the only light in the place was the case — that low, cold, humming glow off the glass shelves, throwing everything blue and soft, and the red of the exit sign over the kitchen door.
"Come here," she said.
"Del—"
"I've done four things today that other people decided," she said. "I'm doing one that I decided."
She was up on the prep counter when I got there.
Stainless, cold, scrubbed down twenty minutes ago, still smelling faintly of the lemon she uses because she says bleach gets in the butter.
The counter she has spent six weeks turning into hers — her tape on the shelf edge, her handwriting on the labels, her rolling pin in the rack with a piece of masking tape on it that says DELANEY'S DO NOT and then, in Otto's hand, underneath, sorry.
"Here?" I said.
"Here."
"Somebody's got to eat off that."
"I'll sanitize it," Delaney said. "Elias, I'm a professional."
I would like to report that I had a good answer for that.
She took my face in both hands and kissed me, and it was nothing like the loft — the loft had been a storm doing half the work.
This was quiet. Just the compressor cycling on the case and the rain gutter dripping outside and her breathing, and she took her time, and every time I moved to give her more room she pulled me back in.
"Tell me," I said, against her mouth, "what you—"
"You're asking again."
"Always."
"Then listen."
And she told me. In a low, clear, unembarrassed voice about nine inches from my ear, with her hands already working my belt: where she wanted my hands and in what order, that she wanted the apron on, that she wanted to be able to see my face, and then one more thing, said flat and precise like a line off a prep list, that put my forehead down on her shoulder for a second like a man taking a corner too fast.
"Okay," I said, when I could.
"Okay," she agreed, and hooked her heels behind me.
She'd worn the apron all day and she kept it on, and I pushed everything else up and out of the way and got my mouth on her breasts while she got my jeans open, and the case light did something to her skin I still don't have a word for — cold blue coming up under the curve of her, the whole soft heavy weight of her going silver where the light hit and dark everywhere else.
I stopped once, just to look at her sitting up there half undone on her own counter.
"Don't," she said.
"No," I said, and kept looking, until she stopped telling me not to.
She was wet against my hand almost immediately and made no attempt to be quiet about it, which was new — the loft had had a storm to hide under and this place had nothing but the compressor.
I worked her slow with two fingers, thumb where she wanted it, standing between her knees with my other hand spread across her lower back to keep her from sliding, and she came the first time like that, fast and hard and about four minutes in, with her forehead against my collarbone and both fists in the back of my shirt.
"That was quick," I said.
"Shut up. It's been a day." She was already pulling me forward by the belt loops. "Now."
"Ask me."
She lifted her head and looked at me — and I watched her understand that I meant it, that this was the part, that I was going to make her say the sentence out loud in her own kitchen with her own name on the rolling pin behind her.
"I want you inside me," Delaney said. "Now. Please."
I pulled her to the edge of the counter and gave her exactly that.
It was slower after the first minute. Her legs locked around my hips and her hands went back behind her to brace flat on the stainless, and she leaned back on them and let me watch — that was deliberate, she told me later it was deliberate — and I kept one hand at the small of her back and the other under her thigh and I did not look away from her face once.
She told me when to go harder. She told me when to stop.
Once she said "wait," and I stopped completely, buried in her, jaw locked, waiting, and she got her breath and said "okay," and the thing that went through her face when I moved again was the whole reason I'd asked in the first place.
There's a shelf under that counter where she keeps the sheet pans. It got hit twice. The second time, a stack of them went over onto the tile with a noise like the end of the world, and she laughed so hard into my neck that we both had to stop entirely for about thirty seconds.
"You good?" I said.
"Don't you dare," she said, and pulled me back down.
She got there again with her mouth against my throat and her heels driving into the backs of my thighs, and she took me over with her, and afterward neither of us moved for a while, her arms around my neck and my face in her hair and the compressor cycling on and off like nothing at all had happened in its kitchen.
We sat on the floor with our backs against the dish machine, sharing the end of a bottle of cooking sherry, which is a horrible drink and the only one on the premises.
"I'm keeping the loan at four percent," she said.
"Nobody asked you to."
"I'm keeping it at four percent," Delaney said, "because in eighteen months I want to hand Judge a piece of paper marked PAID and watch him have to feel something about it in front of people."
I laughed. Out loud. It surprised both of us.
"There she is," I said.