Chapter Six
Lennox
The percolator had been doing its death rattle since before I got there, and nobody had turned it off.
I stood at the cast-iron skillet with a spatula in one hand and an egg in the other.
The grease popped once and caught me on the wrist. I didn’t pull away -- just hissed through my teeth and cracked the egg cleanly into the pan.
The kitchen was thick with the heat of a morning already in motion.
Bacon had been the first thing on the stove, and the smell had worked itself so deep into the walls I suspected it was permanent -- part of the compound now, like the motor oil and pine from outside.
Through the doorway to the rec room, a country station was turned up too loud for the hour, all steel guitar and a woman with something to prove.
Whisper, Forge’s old lady, sang a few words of every third verse, not seeming to know she was doing it.
I was wearing the cut over one of Rogue’s flannels.
The flannel was too big. The cut was too big.
My feet were bare on the linoleum -- someone had told me the floors held heat in the morning, and I’d tested the theory and found it true.
My hair was up, pulled back with a rubber band I’d borrowed from Danica two days ago and not returned. She hadn’t asked for it back.
Whisper was at the counter, slicing bread with a serrated knife that had never seen a bread box in its life. The slices came out uneven but sure.
“Don’t move that off the heat,” she said, without looking up from the bread. “You’ll break the yolk.”
“The yolk was already broken.”
She looked up then.
“Then it was already a loss. Why are you moving it?”
Danica laughed from the pass-through shelf, a full-throated sound with no interest in being appropriate for the hour. Something about it got into my chest and loosened a knot I hadn’t realized was there. I tried to keep my face straight. I failed.
“Move,” Danica said, which was the only warning I got before her hip knocked mine clear of the stove and her spatula went under the egg in a single efficient motion that suggested she had been cleaning up other people’s cast-iron disasters her entire adult life.
She slid it onto a plate. She looked at it critically.
“It’s fine,” Whisper called from across the kitchen.
“It’s overcooked.”
“It’s fine.”
I put my back against the counter and watched Danica add it to a line of plates with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had decided to stop arguing because she was still right.
I reached past her for the percolator and started refilling mugs down the row -- hers, Whisper’s, my own -- and she let me do it without comment, which was its own form of acceptance.
Whisper had a story going about one of the Prospects.
She’d caught him trying to fix a leaking pipe under the second cottage sink that morning, with what she described as considerable authority and a wrench he’d been holding upside down, and she told it across the pass-through shelf, her hands flitting about with every word, as if to accentuate what she was saying.
“I asked him how long he’d been a plumber,” she said. “He said he wasn’t a plumber. I said that was the first honest thing he’d said all morning.”
She reached the part where he’d turned the water back on before reconnecting anything, and she had to stop because she was laughing too hard to finish.
Danica said, “Oh, Lord,” in the voice of a woman who had already heard the story once and was choosing the same reaction she’d had the first time, and something in the rhythm of it -- the call and response, the ease of it -- hit me sideways. I laughed.
Not the careful version. Not the one I had been rationing out for two years, measured and timed and aimed slightly away from myself, brought out for dinner parties and charity functions, calibrated to the exact degree that did not ask for attention or invite correction.
This one started before I decided to allow it.
My head went back and my shoulders dropped, and the sound that came out of me was real and loud and a little ridiculous.
When it faded, I was still smiling with my eyes closed and one hand pressed to the counter at my side.
When I opened my eyes, Danica was passing Whisper a clean dish towel, and their eyes had met above my head for the brief, wordless duration of shared recognition.
Neither of them said anything about it.
Danica pressed her free hand to my shoulder as she went by -- not pausing, not making it into a moment, just the brief, sure weight of her palm and then gone, already at the next thing, the next plate, the ongoing business of the morning.
I stood at the counter with the percolator still in my hand and noticed I hadn’t flinched.
The kitchen still smelled of bacon and burnt coffee and cast iron, the country station was playing something I didn’t know, Whisper was still laughing about the Prospect and his upside-down wrench, and I had not flinched.
I set the percolator back on the burner.
The toast popped up burned for the second time that morning, and Whisper pointed at me without turning around, and Danica said “yours” in a tone that did not brook debate, and I went and collected the two black-edged slices from the toaster and took the blame for them with a complete and total absence of shame, and the morning went on.
By the time the stack of dish towels came -- Whisper pushing them into my arms with a nod toward the back hall, already turning to the sink -- I was still warm from the kitchen.
I tucked the stack against my chest. The cut settled around my shoulders.
Through the doorway, the country station played on, and I heard Danica say something to Whisper that I didn’t catch, and Whisper said something back, and both of them laughed.
The corridor behind the kitchen was narrow enough that two people couldn’t pass without turning sideways, and the linoleum gave way to bare concrete halfway down.
The concrete held the cold the kitchen had burned off.
I went down the hall with the towels pressed against my chest and the warmth of the morning still somewhere in my sternum.
The side door was propped open with a chunk of split firewood. The wedge of cold air coming through it smelled of pine and exhaust and the mineral edge of a November morning that hadn’t fully committed to either winter or fall. I was three feet away when I heard the voices.
They were low. The restrained tone of men who understood their surroundings. One of them had a cigarette -- I could hear the small, wet sound of the inhale between sentences -- and the other was leaning against something, some surface that shifted faintly under his weight.
My feet stopped before I’d realized what I was doing, a sudden halt on the cold concrete. The rest of me simply accepted the decision.
“… every day they sit on that highway is another day someone in Nashville decides to take a closer look at who we are,” the first one said. The cigarette one. “Stewart people push harder, this whole place becomes a target. That’s not paranoid. That’s math.”
A pause. The sound of smoke released.
“Rogue’s got his cut on her,” the second one said.
“Yeah. And that doesn’t make the problem disappear. It makes it louder. Now it’s personal, you know? Now it’s the club against Stewart instead of Stewart looking for a missing girl. Those aren’t the same thing.”
Something shifted again. A boot heel on the step, maybe.
“I’m just saying,” the first one said, and the cigarette came back, and whatever he was just saying was lost to a slow exhale.
I stood in the corridor with the stack of dish towels pressed so hard against my chest that I felt the folded edge through the flannel and the cut over it, and I noticed my jaw had gone tight. There was only the concrete and the cold air and the sound of a man’s cigarette burning down.
My hands had locked around the towels without my noticing. I could see them above the edge of the pile, fingers bent at odd angles, as if they belonged to someone else.
The second prospect said something else, lower, and the first one made a sound that was not quite agreement and not quite dismissal, and neither of them looked toward the door.
They were outside, angled away, watching the yard.
They had no reason to check the corridor.
I had come around the corner quietly in my bare feet on concrete, and they had no idea I was there.
I backed up, one step, then two, then turned and walked back the way I’d come, past the bare concrete, past the point where it changed back to linoleum.
I didn’t hurry, because hurrying made sound and sound invited attention.
I’d spent the last several days inside a place that had started to feel like safety and now the word sat wrong in my mouth.
The kitchen was behind me. I didn’t go back to it.
I went out the other end of the corridor, through the back of the main building, and across the yard to Rogue’s cottage. The cold of the morning hit my bare feet on the gravel and I did not slow down for it.
Inside, the cottage held the quiet of the morning. The lamp from the night before was off. On the kitchen counter, two coffee mugs sat rinsed in the drying rack -- his and mine, side by side. I walked past them, set the dish towels on the edge of the couch, and went down the hall to the bedroom.
The bag was under the bed, where I’d put it three days ago when I’d run out of reasons to keep it on the chair.
A canvas-bottomed duffel from the strip mall, and it slid out without resistance.
I sat on the edge of the mattress, unzipped it, and realized my hands had started to tremble. I went to the dresser.