Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Rooster
"She stays as long as she needs to." Amara says it in the main room with the door open, and half the club's close enough to hear it.
That's the point.
What she’s really saying is that Mila is under her roof and if anyone has a problem with it, they can go see her.
Nobody's got a problem with it.
Nobody's looking at Mila at all.
Word's gone around the club in under two hours, the way it does.
Zorro found out from Razor.
Python found out from Zorro.
By four o'clock, a prospect who wasn't in that office could've told you the name of the town my mother lives in.
Ruby comes out of her kitchen with a dish towel in her hands and stands in the doorway.
She looks at me. Four seconds, maybe five.
Then she goes back in.
She doesn't put her hand on my back.
For years she's done that every single morning, on her way past the stove, half a second, and I never thought about it once until it didn't happen.
Now I'm standing in the main room of my own club with my ears ringing like somebody clapped next to my head.
I go in there anyway. Around seven, when the noise dies down, and the food's gone, and it's just her and the pans.
The can's on the shelf over the stove.
Lid on.
She hasn't asked me to open that can one time in six years, and I've never once mentioned that I do it.
Here it is at eye level with the lid seated down tight where somebody pressed it back on with the heel of their hand.
Ruby's got her back to me at the sink. She doesn't turn around.
She knows I'm in here—she knew before I came through the door, that woman knows who's in her kitchen by the sound of the floor—and she stands there with her hands in the water and doesn't turn around.
I don't take it down.
I don't know what happens if I take it down and I'm not going to find out standing in a kitchen at seven o'clock at night, so I go back out. She never says a word, and neither do I.
The main room's emptying.
Ruby's plates are going back to the kitchen two at a time, and nobody's holding a conversation, and I get through it and out the side door and across the courtyard.
It's cold enough now that the gravel's gone hard and the garage light's on.
Compass is at the parts washer with his back to me.
He's been washing the same bracket since I came in.
Every so often his shoulders come up like he's going to turn around, and then they don't.
Brick comes and finds me at the bench. He doesn't say anything.
He just stands next to me for maybe two minutes with his arms crossed, looking at the same wall I'm looking at.
Then he goes too.
Every man in this club walked through that gate carrying something.
Amara said it to my face in her own office, how everyone lied to get here in some aspect. So, what the fuck is with the silent treatment?
Fuck if I know now, but I’m going to find out.
* * *
They put Mila in the room at the end of the hall, past the laundry.
Ruby made it up. Clean sheets, a lamp, a chair.
Zorro put a lock on the inside of the door in about ten minutes, without being asked, without saying one word to anybody about why.
She's in there, and I'm in a garage eighty feet away, and I don't go down the hall.
Amara said to stay on the property. She didn't say don't go down the hall.
I shake my head and focus on the compressor instead.
Four hours. I get the panel off and the housing out and I get down to the coupler, and I pull it, and it's sheared clean through.
There's nothing wrong with the motor.
There was never anything wrong with the motor.
It was the coupler in October, and it's the coupler now.
I sit down on the bucket with it in my hand.
The metal's cold. There's a burr on the fracture where it finally let go, and I run my thumb over it until it opens the skin.
I don't move for a while.
At six, the light goes orange over the wall, and then it's gone.
At eight, the courtyard's empty and the wind's picking up. Boots come across the gravel and stop in the door.
Dante comes in with two cups of coffee and sets one on the bench without asking if I want it. "She's out back."
I look up.
He's got his hands in his jacket pockets and his chin tucked into his collar. "Figured you might want to know. In the sunroom. Been there about an hour and a half now, in the cold, with the heater off."
"Prez said—"
"Prez said property." He's already turning around. "It's on the property. Anyone can tell you two have shit to talk out, so go fuckin’ talk, prospect."
The sunroom's off the back of the building. It got added on.
Slab, then walls, then windows in three of them, and a corrugated roof that does something in the wind.
There's a propane heater in the corner and a fire pit out past the door that hasn't been lit in at least a couple of months.
Two couches, a coffee table with a burn ring in it, a cooler somebody left out in the summer and never came back for.
Somehow, it’s the warmest room in the building when the heater's going.
She's on the far couch with her feet up under her and her jacket zipped to the chin, and her breath's going out of her in a cloud.
She's looking through the window at nothing.
At the dark. At acres of desert with a fence somewhere out in it.
There’s a bottle on the table. Two glasses, both of them upside down.
The heater's in the corner.
I get down on one knee and turn the valve and hit the igniter, and it catches on the second click, and the coils come up orange, and the whole room starts to tick.
"Turn it off."
She hasn't moved.
"It's thirty degrees in here."
"I know what it is." She still doesn't turn around. "I've been sitting in it for an hour and a half. Turn it off."
I turn it off.
The coils go dark and the room's quiet again, and I stand there like a fool with my hand still on the valve.
She doesn't turn around. "Sit down, Finn."
I sit on the other couch.
She reaches out, turns a glass over, pours two fingers into it, pushes it across the table, and then she does her own.
She doesn't look at me one time while she's doing it.
Her hands are steady. Steadier than mine have been all day.
"Amara's?" she asks.
"Dante's."
"Does he drink it?"
"No." I pick the glass up. "He's had that bottle since I got here."
She turns that over.
Then she picks hers up and puts half of it down her throat in one go, sets it back on the table, and looks at it like it said something to her.
Her eyes water. She doesn't cough.
"All those years," she says. "You know what I thought about? Not this. Never once thought about this."
I don't say anything.
"Oranges." She's still looking at the glass.
"I thought about oranges so much I think I broke something in my head.
There was a woman in year two who'd been to a market in Hermosillo, and she wouldn't shut up about the oranges.
Then she wasn't there anymore. And I thought about them for seven more years. "
The wind gets up under the roof and the tin, a draft comes down the wall, and across the slab and finds my boots.
"You want to know what I ate the day I got out?"
"Yes."
"Everything." She looks up for the first time.
The first time since she was twenty-two years old standing in her mother's driveway with her arms crossed watching me put a bag in the bed of a truck.
I've spent a decade remembering that face, and I don't know this one.
There's nothing on it. She's looking at me the way you'd look at a wall you're thinking about painting.
"I ate everything and I threw all of it up in a Circle K bathroom," she says. "Because your stomach doesn't work anymore. Nobody tells you that part. You dream about food for nine years and your body says no."
"Mila—"
"You owe me an answer." She sits back into the couch. "That was two. Pay me what I’m owed."
My tongue's stuck to the roof of my mouth. That's what happens.
There's ten years jammed up behind my teeth, and not one word of it will come forward.
I've said it before. Out loud. That's what nobody knows.
I said it in a room in Bullhead City to nobody, at four in the morning, sitting on the end of a bed with my boots still on.
I said it on a road outside Gallup with the radio off.
I've said it in my head so many times it's worn a groove.
I've had it ready for ten years.
Had it ready for a woman who'd yell at me. For a woman who'd cry, or hit me, or ask me why.
Not for this.
She's sitting four feet away with her feet tucked up, her hands on a glass, and she's not going to help me.
She's not going to ask. She's going to sit there and let me stand in it, and there’s nothing in ten years of practicing this conversation in my mind that makes this easier.
I can see my own breath and the whiskey's sitting in my chest like a stone.
"Ask it," I say.
"No."
"Mila—"
"No." Her voice doesn't move. "I asked for ten years. I asked in the dark, and I asked when there was nobody in the room. I asked out loud like a crazy woman, and I'm done asking. You know what the question is. You've known since you left."
I put the glass down. My hand doesn't want to let go of it.
Out past the fire pit the dog barks once from under the shed and stops.
"They found out about my mother," I say.
"I know."
"You don't know all of it."
"So tell me all of it."
Nothing's coming up my throat. I get the glass back and put the rest of it down. It doesn't touch me at all, doesn't even burn, might as well be water.
"In April they found out. By July they put her in the ditch.
" I'm looking at the burn ring in the table.
"I sat in a hospital for two days while they put a plate in her wrist, stitched her up everywhere else, and had her on antibiotics and painkillers.
There was a deputy outside the door because nobody knew if they were coming back.
My dad was in the hallway the whole time and he couldn't look at me. Not once in two days."
She doesn't say anything.
"And I'm in that chair on the second day, and I'm thinking about you."
Her head comes up.