Chapter Nine
Lark
Roulette’s closet wasn’t deep, but it was built solid -- the shelves thick enough not to bow, the rod mounted low enough I didn’t need to stretch.
A row of dark T-shirts and jeans already hung there, each one spaced with the same careful precision, as if he’d measured the gaps between them with a ruler.
A pair of scuffed boots sat beneath, toes pointed out, the leather dulled with the kind of wear that didn’t come off with a quick wipe.
Everything in its place. Everything with a purpose.
My grandmother would have approved -- she’d always said you could tell a man by his closet, not what was in it, but how it was built.
There wasn’t much left to unpack. The frayed-hem jeans were already out, already worn twice since that first morning I’d borrowed them off my own hook.
I’d taken care of most of the rest yesterday, before…
well, before. My toothbrush sat on the sink.
A paperback rested on the nightstand. My toiletries lined the dresser in a neat row.
What remained would fit away in a matter of minutes. I’d never owned much.
I picked up a flannel and put it on a hanger, then slid it onto the rod beside his shirts.
The fabric was thin at the elbows, the pattern faded from years of washing, the buttons a slightly different shade of brown than they’d been when my grandmother first bought it for me off a church rummage table.
I hung the second one next to it, then folded the cardigan across the shelf instead of forcing it onto a hanger where it would stretch.
I tucked the last of my things out of sight and pushed the bag beneath the bed.
The motion was automatic, almost thoughtless, but when I stood, something settled inside me.
Ever since my grandmother died, I’d kept one foot out the door without meaning to, half-braced for the next place to fall through.
For the first time in months, I wasn’t thinking about where I’d have to go if this one did too.
Boots in the hallway. Not heavy, not hurried -- the particular cadence of a man who moved through his own house the way he moved through everything: deliberately, with purpose, each step placed exactly where he meant it to go.
Roulette appeared in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, a mug in each hand.
He found my face and held there for a beat that contained no question and no judgment -- just a man taking in the sight of his closet half-full of someone else’s clothes, like he was recalibrating what the room meant now that it wasn’t only his.
Something passed over his expression, there and gone before I could name it.
Then he crossed to the dresser and set one mug down.
“Hot,” he said.
I nodded.
He turned and left, his boots carrying him back down the hall toward the kitchen, each step fading until I was alone with the open closet and the mug steaming on the dresser.
I picked up the mug. Wrapped both hands around the ceramic and felt the heat seep through my palms into the bones of my fingers.
The coffee was black, the way he made it, strong enough to stand a spoon in.
I didn’t add water. Didn’t reach for the sugar I knew was in the kitchen.
I held it against my chest and let the warmth work its way through the thin cotton of my T-shirt and into my skin.
I crossed to the window. The compound spread out beyond the glass in morning light.
The clubhouse doors stood open, conversation drifting out into the morning as members went about their day.
The gravel lot caught the sun and threw it back in pale, dusty gold.
The clubhouse doors stood open, conversation drifting out into the morning as members went about their day.
* * *
The screen door sighed shut behind me, and the morning landed on my skin like something I’d ordered and forgotten about. Warm. Already warm, the kind of Missouri heat that built from the ground up and didn’t bother with warnings.
The compound yard was already moving. Men crossed the gravel toward the clubhouse, someone ran a grinder near the garage, and bacon smell drifted through the kitchen window strong enough to make my stomach answer before my brain did.
Raven was already at the long table near the kitchen door, a basket of clean towels at her elbow, working a fitted sheet into something resembling order.
Fox’s wife and old lady, she had short dark hair pushed back from her forehead, and she carried that look she always had in the mornings -- focused, slightly irritated by the existence of fitted sheets as a concept, and entirely in her element.
“Grab the other end,” she said without looking up.
I took the corner she offered. We snapped the sheet once, folded it clean, and stacked it with the towels.
“You’re going to make the rest of us look bad,” Raven said. “Showing up before the coffee’s even done brewing. Some of us like to pretend we have a choice about getting out of bed.”
“I’ve been getting up for seven a.m. shifts at that diner for two years.
” I reached for a towel, shook it out, folded it lengthwise, then into thirds.
The motion was automatic, muscle memory from a thousand shifts at Patsy’s where the dish towels never stayed folded for longer than ten minutes. “This is sleeping in.”
She snorted. “That’s depressing.”
“It’s employment.”
Becca came around the corner of the clubhouse with dirt on her knees and a trowel in one hand, sleeves pushed up past her elbows. She moved through the rows with the careful attention of someone following instructions she’d been given rather than instincts she already had.
She spotted me at the table and changed course without hesitation, her boots crunching across the gravel.
“You know anything about tomatoes?” she asked. No preamble, no small talk.
“Don’t look at me,” Raven called from the laundry table, not glancing up from the fitted sheet she was still losing a fight with. “I gave her the basics an hour ago and she’s already out there improvising.”
“It’s not improvising, it’s problem-solving,” Becca said, unbothered.
“Enough to know they’re divas,” I said.
The corner of her mouth lifted. Not quite a smile, but the territory adjacent to it. “Come look. Told Marcy I’d finally get out here before the weeds won.”
I followed her to the side garden behind the clubhouse, where two rows of tomato plants leaned into the heat and weeds had already started testing the edges of the bed.
I crouched beside the bed and started pulling. Becca moved down the row pointing out which plants needed staking, and the work settled between us without needing much conversation.
“This one’s going to fall over if we don’t get a cage on it soon.” She tapped a stem that was already leaning at a concerning angle. “And these two need to be thinned. Too close together. They’ll choke each other out by July.”
I nodded. “The herbs look crowded.”
She glanced at the row of basil and oregano near the fence. “Yeah. Was thinking of moving them closer to the edge. Give them more sun, more air. You think?”
I sat back on my heels and considered it. The fence would provide afternoon shade, which herbs didn’t always love, but the soil looked better there -- darker, richer, less compacted. “Move the basil. Keep the oregano where it is. Basil’s pickier about drainage.”
She studied me for a beat, her head tilted slightly, and then she nodded once. “Basil it is.”
My coffee mug sat empty on the edge of the raised bed by the time we finished. I hadn’t looked toward the gate once.
By the time we stood up, my knees were stiff and my fingertips were dark with dirt, and the weed pile beside the bed was substantial enough to fill a grocery bag.
Becca brushed her palms against her jeans and surveyed our work with the satisfied expression of someone who measured progress in visible results rather than promises.
* * *
By late afternoon, the day’s work had mostly wound down and the night hadn’t started yet. I sat on the top step of Roulette’s porch with dirt still under my fingernails.
Roulette came out through the screen door and leaned against the porch rail across from me, one hip braced against the wood, his arms folded over his chest. He didn’t ask what I was thinking.
Not at first. He just stood there, watching the tree line go from green to gray as the light dropped, and let the quiet hold the way it always did between us.
“Back on my porch. You said one of them wasn’t fine. Didn’t push it then.”
I went still. I hadn’t expected him to bring it back up -- hadn’t expected him to have kept it, filed away somewhere behind that unreadable face, waiting for the right evening to set it down between us.
“I remember,” I said. “You didn’t ask twice.”
“Wasn’t going to make you. Asking now, if you’re ready.”
I picked at the hem of my shorts, needing somewhere to put my hands.
“Second placement. I was seven.” I hadn’t meant to say it so plainly, but the words came easier here, on these steps, with the dark coming down soft instead of sudden.
“The foster father there had a temper. Never hit me, not exactly. He grabbed when he was frustrated -- my arm, my shoulder, wherever was closest. Hard enough to leave marks. I was there eleven months, right before my grandmother finally got approved to take me. Learned to keep quiet and count the days until someone came to get me.”
Roulette didn’t move. I watched him take it in the way he took in everything -- no wasted reaction, no performance of outrage for my benefit -- but his jaw had gone tight, the same tightness I’d seen the day I told him about the tulips, and I understood by now that this was what his anger looked like when it had nowhere useful to go.
“He still around?” His voice was even. Too even.
“Dead. Few years back. Heart thing.” I almost smiled at the look that crossed his face -- something between relief and disappointment, like he’d been robbed of a problem he knew exactly how to solve. “You can stop doing the math. Nothing left to collect on.”
“Would’ve collected anyway,” he said, and I believed him.
“I don’t tell people that,” I said. “Not the details. It’s easier to say it was two rough years before the good part started.”
“Told you once. Don’t make it smaller than it was.”
“I know what you told me.” I looked over at him, and something in my chest had come loose, lighter than it had been a minute ago, the way it always did when a thing kept in the dark too long finally got some air on it. “This is me not making it smaller.”
He held my gaze for a long moment, and whatever he saw there seemed to settle something in him, because his shoulders eased down from where they’d crept toward his ears.
“I keep expecting to wake up and realize this isn’t where I’m supposed to be,” I said. The admission slipped free before I could second-guess it. Once it was out, I couldn’t take it back.
Roulette stayed silent for a beat. “And do you?”
I let out a slow breath and tipped my head. “No.”
The corner of his mouth lifted, barely enough to notice. He rested his forearms on his knees and looked out across the compound before speaking. “Then maybe you’ve already got your answer.”