Chapter Thirteen #2
An hour later I was sitting at the picnic table outside the clubhouse with a plastic cup of something that smelled like fruit punch and contained at least three kinds of liquor, watching two of the older women argue about whether the community garden needed more tomatoes or more peppers while a child of indeterminate age chased a border collie across the grass in wide, shrieking circles.
The lasagna sat on the table between us, half-empty, the cheese congealing at the edges in a way that suggested Fox’s recipe involved more patience than skill.
Sal reached into her pocket and produced a key.
She was older than the other women at the table, gray-streaked hair pulled back in a braid, hands that looked like they’d been working since before I was born.
Small, brass, worn smooth like it had passed through a lot of hands before it ever reached mine.
She slid it across the table toward me, her fingers callused and steady, and didn’t say anything.
I picked it up. Turned it over. The metal was warm from her pocket, slightly tarnished along the teeth, and the head was stamped with a number: 17.
Our box. Roulette’s box, technically, though he’d never checked it the entire time I’d known him.
He preferred to let his mail accumulate until someone -- usually Fox -- pulled it out and handed it to him in a stack Roulette would then carry home and leave on the counter for three days before looking at it.
“Mail comes Tuesdays and Fridays,” the woman said. “Holidays screw it up. FedEx and UPS know the gate code. Anything that doesn’t fit in the box goes on the shelf in the clubhouse kitchen. Don’t leave it there more than a week or Hornet will use it for target practice.”
I slipped the key into my pocket. The weight of it sat against my hip through the denim, small and specific and entirely more significant than it had any right to be.
A key. To a mailbox. In a compound full of people who rode motorcycles and handled their problems in kitchens and had, without being asked, decided I belonged here enough to give me a number.
“Took you long enough,” Sal said, and the table erupted.
They came at me from all sides. Kitty launched into a monologue about how she’d had a pool going for ages on when Roulette would finally make it official in Church.
Sal informed her the pool had been settled the same week it happened and Kitty still owed her twenty dollars over it.
Reese -- younger, quieter, a tattoo on her forearm I’d never gotten a clear look at -- leaned across the table and stage-whispered that the real question was whether Roulette had finally figured out how to use a hammer without putting a hole in the drywall.
She’d been in the clubhouse the day he found out the hard way that he hadn’t, and clearly still considered it one of the better afternoons of her year.
I took a sip of the punch. It burned all the way down, sweet and sharp and entirely effective at loosening the knot that lived between my shoulder blades whenever I was the center of more attention than I’d signed up for.
“Roulette can hang a picture,” I said, and the table went quiet, loaded enough to tell me I’d walked into something. “What?”
Kitty’s grin widened. “Honey. That man could not hang a picture to save his life until about two weeks ago. Ask him about the time he tried to mount the TV in the clubhouse and ended up with a hole the size of a dinner plate and Fox made him sit in Church for an hour writing ‘I will measure twice’ on the whiteboard.”
“He argued with the level,” Reese added, delighted by her own memory. “I watched him do it. Stood there in the clubhouse with a pencil behind his ear like he was building a courthouse, squinting at the bubble and saying the wall was crooked.”
“The wall was not crooked,” Kitty stated. “The man had marked three holes, drilled five, and somehow blamed the architecture.”
The table broke open. Someone slapped a palm against the wood hard enough to make the plastic cups jump. One of the kids, hearing laughter and sensing opportunity, barreled over with a stick in one hand and a smear of something red across his chin.
“Is she Roulette’s lady?” he asked, pointing the stick at me with the solemn authority of a child conducting official business.
Every woman at the table turned to me at once.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The punch chose that exact second to burn upward into my cheeks, and Kitty made a pleased sound like she’d found a twenty in last winter’s coat.
“Look at that,” she said softly. “She does blush.”
“I’m sitting right here,” I said.
“We know,” Sal said. “That’s why it’s fun.”
Before I could decide whether to defend myself, the clubhouse door banged open and Fox stepped onto the porch with a paper plate in one hand and the long-suffering expression of a man who had heard his name from three different directions and trusted none of them.
“Leave the man alone,” he called, not looking up from the lasagna balanced on his plate. “He learned to use a level. Growth should be encouraged.”
“You made him write lines,” Kitty called back.
“And look at him now,” Fox said. “Hanging pictures. Providing shelter. Man’s turned into somebody’s husband right in front of us, and he hasn’t even filed the paperwork yet.”
That set them off again. Kitty threw a napkin at him.
The child with the stick, who’d clearly only caught the word “paperwork,” asked if that meant Roulette was in trouble, which made three people answer him at once, and not one of them agreed on the answer.
Somewhere near the grill, a dog barked at the sudden noise, and a man I didn’t know shouted back as if the dog had made a valid point in an argument.
I laughed. The sound came easier this time, less surprised, more settled into the rhythm of whatever this was -- being teased, giving it back, existing in a conversation that expected nothing from me except that I show up and hold my own.
I told them about the mug. About the clubhouse kitchen stamp and how it had appeared in my cabinet like a trespasser with excellent timing.
About Roulette going still in the doorway when I laughed, and how I still didn’t know what to make of that look on his face and probably never would.
“Man’s been waiting to hear you laugh like that since the first week he started finding excuses to go to the diner,” said Sal, and the table nodded in unison.
I took another sip of the punch and let the warmth spread through my chest and didn’t argue, because arguing would have meant admitting they were right.
I wasn’t ready to give them that much satisfaction all at once.
I caught him watching from across the yard.
He was leaning against the side of the house, one booted foot braced against the foundation, arms crossed over his chest, his gaze fixed on the picnic table with the focused attention he gave everything.
Not possessive. Not controlling. Watching, a man keeping sight of something he cared about without needing to insert himself into it.
When our eyes met, he didn’t look away. Didn’t nod.
Didn’t smile. Held my gaze across fifty yards of compound gravel and afternoon light, and the weight of that look carried all the way to the picnic table and settled somewhere below my ribs and stayed there.
I turned back to the women. The conversation had moved on -- someone’s child had fallen off the swing and was being comforted, the child’s theatrical wailing suggested pride was injured more than skin.
Sal was describing, in graphic detail, the time her husband had tried to fix the garbage disposal and ended up with a face full of whatever had been living in the pipes since the Reagan administration.
I laughed again. Drank more punch. Let myself exist in the noise without scanning the tree line or checking the gate or doing any of the things that had once been reflex instead of choice.
Nothing was watching this yard except the man across it, glancing over now and then out of habit more than worry, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, it felt like enough just to sit here and not need him to be.
The afternoon bled into evening as it always did on the compound -- gradually, without ceremony, the light thinning from gold to amber to deep blue, the hour when the clubhouse jukebox would soon be audible from every porch on the property.
The women dispersed. Kids were collected.
The lasagna dish was carried back to whichever kitchen it had come from, and I found myself walking across the gravel toward Roulette’s house with the mailbox key in my pocket and the last of the punch warming my blood.
Someone fed coins into the jukebox, the distant thump of the music carrying on the cooling air.
He was on the porch when I reached the steps.
Had been there, I suspected, since he’d left the side of the house -- sitting in the wooden chair beside the swing, one boot propped on the rail, a beer in his hand he hadn’t opened yet.
I dropped onto the swing, the chains creaking under my weight, and pulled my knees up to my chest. I didn’t say anything because nothing needed saying and the quiet between us had long since stopped feeling awkward and started being something I looked forward to.
The compound settled around us. Someone’s grill sent up a plume of smoke from three houses down, the rich, greasy smell of burgers carrying on the breeze.
The clubhouse laughter rose and fell in waves.
The perimeter lights clicked on one by one, sweeping the yard in their patient arcs, and the dark beyond the fence felt less like a threat and more like a boundary.