Chapter 17 #3
It came the way it always comes, from underneath, a hand shutting around the bottom of my lungs, and I got the knife clear of the rubber and sat straight down in the gravel beside the wheel with the blade flat on the ground and my other hand splayed on the hot metal of the fender.
Eight days out of a hospital. I could hear my own breathing from the outside, thin and high and ugly, and the yard could hear it too, because the yard had gone silent.
Leah crouched on my right with the inhaler already out of the pouch and put it in my hand instead of my mouth, because she knows better than to feed me anything.
Two puffs. Wait. The count. Four minutes on a truck bumper in front of the entire club with my hair stuck to my neck and my hands trembling on my knees, being watched being sick, in the middle of the one thing that morning I had chosen for myself.
That was the worst of it. Not the porch, not the kitchen. Sitting in the gravel needing four minutes.
When the air came back I got up. Leah stood up with me and stepped away without being asked.
The fourth tire was the driver’s side rear, the one nearest the door Jess had used, and it was the hardest of all four, because I was tired and because it had cost me.
I put the point in and got my weight over it and pushed until it went, and it went, and the air came out and I stayed down on one knee until the noise stopped.
Nobody applauded. Nobody laughed. There was the sound of four sidewalls emptying at different rates and the long creak of a truck settling onto its rims, and men at the windows with their hands at their sides.
I walked back to Ryder with the knife open. Bear moved out of the way only after Ryder held both hands out from his body. I folded the blade, put it in his palm, and closed his fingers around it.
“There’s no path because you didn’t fuck her,” I said.
My voice was still wrong from the effort.
“You loved me. That’s how you knew I’d protect a pregnant girl.
That’s how you knew I’d blame my own lungs, and which sentence would gut me, and what number in the account would make me pack, and exactly what I’d ask when I saw her on my steps.
Then you stood there and watched every one of them work. ”
He stood in the gravel with his hands out from his body and took it, and said nothing at all.
“You don’t come in my house. You don’t touch my money, my records, my medication, my car, my mail, or my business. You’re not my emergency contact and you don’t answer a single question as my husband. Everything else goes through Mia.”
“Mia has my attorney’s name. He’ll have every account I hold by tonight and he won’t be told to slow any of it down.”
“If you hide a dollar, every financial record in your name goes to Mia and to the state.”
“Eden.” Bear said it from three feet away, and he didn’t say it the way a man says a woman’s name when he wants her to be quiet.
“You can do that. I’m not going to argue with you and I’m not going to ask you to protect this club.
But you’re owed the price before you pay it, so here it is.
Those books have four men in them with old convictions who’d get looked at again for things they did before you ever came here.
Gage’s disability paperwork sits in that file.
The houses are held by the same entity, which is Leah’s roof and her kids’ roof.
And Jess’s relocation is being funded out of an account that’s in there too, so the woman you’re angriest at goes back to Dez with no money. ”
“You’ve had four minutes to put that together.”
“I’ve had six days.” He didn’t move any closer. “It’s your call. If that’s what you want, I’ll drive you to the office in Terre Haute myself, forty miles, and I’ll sit outside while you do it. I just won’t let you do it believing it lands on one man.”
I stood in that yard and hated him for being right and hated Ryder for making a decent man have to say it.
“Then separate them,” I said. “Mia and June go through everything in his name and pull out what’s only his.
Every dollar, every job, every route he was paid for.
By Friday. If he ever hides money from me again, I hand over his half and you all keep yours, and you can explain to him why he was the only thing I was allowed to burn. ”
“That’ll take longer than Friday,” Mia said from the porch. “It’ll get done.”
Bear nodded once and stepped back from me.
“One more,” I said to Ryder. “You correct them. Every person who has watched me be your discarded wife for two weeks hears you say I didn’t leave you, didn’t fail you, didn’t steal from you, and didn’t make you want somebody else.
In the common room, with the divider open, with the women in it.
Not in church where the men can close a door around your rank. ”
“Yes.”
“Not today. Today you sit next to that truck and think about how much worse I could have made it.”
I went back to the house with Leah and Mia and washed my hands at the sink out of habit, and the water ran off them clean, and the smell of burnt rubber stayed in the back of my throat until the middle of the night.