Chapter 6
Gabriel
Word travels fast in a small town, and it travels fastest when it's bad. By Wednesday morning I know three things: Ruth's been forbidden from seeing me, her father tore up her art application with his own two hands, and she hasn't answered a single text since Tuesday night.
The old me — the seven-year-old with the missing fork, the twenty-year-old who rode into this town looking for a fight because fighting was easier than hoping — would handle this one of two ways.
Rage, loud and immediate, the kind that gets you banned from a church parking lot for the rest of your natural life.
Or retreat, quiet and permanent, disappearing before anyone else gets the chance to decide I was never worth the trouble in the first place.
I do neither.
"You're doing something," Diesel says, watching me shave for the first time in about a week. "You never shave unless you're doing something."
"I'm going to church."
Diesel's razor-adjacent commentary dies in his throat. "You're going to church."
"I'm going to talk to the Reverend."
"Gabriel. He forbid his daughter from seeing you. You show up on his doorstep, that man is going to have you arrested for trespassing before you finish your sentence."
"Maybe," I say, rinsing the blade. "I'm going anyway."
"You want backup?"
"I want you to stay exactly here and not follow me on principle."
"That's not a no."
"It's a no, Diesel."
Hawk wanders past with a coffee mug, takes one look at my clean shirt and my hat and my generally overdressed state, and stops dead in the doorway.
"Who died," he says.
"Nobody died."
"You're dressed like somebody died. Or like you're getting married. Which is it?"
"He's going to church," Diesel supplies, entirely unhelpfully.
Hawk's eyebrows climb somewhere near his hairline. "The church? The one with the reverend who forbid his daughter from seeing you? That church?"
"That's the one."
"Gabriel. Buddy. My friend." Hawk sets down his mug like he needs both hands free for this conversation. "That man could have you arrested. Or worse. Preachers know people. He could have you excommunicated from three counties' worth of Sunday potlucks."
"I'm not currently attending any Sunday potlucks, Hawk."
"That's not the point. The point is the man has reach."
"I appreciate the concern. I'm going anyway."
Hawk and Diesel exchange a look — the specific look of two men who've watched me do plenty of reckless things over the years and have learned, mostly, when arguing is pointless — and Hawk just shakes his head and picks his coffee back up.
"Bring back a good story at least," he says. "If you're getting arrested, I want details."
He watches me leave anyway, arms crossed, worried in the specific way brothers get worried without saying so directly, and I ride into town with my collar too tight and my stomach in knots, rehearsing a speech I'm still not sure I'll manage to get through.
I go in daylight. Sober, which isn't hard, since I wasn't drinking to begin with, but I make a point of it anyway, some old instinct telling me this needs to be done exactly right.
I leave the bike two streets over again, walk up to the church in a clean shirt with my hat actually in my hand, which feels absurd and also, somehow, exactly correct.
Reverend Thomas Calloway is in his office when I knock, going through what looks like a week's worth of unanswered correspondence, and the look on his face when he sees me is exactly the look Diesel predicted — cold, immediate, already halfway to calling somebody.
"Mr. Mercer," he says. "I believe I made myself clear on Tuesday."
"You did. I'm not here about that. Well." I correct myself, because lying to a preacher in his own church seems like a bad way to start. "I am here about that. But not the way you think."
"I have nothing to say to you."
"Then just listen. Five minutes. If you still want me gone after that, I'll go, and I won't come back."
He studies me for a long moment — the kind of read I imagine he's spent thirty years perfecting on parishioners hiding something in a confession — and finally sets down his pen.
"Five minutes."
I sit. I don't ask permission; I just sit, because standing felt like I was bracing for a fight, and I didn't come here to fight.
"I'm not here to convince you I'm good enough for her," I say. "I'm not. Nobody is. I've done things in my life that would make your hair curl, Reverend, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend otherwise, because you'd see through it in a second and you'd be right to."
His expression doesn't shift, but he doesn't interrupt either.
"But I love her," I say, and it's the first time I've said the word out loud, to anyone, and it lands heavier than I expect it to.
"And a man who loves someone wants them to fly.
Not stay caged where it's safe and small and easy to keep track of.
You tore up her one chance to study the thing that makes her come alive, and I came here to ask you to tape it back together. "
Something flickers across his face — not softening, not yet, but a crack, a hairline fracture in the wall he walked in with.
"You have no idea what it is to raise a daughter," he says, low. "To watch her mother die when she was four years old and know you're the only thing standing between that child and a world that will chew her up if you let your guard down for one single second."
"You're right. I don't." I lean forward, elbows on my knees.
"But I know what it is to be a kid nobody believed in.
I grew up in the foster system, Reverend.
Group homes, families that gave me back like a library book that came in defective.
Every single person who was supposed to raise me decided in advance who I'd turn out to be, and then acted shocked when I turned out exactly that way, because that's what happens when you tell somebody who they are before you let them show you. "
The Reverend is quiet. Truly quiet, the kind of quiet that means he's actually listening instead of just waiting his turn.
"Your daughter has a gift," I say. "You've seen the paintings.
You've had to have seen them, somewhere, sometime, even if she kept the studio door shut.
And instead of asking her what it means to her, you decided in advance it was dangerous, and you tore it up before you gave her the chance to prove you wrong. "
"I did it to protect her."
"I know you did. I don't doubt that for one second.
But Reverend — respectfully — protecting somebody and controlling somebody can look identical from the outside, and it took me until I was almost thirty to learn the difference.
" I stand, because five minutes is five minutes and I said I'd honor it.
"Don't do to your daughter what the world did to me.
Don't decide who she is. Let her show you. "
I put my hat back on. Head for the door.
"Mr. Mercer," he says, before I've made it out.
I stop.
"Why does it matter to you?" he asks. "Her going to that program. What is it to you, if she leaves for the summer, if she's three hours away learning to paint?"
I think about lying. Think about some easier answer, something that doesn't cost me anything.
"Because I've spent my whole life being told what I'm allowed to want," I say instead.
"And watching somebody I love get told the same thing, by the person who's supposed to love her best — that's not something I can sit quiet for.
Even if it means she flies further away from me. Especially if it means that."
He's silent for a long moment, studying me with an expression I genuinely can't read.
"Sit back down," he says finally.
I do, surprised.
"Tell me about these group homes," he says. "All of it. I want to understand what I'm actually looking at, before I decide anything else."
So I do. I tell him more than I told Ruth, even — the specific houses, the specific betrayals, Mr. Osei and the diversion program, the exact moment at fifteen when I decided trouble was easier than hope.
He listens the whole way through without interrupting once, and when I finish, he's quiet for a long time, hands folded on his desk, looking older than he did when I walked in.
"I buried my wife when Ruthie was four," he says finally, unprompted.
"I have spent every day since terrified of losing the only other piece of her I have left.
I think, somewhere along the way, protecting Ruthie became the only way I knew how to keep loving my wife.
And I never stopped to ask whether that was fair to either of them. "
"That's not for me to judge, Reverend."
"No," he agrees. "But you've given me plenty to judge myself on."
I leave him sitting in his office. I don't look back to see his face, because whatever's happening on it isn't mine to witness.
The Reverend sits alone in his empty church for a long time after I go.
I don't know that for a fact — I'm not there to see it — but Mrs. Petraki mentions it to Harper two days later, who mentions it to me, that the Reverend's truck was still in the lot at six that evening, long after his usual hours, and the sanctuary light stayed on until well past dark.
I like to think he was doing what I asked. Taping something back together.
I don't go straight back to the clubhouse after leaving the church.
I ride the long way instead, out past the county line and back again, letting the wind do what it usually does, which is nothing, really, except give me somewhere to put all the feeling I don't have words for yet.
By the time I roll back into the gravel lot, the sun's dipping low and Diesel's sitting on the porch steps waiting, exactly where I left him, like he never actually believed I'd tell him to stay put.
"Well?" he says.
"I said my piece."
"And?"
"And I don't know. He didn't throw me out a window, which I'm choosing to take as a win."
"Low bar."
"It's been a low bar kind of week."