Chapter 12
CLINT
She walked out of that hotel a different woman than the one who stood behind the desk. I was in trouble inside of a block.
The blouse and the pins had been armor. I understood that now, because the armor was gone.
Jeans, a red top with no sleeves to it, her hair down and moving when she turned her head.
She looked younger and sharper at the same time, and something about the plain clothes made her harder to look away from, not easier.
I felt it land low in me, and I let it sit there.
A man can carry a thing without acting on it.
She set off up the street with purpose. I fell in beside her, three feet of brick between us.
"That house there," she said, pointing with her chin at a pink one with its porch turned sideways to the street, "isn't facing wrong.
Everybody thinks it's facing wrong. Those side porches are called piazzas, and they face south or west on purpose, to catch the breeze off the water.
The front door on the street? Opens onto the porch, not the house.
Used to be, if that door stood open, it meant the family was receiving visitors. Closed meant come back another day."
"A door that's a message."
"Everything in this city is a message. That's the first thing to know about Charleston.
" She stepped around a palmetto root heaving up the sidewalk without looking down at it.
She knew where every crack was. "Second thing.
See the iron gates? A lot of the good ones were made by a man named Philip Simmons.
Started as an apprentice at thirteen. Blacksmith.
There's poetry in his gates, and there are people who will walk you past two hundred years of mansions and never once say his name. So, I say it."
"Philip Simmons."
"Now, you know more than most of the tour guides." She cut me a look. "You're getting the friends-and-family tour, by the way. I don't do this for everybody."
"I figured, when you didn't charge me."
"Oh, this is going on the card."
I laughed, and she looked satisfied with herself.
We went on up King Street with her narrating the town like a woman introducing me to her relatives.
The bottom blocks were T-shirt shops and fudge, and she moved through them the way you move through an airport.
Then, the street changed under our feet, and she slowed, and her voice changed with it.
This block flooded on king tides. That window used to be a pharmacy with a lunch counter; her mother wasn't served there, and her mother's daughter now comped suites nearby.
She said that one plainly, no flag on it, and kept walking. I carried it the rest of the block.
The boot shop was up past Calhoun, right where she'd promised. Two brands. Snotty about it. And in the back, at a bench with a lamp over it, a man with forearms like a farrier's, surrounded by lasts and leather.
"Oh," Sasha said, and stopped dead. "Oh, they do custom now. On site." She turned to me with her whole face lit. "Do you know how rare that is?"
The bootmaker looked up. He had half-glasses down his nose and the unhurried manner of a man whose work cannot be rushed and knows it.
"He does custom," she said to me, like I hadn't seen him.
"I heard."
What followed took the better part of an hour, and I'd have paid double for it.
He measured my feet the way a surveyor measures ground—both of them, because feet are brothers, not twins, he said.
He looked at my old boots a long time, turned them over, read the wear on the heels like a man reading tracks.
"You walk," he said.
"Some."
"This much wear on the outside line, you walk more than some." He set them down with respect. "These were good boots. They've got nothing left to give you."
Then, the price came up, and I about went over backward.
I kept my face still. I've kept it still through worse.
But somewhere in me, a boy who grew up counting quarters made a noise, because the number was more than my father paid for his first truck.
A man used to come through Valentine once a year with a trailer and a sewing machine, and he'd measure the hands' feet and send boots back from El Paso two months later.
His price was pennies against this. Good boots, too. Men worked whole seasons in them.
Then, I thought about the jet. The suite. Brothers who flew me across the country and told me half of everything.
Screw it. I had a card that said Neverland on it, more or less. If Dominion Hall wanted to buy my silence and my patience, they could start with my feet.
Sasha ran the selection like she'd been planning it for years. Leather out on the counter in ranks. She went through it with her hands, talking to the bootmaker in a language of grain and temper that he warmed to fast.
"Tawny," she said, finally, holding a piece up against my forearm like she was matching paint. "Not the chocolate. Chocolate's what everybody buys. This one's got some gold in it. It'll age like a saddle."
"Tawny," I agreed.
The stitching pattern took longer. She pushed for something with flourish; I pointed at the plainest card on the table. We met in the middle at a pattern the bootmaker said came out of West Texas patterns from way back—long lines, spare, a little lonesome. She looked at it a while and then at me.
"Yeah," she said. "That's you."
"Toe?" the bootmaker asked.
"Square," we both said, at the same time, and he smiled down at his bench like a man who'd seen this before.
I paid with the black card. He ran it, and his eyebrows did one small thing at whatever came up on his screen. He handed it back with both hands, and said the boots would be ready tomorrow, midday.
Tomorrow. One more day this town had bought itself. I noticed I didn't mind, and I noticed that I noticed.
Outside, she squinted up the street, planning her next campaign.
"Where to? You said T-shirts."
"I'm all shopped out."
She turned and gave me a look with a whole courtroom in it.
"I saw that card, Clint Dane. If this is on Dominion Hall's dime, you are legally and morally required to keep going. That's not shopping. That's justice."
She said the name easy—Dominion Hall—the way you say a thing you've known a long time, and a wire went taut in the back of my head. She knew the name. She knew something about what the name meant, too. I buried the question with the others. Not yet.
She skirted four shops without slowing—too precious, too cheap, tourist trap, "they iron creases into the jeans, Clint, creases"—and pulled me into a fifth, a narrow place that smelled like cedar and new cotton. She came at me first with printed shirts. Flowers. One with fish on it.
"No."
"It's fun."
"I'm not fun."
"That's not true, but fine." And to her credit, she folded on it clean, no campaign.
She went to the plain stacks, and started reading fabric with her fingers the way she'd read the boot leather.
She built me a set of five—grays, a green, a blue so dark it kept its mouth shut—and every one of them was heavier in the hand than what I own, cut some way I couldn't have named except that when I looked in the glass, I looked like a man who lived somewhere.
"Jeans?" she said.
"Now, I'm cooked." I meant it. Shopping wears me worse than a ruck. "Especially on no breakfast."
She stopped with a shirt half-folded.
"You skipped breakfast?" Her eyes went wide, and her whole concierge engine audibly turned over. "It's nearly noon. Why didn't you—okay. No. It's fine. There's a place around the corner. Come on. Jeans after. Maybe."
The place was called Millers All Day, back down King a way.
The girl at the door lit up before we were through it, and Sasha asked after somebody's mother by name.
Biscuits. Grits ground in-house in a mill sitting right in the window like an altar.
We got a table. I read the menu once and ordered half of it.
The pimento cheese biscuit. The fried chicken on top of another biscuit.
Eggs. Grits with shrimp. Coffee, kept coming.
Sasha laughed at me over her menu.
"You said enjoy the card," I told her. "I'm enjoying the card."
She ordered like a woman who eats—the hash, an extra biscuit, no apology anywhere in it—and when the plates came, she went at hers with both hands and her elbows on the table.
I liked that more than I could say. I've sat across from women who ordered a salad and interrogated it.
Watching Sasha Benning eat fried chicken was like watching somebody be from somewhere.
She talked to the waitress like a colleague, asked about the Saturday crowds, learned the girl was new and from Moncks Corner, told her which manager to ask for more hours. Never once talked down. The girl walked away taller. I watched Sasha not notice she'd done it.
We talked.
She grew up downtown and over the bridges, both, a kid who belonged to a whole web of aunts and porches.
Summers out on Wadmalaw with her grandmother, shrimp off the dock, learning the tides before she learned her times tables.
Her mother in that hotel, and little Sasha doing homework in a linen closet, raised on quiet and bleach-smell and don't let them see you.
She told it warm, not bitter, like a story about a country she loved with a border she'd been walking her whole life.
Her daddy passed when she was small; her mother never remarried; the building raised her as much as anybody.
She talked about her mama's hands. I could have listened all day.
"Your turn," she said. "Valentine. Tell me."
So, I told her.