He glanced across the cab at me; he’d felt me turn. He didn’t ask. He simply left the quiet I’d opened for it sitting there empty between us.
I put my hand over his on my thigh and squeezed once. He turned his hand and laced his fingers up through mine andheld on, hard, the both of us looking straight ahead now — the highway empty, the fields black, the foil parcel sweating on the back seat — and neither of us said the thing we were each, I was so sure, only waiting for the right order to say.
24
Caleb
The phone lit the dark and I had it off the nightstand before the second buzz — the old reflex that counts the room before you know your own name. Tuck on the screen. A little after three.
Second time in a month his name had lit my phone in the dead middle of the night, and the cold came up ahead of anything he’d say. A man doesn’t call you at three twice in a month for something small.
“Tuck?”
“Yeah.” A breath. “Somebody hit my house, Cal. Front wall, and a window. Come.”
I was across the room with my jeans half on. “You and Bea alright?”
“We’re fine. Bea’s freaked the fuck out, but we’re fine. Nobody got in.” A beat. “Come look before I clean it off.”
“Fifteen minutes.” I hung up before he could tell me not to hurry.
Behind me, she stirred, her hair loose across my pillow because she’d stopped tying it back to sleep this last month. She surfaced halfway, the body checking whether it had to come the rest of the way.
“S’wrong,” she said into the pillow. Not a question. A nurse’s reflex, fired before the rest of her was awake.
“Nothing.” I put my hand in her hair and my mouth behind her ear and kept my voice the size of the room. “Tuck needs a hand. Go back down. I’ll be back.”
“Mm.” She was already going under, her hand finding the warm dent I’d left.
I watched her breathe, easy and undefended, not one cell of her holding the thing I hadn’t told her. I found my boots, crossed to my own house for my keys, and took Sycamore Row toward the wrong side of the railway, my hands not as steady as I’d have liked.
Tuck’sbungalow sat low on the railway side, porch light on, the front window beside it a black hole with the glass gone out of it. Tuck stood on his lawn in a t-shirt against the cold, a mug in his hand, not watching the road for me. Watching his house.
I pulled in behind his truck and got out.
They’d sprayed it in red across the front wall, big, low under the broken window — two words, and under them a mark. I read it and got nothing back. But I’d looked at those same two words and the exact same mark three weeks back, on the bench wall at the shop, and got the exact same nothing.
Tuck had his phone up before I’d finished thinking it. “I already checked. While I waited on you.” He held the screen out — the shop photos beside the wall. “It’s not close, Cal. Letter for letter. Same hand.” He lowered it, no fear in his face, just a flat readiness. “So what the fuck is going on. This isn’t a coincidence anymore. They hit the shop, now my house, and I want to know what it is.”
“Tell me what you heard.”
“Heard a car a bit before three. Engine I half-clocked — tick in it, I’d know it again. But it’s a busy street, cars go past all night, and I figured a husband rolling in late and went back under.” He nodded at the window. “Didn’t hear another thing till that went in. He put the can through when he was done — threw it straight through the front. That’s what got us up.” A beat. “Bea’s freaked the fuck out, Cal. She wants to call the cops.”
“No cops yet,” I said. “We talk to my dad first.” Tuck looked at me. “His face went grey at the shop wall and he called it random and I let him. He knows what this is. I want to know what we’re looking at before we hand it to a deputy who files it under teenagers.”
I called him from the lawn. Second ring — he doesn’t sleep much past four anymore — and I didn’t leave him room to be easy about it. “Somebody hit Tuck’s house tonight, Dad. The wall — same word as the shop, same mark, a window put through. Tuck and I are driving out. We’ll be there in an hour, and I want answers — whatever you’ve been sitting on since the shop break in.”
The line held a second. Then, low: “Fuck.” A breath went out of him. “Okay. Come out. I’ll tell you what I know.”
He hung up. I’d never once heard my father swear at four in the morning.
“I’m gonna run Bea to her mom’s first,” Tuck said. “I’m not leaving her here, not with that on the wall. I’ll come straight out after.”
“Good. Bring the photos — your wall and the shop both.”
“Already shot mine.” He looked at the wall one more time and went up the path to get her.
My father’s kitchen,the dark still solid outside the window. He’d put a pot on and set out mugs, and he’d made calls of his own after mine — the two men at his table were the only two left alive besides him who’d know that wall on sight. Tuck and I took one side. Across from us sat Dutch — heavyset, grey ponytail, flat stare — and Roy, older and quieter. Both of them still in the Iron Saints cut, the leather gone soft and pale at the seams. Roy went still when I set the phone down, like he’d seen it before.
