“Doors,” Erik says.
“Doors. Yeah. Aisle eleven, I can show—”
Erik’s already moving. “Interior. Thirty-six by eighty. Prehung, right-hand swing.”
The kid double-times to keep up. “You, uh. You know your stuff.”
“It’s my door,” Erik says, which clears up nothing for anyone.
Nobody asks how he’s got it memorized. His door is her door — same building, same hallway, three years of walking past it. Of course he knows it to the quarter inch.
Rayner has said five words since we left the building, and a stranger with a yoga mat had to pull them out of him.
That’s wrong. Rayner’s the one who picks things up in places like this. He lets his curiosity get the best of him and asks so many questions the guys working usually kick us out. Today he’s just walking ten feet back, smiling at a shelf of paint like it’s in on something.
“You’re being weird,” I tell him. Somebody had to.
“I know.”
That’s it. That’s the whole answer.
“He woke up like that,” Brock offers.
“Smiling?”
“Smiling.”
I look at Rayner. Rayner smiles at me.
No way. Not investigating that. Some doors you don’t kick.
At aisle eleven the kid asks the question they must teach in training. “So what happened to the old one?”
Rayner shifts the door under his arm. “It lost an argument.”
The kid looks at him. Takes him in and decides no follow-up questions.
Smart kid.
The door Erik picks is beige and hollow and weighs less than my boots.
“Absolutely not.”
“It matches the building.”
“I’ve broken doors like this by leaning on them. Beautiful deserves a door that fights back. Solid core at least. Steel, if they—”
“It has to look like every other door in that hallway.”
He’s right, which is one of his worst qualities. I pull the solid core off the rack myself and dare anyone to say anything about it.
“Sir, we have carts—”
Rayner is already taking it from me and has the door under one arm like a magazine.
The kid’s eyes get bigger but he doesn’t comment.
On the way to hardware there’s an entire aisle of plants that aren’t real.
