Page 41 of The Drifter

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.