Page 24 of Slander
Hoagie comes through the gap like he's running an errand he's run a hundred times, trots straight up onto my porch, and sits at my feet with his whole body wagging, looking up at me likewell, are you coming or not.
"You're a setup," I tell him. "You know that."
He thumps his tail.
I walk him back. It's the third time, and we both know it, and I'm starting to think the dog's smarter than either of his people.
She's at the fire in the second-chair setup again, and she stands when she sees me coming.
Even in the low light, I can see she's had another long day stamped on her somewhere.
"He did it again," she says. "I'm so sorry. I'll fix that fence myself if my father won't."
"Leave it." It comes out before I think about it. "I don't mind him. It’s nice to have the company."
She tilts her head at that, and something in her face eases, and she gestures at the empty chair like it's already got my name on it.
I sit.
"I'm Sophie, by the way," she says, once I'm settled and the dog's collapsed between us. "I realized after you left the other night that I never even told you. I sat here drinking wine with you for an hour and never said my own name. My mother would be mortified."
"Njal."
"Njal." She says it carefully, gets it right the first time, doesn't ask me to spell it, tell me it's unusual, or any of the things people usually do. She just sets it down between us like she's keeping it. "That's a good name."
"It's my grandfather's."
"Norse?"
"Norse."
She nods like that fits, like she'd already guessed I came from somewhere with old names, and she hands me a glass of wine.
Our hands don't touch and I notice, the same as I noticed the dog, the same as I'm noticing everything about this woman I shouldn't be noticing.
I take a small sip and set it on the chair arm and mostly leave it.
She watches me do it. She doesn't say a word about it.
We talk easier than two strangers ought to.
She asks about the club, careful, curious, not afraid the way she's got every reason to be, and I give her the safe pieces—my father, my brother, the work, the way the clubhouse sounds on a Sunday. I leave out the parts that would send her inside with the deadbolt thrown. There'll be time for the hard parts or there won't.
And then she goes quiet in a way I recognize, the bracing quiet, and she turns her wine glass in her hands and looks at the fire instead of at me.
"Can I tell you something?" she says. "And you don't have to do anything with it. I just—I don't get to say it out loud much."
"Go ahead."
"I have a sister. Hannah. She's older than me." She keeps her eyes on the fire. "She has bipolar disorder. The intense kind, the kind that put her in the hospital twice before anybody in my family would say the word out loud."
Her jaw works.
"For years, they said it was spiritual. That she needed to pray harder. That her faith was weak, or there was sin she hadn't confessed, or she just needed the right people to lay hands on her."
She turns the glass in her hands.
"Years, Njal. She was sick foryears, and the people who were supposed to help her told her toprayabout it, like it would make a difference."
