Page 13 of Slander
"I was here at seven." I drop my bag by the wall and pull my own drill out of it. "You were in the parking lot whimpering about your back."
"My back is a war wound."
"You threw it out lifting a box of cups."
"Aheavybox of cups." He comes down the ladder and claps me on the shoulder, and the grin eases into something quieter when he gets a look at my face. "You good?"
"I'm good."
"Yeah?"
"Bodul."
"I'm just asking." He lifts his hands, drill and all. "A man can ask."
And the thing is, he can. That's the difference between Bodul and most of them.
He asks you if you’re good and he means it, and then he lets it go—no weight left hanging in the air, no watching out of the corner of his eye to see if I'm about to come apart in his hands.
He asks me the way he'd ask anybody. Like I'm a man and not a glass that somebody already cracked once.
I've never told him what that's worth to me. I'm not going to. But I catch it every time he does it, and every time, it loosens something in my chest by a notch.
"Hand me the level," I tell him, and we get to work.
We hang fixtures and run trim for three hours, and it's hard work, the kind that lives in your hands, your shoulders, and asks nothing of the part of my head that gets me in trouble.
Bodul talks the whole time.
About a bike he's rebuilding, about Hakon coming in Thursday, about how I've got the personality of drying paint these days and somebody ought to do something about it. "You used to be funny," he tells me, sinking a screw. "Before. You were funny before."
"I'm hilarious."
"You're a wall, Njal. I'm working with a wall."
"I’mnot."
"Okay, I believe you."
"You don't, and I hate you." I’m fighting a grin when I say it.
Here's what nobody tells you about coming back from the dark.
It's not the big moments that put you back together. It's this.
A man on a ladder giving you grief about a level. The radio playing something nobody likes, the AC losing its fight with the afternoon, the dumb steady rhythm of working beside somebody who knew you before you had a complete psychotic break and stayed anyway.
Somewhere in the second hour, I notice my shoulders have come down from around my ears. I notice I've stopped listening for the thing in my own head that I'm always listening for.
I forget, for a while, to brace.
I can't tell you the last time that happened.
"You two planning on eating, or you gonna run on spite all day?"
Meghan's in the doorway with a paper bag in each hand and her sunglasses shoved up into her hair.
She’s Tor’s ol’ lady, Tindra’s mom, and runs the original Beans and Babes.
