Page 14 of Slander
She's running this one too, the boss on this job exactly like Runes told me she'd be—warm right up until the second you cross her, and then God help you.
"Meghan," Bodul's already coming down the ladder. "Tell me that's the chicken biscuits."
"It's the chicken biscuits." She sets the bags on a sawhorse and starts unpacking them. "Eat over the drop cloth, not on my new floor. Iwillknow if you spill anything."
We eat. Bodul talks with his mouth full and Meghan tells him he was raised in a barn, and the whole thing is easy in a way that surprises me every time it happens, like a muscle I thought I'd lost still firing.
When Bodul wanders off to take a call, Meghan settles onto an upturned bucket across from me and looks at me over her biscuit.
"You doing all right out there?" she asks. "That far out by yourself?"
"It's quiet. I like quiet."
"Quiet's good." She picks at the wrapper. "Quiet's also a lot of room for a man to get up inside his own head and lock the door."
I meet her eyes. "I've got people I call."
"I know you do." She nods, satisfied, and drops it right there. "Permit office is jerking us around on the inspection, by the way, so don't be shocked if Tuesday's a wash and we send you home early. Somebody downtown wants his palm greased and Tor's handling it." She wads up her wrapper and pitches it intothe trash bag clear across the room, nothing but net. "Not your problem. Just so you're not blindsided."
"Appreciate it."
"Eat your other biscuit, Njal. You're too damn thin." And she's up and gone, hollering at Bodul about something across the site, before I can get a word in.
I eat the other biscuit.
* * *
The ride home is the best part of the day, the way it's the best part of every day.
The sun's going gold and low by the time I clear Tallahassee, and the road opens up.
I let the bike eat it. Out here there's nothing but pine, pasture, and the long light coming sideways through the trees.
The engine settles into that low steady note I feel in my teeth, in my breastbone, in the parts of me that don't quiet down for anything else.
I've lost a lot. I don't lie to myself about that.
The mania took the better part of a year and it took things I'm not getting back—brothers who don't call anymore, a look in Bjorn's eye that didn't used to be there when he watches me drink my coffee, a version of myself I can't ride back to no matter how clean my labs come up.
The hospital took the rest.
There are whole stretches of the time I was in treatment gone out of my head like somebody took a wet rag to them. It was years ago, yet it still feels fresh.
The stretches that stayed, I'd hand over the others to lose.
But it never took this.
The bike. The road.
My own mind has turned on me every way a mind can turn, and out here it has never once betrayed me.
Whatever's broken in me goes still on the road.
It's the only church I've ever set foot in and believed, and I worship at it every evening on the way home, and some nights it's the one thing that carries me from the job site to my own front door with the weight off my shoulders.
I pull into the gravel drive as the last of the light goes. Kill the engine. Sit there a second in the sudden ringing quiet.
Through the pines, the neighbor's porch light is already on.
