Page 56 of Handful

I had been in church. I’d heard Glitch say it — my woman paid her way through college on a pole — watched the words drop on the table and just sit there, and then I’d filed the whole thing somewhere I wouldn’t have to look at it again. Because the Wren I knew was shy. Sweet little Wren with the cute little wave, who went pink ordering a coffee and kept her eyes on the floor in any room with people in it — unless Glitch was in that room, and then her eyes were on Glitch, and pretty much never came off him. Put that woman on a stage in front of a room full of men?

“I still can’t get there,” I said.

“Nobody can.” He went back to the tablet. “She knows what those girls are going to want from a manager, because she was one of those girls. You want, I’ll bring her down to walk it with you. She’d come.” He looked up. “She wasn’t surprised you put your hand up for this. Neither was the rest of the club — but not for the same reason. They figure you’re going to live up to your roadname. She figures you’ve actually got it in you to make the place better.”

“Wren,” I said again, helplessly.

“You’re going to keep doing that a while,” Glitch said. “It passes.”

We sat in the office after and built it properly — his numbers, my list, the base pay carried off the club through the dark week, the camera plan. By the end of it we had the whole thing costed, line by line. A real report.

“Run it past me as many times as you need before you take it to Dutch and Indira,” Glitch said, packing up. “I’ll ask you everything they’ll ask. A couple things they won’t.”

“How many times is that going to take?”

“Depends how bad you are.” He shouldered the bag. “Get Wren down here, Handful. I mean it. She’ll see things you and I won’t.”

After Glitch left, I did what he’d told me to. Spent the rest of the night on my feet in the office, the report in my hand, running the pitch to the empty room — the numbers, the dark week, the base pay, all of it — until I quit struggling for the words.

One of the girls leaned in my office doorway near the end of her shift, still catching her breath off a set.

“Long night, boss.” She tipped her head back toward the floor. “I could stick around after we close. Keep you company a while. On me.”

I figured in her head it made sense — keep the new man in charge happy, buy yourself a little cover, get out ahead of whatever he was going to want anyway. Not so long ago I’d have jumped at the offer.

“No,” I said. “Thank you.”

The smile dropped off her face and her shoulders pulled in, and I watched her start to brace. She thought she’d read me wrong — offered the boss the wrong thing, and now it was going to cost her. A shift. Her spot on the schedule. Maybe the whole job. I knew that flinch. It’s what you do when you’ve learned the man in charge can end you for less than nothing.

“Hey. You didn’t do anything.” I kept it easy. “Nothing about your shift or your schedule or where you stand in this place moves an inch — not for asking, not for me saying no. Asking costs you nothing. Saying no costs you nothing. We good?”

She looked at me like she was waiting for the catch — likely far as she’d ever known, there was always a catch. “Okay,” she said, slow, and I watched her go. Not the way I would’ve a year ago. Just long enough to know she got out the door all right.

The only body I wanted was a copper-haired one across town — the one who’d stood on a sidewalk outside Velvet and told me my hands couldn’t be trusted. She wasn’t wrong. But I’d told her that same night she was my last, and I’d meant it down to the bone.

After the girls had gone to their cars, I did what I’d done every night that week — went out the back to check on the dog.

He was under the old loading dock, same as always. Shepherd mix, ribs like a ladder, one ear that wouldn’t sit right. The girls had been feeding him — a margarine tub of water, a paper plate scraped clean. A building full of women nobody had looked out for in years, quietly looking out for a dog nobody wanted.

I crouched down slow, hands where he could see them. He backed further under the dock and watched my hands. Somebody’d been quick with theirs around him once — you could see it in his reactions.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know the feeling.”

I didn’t reach. Just stayed down in the cold a while, a grown man talking low to a stray that wanted nothing to do with him.

He was a little less far under the dock than he’d been on Monday. Not much.

“Tomorrow,” I told him. I set out fresh water and food, and pushed a couple of old blankets in under the dock, out of the wind. Then I locked the place up and rode back to the clubhouse.

❧

The other thing Glitch told me to do took until Saturday.

Wren came down before we shut the doors to gut it. I’d half figured she’d back out — shy little Wren, in a strip club, with me. Instead Glitch texted We’re outside at two in the afternoon.

She came in tucked under his arm in leggings and an old hoodie, hair up, like she was headed to the gym instead of a dead strip club with the work lights up. Then she let go of his arm, and I watched something happen to her that shocked the hell of me.

She walked the whole floor first, slow, hands in her hoodie pocket, head tipped like she was listening to music the rest of us couldn’t hear. Then she walked straight up the steps onto the main stage — didn’t ask, didn’t hesitate — got a hand on the pole, and swung herself around it once. Stopped dead center and looked out at the empty room the way a girl on a Friday night would’ve looked out at a full crowd.