Page 297 of Slashed Bonds

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The roof of Volkov Athletic is flat tar paper and gravel, four stories up, with the river a gray smear to the west and the whole of Blackridge laid out small and ugly in the direction of campus. There’s a door nobody uses but me. There’s a chair I brought up in September. There’s a coffee tin with sand in it where I put the cigarettes I don’t smoke in front of the others, because the pink girl doesn’t smoke, the pink girl eats candy, giggles, skips across parking lots.

I sit. Light one. Breathe it out toward the river.

My wallet’s pink too. Everything that shows is. I open it and slide my fingers behind the student ID and the gear-store loyalty card and the folded receipt from the gala dress, down to the pocket that’s been sewn into the lining, and I take out the photograph.

It’s old. Not old-old. Thirteen years. The paper’s gone soft at the corners from handling and there’s a crease through the middle where it lived folded in a shoe for the first two of those years.

Two girls on a dock. Summer. Lake behind them that goes all the way to the edge of the picture. The small one’s maybe seven, blonde, in a swimsuit with strawberries on it, squinting, gap in her front teeth, one arm up around the neck of the bigger one. The bigger one’s maybe twelve. Dark hair to her waist. Hand flat on the small one’s back, holding her steady on the dock boards, looking not at the camera but down at the small one, with a face that says I’ve got you.

I’ve got you.

I knew what love looked like at seven because I had a picture of it. I could take the picture out of my head any time and look at it. I could take it out now.

I don’t need to. I’m holding it.

My bag’s heavy for a bag with nothing in it but a wallet, a lighter, a stick of lip gloss, and a phone that isn’t pink. The phone’s black. No case. Nothing on the screen but a clock. It doesn’t ring when it rings; it buzzes, once, against the bottom of the bag, and I know the buzz the way a mother knows a cry.

It buzzes.

I put the photograph on my knee, face up, so the two girls can watch, and I answer.

“Piers.”

“Boss.”

A man’s voice. Flat. East-coast flat, the kind of flat that comes from a place where the winters are long and the men don’t talk unless the talking’s done something. Not a voice I’d recognize on the street. That’s by design. I’ve got nine of them and I’ve never seen a face.

“Go.”

“We finished skinning the wheelchair bond dude. Organs harvested. Should have the deposits in your account already. Both tranches. Cleaned through the shipping company.”

I look at the river.

Theo Ross. Twenty feet onto stone, the night the river came in through a glass door. Didn’t die. Doctors said he wouldn’t walk again and he didn’t. Doctors said he’d be in care for the rest of his life and, for a while, he was. Then the care facility had a staffing change. Then his bed was empty one morning, and the nurse on nights was new, and the paperwork said transfer, and the transfer went nowhere.

Mori never asked. Mori had a baby to grow and three men to hold still in a dark room. Mori said once, standing over him with her hand on her stomach, that what was waiting for a man who lived through that fall she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy.

She didn’t have to wish. She has me.

“Good,” I say. “Any noise?”

“None. Family’s not looking. The father cut him off after the arrests. Nobody filed.”

“And the rest of it?”

“Hellsing took his deal, he’s inside, he’s quiet. The other two are in the facility upstate. Correction facility, they call it.” A dry sound that might be a laugh. “We’ve got a man in the kitchen.”

“Leave them. For now. Mori likes the idea of them in there. She looks at it the way other people look at a fire in a fireplace.”

“Understood.”

The pink phone lights up on the chair arm beside me. A text. I don’t need to read it. The lock screen’s a picture, a man in a beanie with green hair laughing with his head back in a grocery store parking lot, the twentieth freckle showing under his jaw, a seagull in a cart behind him like a passenger. I took it myself. It’s the only picture on any device I own that isn’t a picture of something I need.

I turn the pink phone over. Face down.

“Tell Papa,” I say, “I’m gonna be busy playing house over here. I have a few boy toys that caught my interest, and a sister-in-arms who’s about to make me an aunt, and a season under lights starting on the seventeenth. He doesn’t need me back east. He’s got nine of you and a shipping company. He’ll manage.”