Page 72 of Patch

Nothing came. Just the fact of it, sitting there like a lab value.

“And the other one,” I said. “The heavy one. He put himself in front of me.”

“Bo Tarasenko.” Dread almost smiled. “Patch put him on a bus.”

“He what?”

“Stood in a driveway with you bleeding in a truck bed and told Brazil the man walks.” He picked the can back up. “Fox backed him. Vasha backed him harder. He’s somewhere north of here being somebody else’s problem, and as far as this club is concerned that account is closed.”

I sat with that a while.

None of it was tidy. None of it was going to make a story I could ever tell anybody.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” Dread agreed.

Then he was gone. Stood up, walked toward the clubhouse, and the sound of him faded out under the music.

I stayed where I was until my beer was empty. Then I stood. Crossed the gravel to where Ruth was still seated in her folding chair.

The party went on around her. Bodies moved. Voices overlapped. Someone laughed by the grill. Everybody had drifted toward the fire without deciding to, the way people do in January, and nobody was going inside yet because going inside would mean the night was over.

Ruth’s hands were in her lap. I sat in the empty chair beside her. Reached across. Took her hand.

Her fingers were cool. Dry. The skin paper-thin across the knuckles. She turned to me. Her eyes found mine. Held. The warmth of recognition that happened on good nights and never on a schedule.

“I met a man once.” Her voice was bright. Social. The fluency that dementia hadn’t taken. “At a party. Not this one. Another one. Long time ago. He had silver in his hair even then. Not much. Just here.” She touched her own temple. Her fingers trembled slightly. The fine motor hesitation that came and went. “He stood very still. The way some men do. You know the way.”

I knew the way.

I held her hand. Let her talk. She described a man who stood at the edge of rooms and watched, and the man she was describing was standing by the fire pit right now with a bottle in his hand.

The thread dropped eventually. It always did. One sentence trailed into silence. Her eyes stayed on mine. Something shifted behind them. A recalibration, the moment when the present rearranged itself and the woman looking at me was seeing someone whose name she couldn’t quite place.

Her hand tightened on mine. The apologetic brightness flooded her features. Social fluency kicking in where memory had lapsed.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Her voice was warm. Sincere. The regret of someone who knew she had made a mistake and couldn’t remember what the mistake was. “You look so much like…”

“It’s okay.” I squeezed back. Not too hard. Her bones felt fragile under my fingers. “You’re right. I do look like her.”

She nodded. Relieved. Her hands went back to folding. The rhythm reclaimed her. The party went on. Someone threw another log on the fire. The flame jumped. Orange light reached us and retreated.

I stayed in the chair. Our hands linked. Fold, smooth, fold against my knuckles.

* * *

Patch

I had been at the edge of compound parties for twenty years.

Standing by the fence. By the clubhouse steps. By the cooler that nobody else wanted to stand by because the beer was warm and the conversation died there. I knew the rotation of every gathering. Knew which brothers arrived early and which arrived late and which ones stayed until the fire burned down to ash because going home meant facing something they weren’t ready to face.

I wasn’t at the edge of this one.

The observation arrived somewhere around the time Fox clapped me on the shoulder and moved on. His hand was heavy. His eyes held mine for half a second longer than they needed to. The look of a President who had watched a brother stand at a gate for years and had just watched that brother step away from it without announcing he was stepping away.

Earlier, before the party, I restocked the kit in my saddlebag.