Page 20 of Savage Daddy
“I have a lot to do,” she said. Flat. The shutter all the way down. “I have to finish this and bag the glass and there’s an order for tomorrow I haven’t started and I’d like to do all of it without—” she stopped, breathed, started again, level, “—I appreciate it. I do. But I don’t need help. I don’t need you to come crashing in here like Saint George again. I’ve got it.”
And there it was. The brush back in her hand. Her shoulders turning the quarter-turn that closed me out. The wall I’d thrown my whole arsenal at and watched it bounce, except now there was a scorch behind the wall and her hands were shaking around the brush and she was telling me to leave, and I stood there in the wrecked warm middle of her shop and understood, finally, completely, the shape of the problem.
I didn’t leave.
She wanted me to. Maybe I should have. But instead I leaned a shoulder against the door frame where she’d told me to get out and I watched her scrub a wall she couldn’t unburn, and I let the gears go.
Because here’s the thing about me that people miss, the thing the charm is built to hide: when I stop being funny, I’m very good.
She would never let anyone help her. Not me. Not anyone. I’d seen and heard people come and offer help. And watched her refuse over and over again. I’d watched her load down nurses and feed a kid who came up short on his change and press bread on every soul who came through that door, warmth to spare, an ocean of it—all of it pointed out, away, at everyone but herself. And not once, not one single morning in three months, had I seen a living person carry a single sack of flour for that woman. She’d rather break her back. She’d rather fall down and let the bread burn, she’d said it to the grocer near enough, I’d half-heard it through the glass.
Protection was poison to her. Charity was poison. Rescue—Saint George coming through the door—was the worst poison of all, because rescue made her the rescued, made it his story, and she’d told me that with her whole body twice now. You couldn’t give this woman anything. The giving was the trap. The kindness was the leash.
But . . .
You couldn’t give her a hand. But you might be able to ask her for one.
And that—that was where the cold part of me, the useful part, sat up and looked at the warm part and found, for once, that they wanted the same thing.
I needed this block. Truly needed it. That wasn’t a story I was telling myself; it was the job. So I’d ask her to work. A man with a job at Filoxenia could watch everything. Who came. Who leaned. Who she paid or didn’t. A man with flour on his arms was invisible in exactly the way I needed to be invisible.
So I’d offer to work.
Not protect. Work. Baker’s hand. The heavy lifting she wouldn’t take from the grocer’s nephew—the flour, the deliveries, the early load-in, the things that were breaking her. And I’d frame it the only way she could possibly take it: as my need.
It was good. It was clean. It was the kind of door you find when you’ve spent your whole life finding doors in people, the soft place to stand near, and I felt the cold satisfied click of it land behind my ribs the way it always does.
“You’re still here,” she said.
“I’m still here.”
“Why are you still here?”
I came off the door frame. I put my hands in my pockets, easy, no crash this time, no Saint George, the morning man and the boxer both stepped back and a third one came up that I hadn’t used in a while, the one who sits across the table and makes a man an offer he doesn’t know he wants.
“I’ve got a proposition for you,” I said. “And before you throw me out—it’s not what you think. It’s business.”
“Business?” she repeated, like I’d said something in a language she didn’t bother speaking.
“Business.” I stayed where I was, didn’t crowd her, let the word do its small work. “I need a job.”
That landed somewhere she wasn’t braced for, I watched it — the brush stopped halfway to the bucket. Whatever she’d been ready to swat away, it wasn’t that.
“Youneed a job?” she asked, incredulous.
“I’m new in the city. I’ve got reasons to be on this block—my own reasons, and before you ask, no, I’m not going to tell you what they are, and yeah, I know how that sounds.” I kept my voice flat, even. “There’s a man I’m keeping an eye on. Down the street. The yard by the freight line. That’s all you get, and it’s the truth, and it’s got nothing to do with you. But I need a place to be that nobody questions. A reason to be here every day, early, late, hauling things in and out. And you—” I nodded at the wall, the plywood, the broom against the door, all of it, “—are doing the work of three people with two hands, and the heavy half of it is killing you, and I can lift.”
She looked at me and I could see her reading me, weighing me, measuring the distance to the door and the size of the lie and where the catch was. She is not a stupid woman.
“You’re not telling me everything,” she said.
“No, of course not.”
“There’s a thing you’re not saying.”
“There’s more than one! Plenty, in fact. But I just told you there was something I wouldn’t share.” I spread my hands. “I’m being more honest with you than most people will ever be, which is that I’m admitting there’s a part I’m keeping. You can take that or not.”
She set the brush down. Folded her arms. The fury was gone, mostly—what was left was the cold sharp working part of her, the part I’d fallen for across a counter without knowing it.
