Page 20 of Bounced!
I claim. I was not, as a rule, claimed.
And there was Mark Delgado, gruff and graying and lonely in a way he thought nobody could see, apologizing on the interstate for the crime of not knowing me well enough, calling me his like it was a debt he intended to repay.
I didn’t tell him any of that.
“Vernell,” I said instead.
“What?”
“Her name, my mother, it’s Vernell.” I looked out the window at the off-ramp coming up. “And you don’t owe me an apology for running a bar instead of interviewing your bouncer. The job doesn’t come with a friendship. You’ve been fair to me every day for two years. That’s more than most men get from most men.”
“Still,” he said.
“Still,” I agreed, and let that be the end of it.
Inside, where the wall doesn’t reach, I was smiling. I always had a good interior smile. It served me well because no one had ever seen it. Mark hadn’t earned the outside one yet, though I was beginning to suspect, with something between alarm and resignation, that he was going to.
“Vernell,” Mark repeated, careful with it, as though holding something delicate in his meaty palms. “Good. I’ll remember that.”
“I know you will,” I said. “You keep everything.”
He glanced sideways, something startled and pleased moving behind his eyes, like I’d handed him a fact about himself he hadn’t known was visible. I let him have it because it was true and small and it cost me nothing. It was the first thing I had ever given him on purpose.
The fairgrounds exit came up. Neither of us said anything else the rest of the way. This time, the silence had lost its texture entirely, and had become, without either of us deciding it, the comfortable kind.
I told myself that meant nothing.
I told myself a great many things like that since.
Chapter 6
Mark
The restaurant supply place out past the fairgrounds was a warehouse the size of a hangar run by a man named Cyril. He had the weathered calm of someone who had watched a thousand people underestimate a commercial appliance and had stopped warning them.
“That’s the floor model.” Cyril pointed.
The machine sat at the end of an aisle like a small refrigerator that lifted weights. Stainless steel, square, and squat, it radiated the quiet confidence of an object that knew exactly how much it weighed and knew you didn’t. I walked up expecting an ice machine, which was a metal box that made ice, a thing humankind figured out a hundred years earlier and hadn’t needed to improve since.
This was not that box.
This box had a touchscreen.
“Ah,” Cyril said, something shifting in him, a light coming on behind his weathered calm. I understood too late that I’d made eye contact with a man about to give a presentation. “You’re looking at the IceMaster 2000. Top of the Frost Dynamics line. This isn’t an ice machine. This is an ice platform.”
“I just need it to make ice,” I said.
Cyril didn’t appear to hear me. He was too busy drooling over the IceMaster 2000.
“Nine cube profiles,” he said, holding up fingers, losing count of his own fingers, then starting over. “Full cube, half cube, nugget, crescent, gourmet sphere, and something they call ‘the diamond,’ which I personally have questions about but the customers love. Oh, and you can program customized cubes, if that’s your thing. Dual-sensor bin management. Antimicrobial coating. It’s got a self-cleaning cycle you can schedule from your phone.” He said “phone” the way a preacher says “salvation.” “You want it to text you when the filter’s low? It’ll text you. You want it to make forty pounds of nugget ice for a kid’s birthday and then switch back to gourmet sphere for the evening service? It does that. On a timer. While you sleep.”
“I own a bar,” I said. “I don’t need it to text me.”
“It’ll text you anyway,” Cyril said, with the gentle finality of a man describing yesterday’s weather. “There’s a companion app. There’s a loyalty program. Points for cubes. It’s pretty awesome.”
“Points toward what?”
“Nobody knows,” Cyril said, and for the first time all day he looked genuinely troubled by his own product. “More ice, I assume.”
