Page 3 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

I have exactly one month before the money runs out. One month to save everything.

I pick the bucket back up and set it upright, because my hands want a job, and I square my shoulders toward the headlights.

"Jilly!" Patsy's silhouette fills the doorway, phone already raised, already filming me for reasons I will never understand. "Tell me you signed the orc."

"He hung up on me."

Her smile does not waver. If anything it sharpens to a point.

"Then we go get him," she says.

CHAPTER 2

OGGAN

The pipe is the problem. The human is a symptom.

I lie on my back beneath the sink of a house that should have been condemned three owners ago, and I trace the copper with two fingers, following the corrosion to its source the way I follow everything to its source. Water hunts the weak seam. Rot hunts the untreated joist. Trouble hunts the man who answers his phone.

I did not have to answer the phone.

Above me the drain assembly weeps a slow bead of rust-colored water onto the bridge of my nose. I let it. A man who flinches at water has chosen the wrong trade.

The barn job is finished. I closed it out this morning, swapped the water heater some previous idiot installed backwards, sweated the joints clean, tested the pressure, collected my rate from a woman too busy staring at a small glowing rectangle to meet my eyes. A normal job. A good building underneath, actually. Solid bones beneath all that theatrical ruin. I respected the bones. The ring lights earned no such respect.

She talked the entire time I worked. To the camera, to herself, to a wilting plant on the windowsill. A running river of words about grout colors and natural light and her audience, whoever they are. I tuned it out the way I tune out a compressor running in the next room. And yet somewhere in the third hour, when she believed no one was looking, the river went dry. I came up out of the crawlspace and caught her folded over on an upturned crate, head in her hands, shoulders shaking, dead silent. She did not perform that crying for anyone. It was the one honest thing she did all day. Then the little rectangle chimed on her hip, and the smile snapped back onto her face like a breaker thrown, and the river started up again as though it had never stopped.

And now, hours later, in a different house, with a different sink, the small glowing rectangle in my own pocket buzzes against my hip like a trapped hornet, and the woman's words rattle around in my skull where they have no business living.

You went viral.

That phrase means nothing to me. I hold a general suspicion it describes a disease.

Your shoulders, specifically.

I sit up too fast and crack my head on the drainpipe. The whole assembly shudders.I grip it before it can tear loose, and I hold it, and I breathe, falling back on the habit my mother drilled into me. I name what is true out loud so the lies cannot get comfortable.

"I am a builder," I tell the pipe. "I build."

The pipe declines to comment.

I finish the join. I do not rush it. A rushed weld is a future flood, and in nineteen years I have never once left a job that would flood, and I will not start today because a stranger dangled a word I dislike in front of me.

I would compensate you almost aggressively.

The number riding underneath that offer was not small. I can price my own labor to the dollar, and I can name the exact figure I am short, and the gap between those two facts is the only reason I do not simply block the woman and drive into the hills.

The workshop.

There is a plot outside town. A metal building on two acres, high ceilings, a concrete pad already poured, three-phase power run to the box. A place a man could work steel and wood with nobody hovering, no landlord jacking rent every spring, no leak of other people's opinions seeping under the door. I have put money toward it for six years. I am close. I am one good season from close.

My father built furniture that outlived him by forty years. Chairs people still sit in, tables people still gather around, in houses three counties over. He never once posted a photograph of a single piece. He would have had no idea what a livestream was, and he would have been right about that. A thing is good because it holds weight, because it lasts, because it does the job it was built to do. A thing is not good because strangers clap at it on a screen. My father taught me that at a bench, with his hands, in a shop that smelled exactly like the one I want to buy. The shop is the whole point, not the money. The bench. The quiet. The chance to make something my father would have run his thumb along and grunted at, which was the highest praise the old man owned.

And a woman just offered me one good season inside one month, in trade for the one thing I will never sell.

Myself. Perceived. On purpose. For strangers.

I gather my tools. I coil the drop cloth. I leave the house cleaner than I found it, which is my habit and my pride, and I climb into my truck. The rectangle buzzes one more time before I can turn the key.