Page 35 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"Jilly." He crouches. Even folded down to my level he blots out the work lights. "What happened. Tell me who I need to scare."

A laugh tears out of me, wet and awful. "You can't scare a spreadsheet."

"I can try." He does not smile, but the line between his brows has changed shape. Worried now, no longer walled off. "What number is on the screen."

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters if it's putting you facedown on this table." His huge hand comes up, hovers by my cheek, uncertain of its welcome after three cold days. I lean into it before I can stop myself. His palm cups my whole face, rough and warm, and I close my eyes and let one tear roll into the calluses of a man I am about to ask to humiliate himself for money.

His thumb brushes once across my cheekbone, catching the tear, and the tenderness of it after three days of frost nearly finishes me off entirely. This is the man Patsy wants me to strong-arm into a rhinestone costume. This is the man whose privacy I already sold once, by accident, by reflex, with a tarp. And here I sit, about to do it again on purpose, with a sponsor number pointed at his pride like a nail gun, because the roofer wants paying Friday and the bank wants paying forever.

"Oggan," I whisper. "I have to ask you for something terrible. And I need you to know you can say no. If you say no, I mean it, I will find another way and I will never bring it up again."

CHAPTER 20

OGGAN

The shirt is yellow the way a warning sign is yellow, and across the front, in rhinestones, it reads GLAM SQUAD, and beside the words a sparkle emoji has been picked out in tiny plastic gems.

I hold it up between two fingers in the pole barn's morning light like a dead thing pulled from a trap.

"You want me," I say slowly, "to wear this."

"No." Jilly stands three feet off, hugging her tablet to her belly, and her eyes are still swollen from last night. "I don't want you to. I need you to. There's a difference, and I hate that the difference is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars."

She laid the whole thing out at the folding table. The roof. The overrun. The bank. Patsy's flat little knife of a sentence, I cannot represent a cautionary tale. She gave me the true number on the screen, negative four thousand and change, then the other number the shirt would erase, and she did not once dress it up as anything but exactly what it is.

That is the part that guts me. She did not use the leverage Patsy handed her. Whatever that woman told her to do, she came to me raw and wrecked and honest and said, I have to ask you for something terrible, and then she asked, and then she said, you can say no, and I will find another way, and I will never bring it up again.

No one has ever handed me a real no to say.

I turn the shirt over. GLAM SQUAD. Sparkle emoji. Everything I have kept myself apart from for thirty-five years, distilled into rhinestone and stitched across a garment sized for a man who took a beam to the collarbone at twenty-two and let no stranger ever see him wince.

Judanna's words come back down the line in my skull. Go fix it before the numbers do the fixing for you.

A spreadsheet cell putting Jilly facedown on plywood. A bank taking a barn she staked her whole life on. A small warm weight over the drum of my heart, telling me she had it, it was real, and three days of me making her pay for a text she did not write the rules of.

Pride is a fine thing. Pride kept me on my feet after a lot of beams dropped. Pride walked me out of a marriage without bitterness and into a life I built board by board with my own two hands, answering to no one, perceived by no one, exactly the way I wanted it. For thirty-five years pride has been the load-bearing wall of the whole structure of me.

And a load-bearing wall has one job. It carries weight so the roof does not come down on the people underneath.

That is the thing I circled all night in my too-flat bed. What is my pride for, if not this. What good is a wall that will not hold up a roof. I have spent three days guarding a bruised place in me as though it mattered more than the woman who put warmth back into a room I built cold, and that woman is downstairs at a folding table doing math that ends with a bank taking her home. My pride is intact. Her dream stands four thousand dollars from rubble. One of those two things I can carry on my back across any distance. The other one is only yellow, and it washes off.

My mother had a saying, back in the old enclave, about the difference between a man's armor and a man's home. Armor you wear to keep the world off you. A home you build to let one person in. A man who confuses the two, she used to say, dies warm inside good steel and utterly alone. I have worn my quiet like plate mail for so long that I forgot a wall can also be a door. Jilly threw a tarp over me and I called it a wound. She is about to hand me a rhinestone shirt and call it a mercy, and give me a real no to say, and the difference between those two women is nothing. The difference is only which one of us was brave enough to ask first.

Pride will not keep her house.

"Turn the camera on," I say.

She goes rigid. "Oggan."

"You heard me." I strip off my flannel and drag the yellow horror over my head. It stretches across my shoulders to the very limit of its stitching, rhinestones flaring under the work lights, the sparkle emoji riding somewhere over my sternum, and I stand there in the middle of an unfinished great room dressed like a novelty balloon and I hold my face absolutely, perfectly flat. "Six videos. Whatever the shirt people want. Roll it."

Her eyes fill. "You don't have to do this. I meant every word. There's another way, I'll find it, I'll sell the truck, I'll . . ."

"You will not sell the truck." I pick up the drill. "You will point the camera at the ridiculous Orc in the ridiculous shirt, and the shirt people will wire you their ridiculous money, and you will fix your roof. That's the whole plan. It's a good plan. Roll it."

She lifts the tablet. Her hand shakes. The little red light comes on.