Page 7 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

She does not ring me up. She sets the tablet down and folds her arms, mirroring me, and the humor drains out of her stance until what remains is the pragmatic woman I stayed friends with for a reason.

"Two hundred thousand people," she says quietly, "looked at you today and liked what they found. And you are standing in my store trying to buy screws to build a life where nobody ever does."

"That is the life I want."

"Is it." She does not shape it as a question.

I gather my items myself off the pegs behind her, since she will not, and I stack them on the counter, and I keep my hands busy so my mouth does not have to. Bar clamps. Screws. A tube of the good adhesive.

"She offered me money," I say to the counter. "The barn woman. To ride along in the videos."

Judanna goes very still, the way she does when a thing matters. "How much money."

"Enough." I stack the last box. "Enough for the workshop. In one month."

She exhales through her tusks, a long low whistle. "Oggan. The Renner place? Two other buyers are circling that lot. Big Hettle told me himself, he expects it gone by spring."

"I am aware."

"And this would let you buy it now. Outright."

"I am aware."

"And you are going to turn it down."

I set both hands on the counter and lean into them, and the wood creaks under my weight, honest and solid, and I look at the only person in this town who has ever taken in the whole of me and stayed.

"Every morning of my life," I tell her, "I go somewhere nobody wants to look at me. Under a sink. Inside a wall. Down in a crawlspace. And I made my peace with that. I told myself the not-being-looked-at was the price of the quiet." I straighten. "She wants to sell the exact opposite. She wants to aim a light at me and let two hundred thousand strangers rank my worth by the shape of my arms holding a water heater. Nineteen years I have built things that outlast the people who glance at them. And she wants to turn me into the thing people glance at."

Judanna stays quiet a long moment. She reaches over and straightens a display of drill bits that does not need straightening, which is her tell, the thing she does when she is loading up something I will not enjoy.

"You want my honest opinion or my nice one," she says, bagging the clamps.

"When have you ever handed me the nice one."

"Fair." She slides the bag across the counter. "My honest opinion is that you have spent so long insisting nobody wants the quiet man that you stopped checking whether the insisting is still true. You are not scared of the camera, Oggan. You are scared that if people look at you, look close, they will find a whole person under the shoulders. And they will not want him." She taps the counter. "That is not the barn woman's job to fix. But she is offering you the one thing you need, and you are going to walk out of here and quit on her by lunch, and buy your quiet workshop next year instead of this one, and tell yourself you won."

"You married me," I say. "You, of all people, looked close."

"I did." Her expression softens, and for a heartbeat the store and the tablet and the whole silly circus of it fall away, and there is just the two of us and eleven years of history. "And I found a good man who did not want a wife, he wanted a fortress. I got out before I turned into another wall." She points the pencil at me. "I am the last person who quit trying to reach you, Oggan. Do not use me as proof it cannot be done. Use me as proof it is worth the effort."

I glance down at the bag on the counter. Two-inch deck screws, a box of two hundred, four dollars and change. I have bought this exact box a thousand times. It has never once required me to have a conversation about my soul. That is the thing I liked about it.

"You are glaring at the screws like they wronged you," Judanna says.

"They are simpler than you."

"Everything is simpler than me. That is why you married me, and why you divorced me, and why you still drive to my little store instead of the big-box place forty minutes closer." She bags the adhesive. "Go to your conversation, Oggan. Say your no in person, like a polite man. And when you catch yourself saying yes instead, do me one favor."

"What."

"Do not make her pay for the fact that the last person who tried to love you had to walk away to save herself." She slides the bag over the counter with both hands. "She has never heard that story. Do not turn her into the next chapter of it."

I take my bag.

"I already told her one conversation," I say.

Judanna's eyebrows climb toward the ceiling tiles. "You did?"