Page 29 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“The men your brother owes are sending someone out here on Thursday evening,” I say. “The man who’s coming is the man who broke your hand. He won’t hurt you. He’s been told not to, and he’ll do what he’s told. He’ll sit in this room for twenty minutes, say almost nothing, and then he’ll go. The entire purpose of it is that you’ll telephone Kieran afterward in a state.”

Fin has gone the color of the wall.

“You’re telling me this,” he says. “You. You’re the one who⁠—”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because I want you out of this house by Thursday.”

He stands up. He sits back down. He puts his good hand over his mouth and takes it away again.

“I’ve got a job on Tuesday. I’ve got Marcus and Tony on the school district walk-through on Wednesday. I can’t just⁠—”

“You can do all of that from somewhere else. Nobody is asking you to stop working.” I take a folded page out of my inside pocket and put it on the table. “There’s a house two hours north of the city, off the county road. Two bedrooms, furnished, six months paid. The landlord thinks you’re a contractor working a job out that way. There’ll be a van and two men here at eight tomorrow morning.”

He looks at the page. He doesn’t pick it up.

“Who’s paying for that?”

“It’s handled.”

“Does it go on what Kieran owes?”

“No.”

“How do I know that?”

“You don’t,” I say. “You’ll have to take it, or stay here and sit in that chair on Thursday at seven.”

He starts crying with his back half-turned, one hand raised as if to stop me from seeing. His shoulders shake. He apologizes twice.

Then he wipes his face with the dishtowel and says, “Okay.” After that, he starts packing.

He’s packed in an hour. One man, one hand, a house he’s lived in for eleven years, and he’s done in an hour.

I stay and do the lifting, because he has one hand. He directs from the middle of the room with the splint held against his chest, talking without stopping the entire time. About a third of it is instructions. The rest is a running account of his own life delivered to a man he’s met twice.

The school district job is worth a hundred and ten thousand if it lands. Marcus’s baby is a girl; they’re naming her after his mother. There was a woman called Marla until eighteen months ago. She left the good tea. Kieran stopped talking for eleven days after their mom left, so Fin took a scrapyard job on top of the two he already had. He tells me this while wrapping a mug in newspaper, apparently unaware of what he’s just given me.

“He was the best kid,” he says. “I want you to know that. He never asked me for anything. Not once. Not ever. Not even when he should have.”

I put the box down by the door with the others.

“He’s still like that,” Fin says. “Isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

The movers come at eight the next morning. I meet them at the house and stand in the drive in the cold while they load. At the end of it, the foreman brings me a clipboard and a card reader. I put my own card in it, enter my own PIN, and the machine prints two copies of the invoice with the buyer’s name across the top.

MAREK BRANDT.

I take both.

Thursday, four o’clock, Vera’s office.

Roth is already there when I come in, standing, hands in his coat pockets. Vera is on the telephone about a container consignment—actual business she actually manages. She holds up one finger and finishes the call.