Page 55 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

I stand in the doorway of my bedroom in the dark and look at him for a while.

Then I go into the kitchen and turn the phone back over.

The drive is a black rectangle the size of a deck of cards. I bought it in December, in a shop under the rail bridge, in cash, and it’s been in an envelope taped to the underside of the drawer in this kitchen since the second week of working on Kieran’s account.

I plug it in at twenty past one.

I have four months of Vera Lindqvist in this laptop, because I’m the person who files everything. Every instruction she’s given me on the account. Every transfer against the balance, the date it cleared, the reference it went under. The market notes she sends on Sunday nights. The condition reports I wrote and what she credited afterward, which is the arithmetic that proves what the information was for. Her message from three hours ago.

And the licensing line. Harbor and Main, forty thousand dollars, Q1. Not Vera’s at all. The only item on this drive with my own hand on it.

I copy all of it.

It takes forty minutes. I sit at my kitchen table at half past one in the morning and watch a progress bar.

I know exactly what this is, and I’ve known since December. It’s the oldest habit in my profession: a man who handles other people’s money keeps a copy of everything, because the day always comes when somebody stands over him with an incorrect version of events.

It was insurance for me in December.

Now it’s a hockey player letting a point shot past his glove hand at 5:52 of a first period, in enough detail that no arbitration panel in the world could call it a bad bounce. There’s no way to hand a federal attorney what Vera did without also handing him what Kieran did. I could sit here for a year and it would still be true, because the two of them are the same set of transactions. Always have been.

I look at the progress bar and I think about that, plainly, for the first time.

Then I let it finish.

I eject the drive, put it back in the envelope, and tape the envelope under the drawer. I wash the two glasses in the sink and square the papers on the table.

At ten past six, there’s light in the airshaft and a truck reversing somewhere down by the water.

He comes out at seven in yesterday’s shirt, unbuttoned, with his hair flat on one side and his walk not right. He stops in the kitchen doorway and rubs his face with both hands.

He sees the empty chair, the laptop still open. “You didn’t come to bed.”

I look at him. “I had four months of filing to do.” I close the laptop. “There’s coffee. Sit down before you fall down.”

He doesn’t sit down. He comes over, stands behind my chair, and puts one hand flat on my shoulder. Neither of us says a word about it, and we stay like that while the coffee goes cold.

15

Ten days later, I’m holding a sheet of drywall over my head in a bedroom two hours north of the city while my brother puts screws into it one-handed.

“Up. Up on the left. Left, Kieran, your left.”

“It is up.”

“It’s a quarter inch out. It’ll show under the tape forever and I’ll have to look at it every night of my life.” He gets four more in, walking the gun along the stud, tongue between his teeth. “There. Now it’s right.”

The room smells like gypsum dust and the woodstove down the hall. There’s a radio going on a paint tin, a country station out of somewhere with a nine-minute weather report. The window has no curtain on it. Outside the fields are half snow, half brown, and the melt is coming off the roof in a steady tick against the sill.

We do four sheets. It takes two hours because of his hand.

He’s not supposed to be doing this. Nobody has told him that, because the only person who would tell him is a surgeon two hours south whose follow-up appointment he skipped in February. I know he skipped it because the clinic left a message on my phone, because I’ve been his emergency contact since I was seventeen.

I don’t mention the appointment. I hold the sheets while he runs the gun. We get four rooms boarded in an afternoon.

The fourth finger still doesn’t close, and it isn’t going to. He has a way of working around it now, thumb and two fingers braced by the heel of the hand.

At two, we sit on upturned buckets in the half-boarded room and eat sandwiches out of a bag.