Page 6 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“Nothing you can pay tonight. That’s the point of the arrangement. It buys time, and time is the only value left on this table.” That’s true. It’s also the line I use in this chair four or five times a year.

He’s quiet. I count the seconds out of habit. The length of the silence is information. Four. Nine. Fourteen.

“All right,” he says.

I have a page ready for the negotiation. There’s always a negotiation. They ask for terms. They ask for a rate. They ask what happens if the season goes badly. Those questions tell me they understand. Then they ask them three more ways, hoping for a different answer. I once sat across from a hotel owner who argued for six hours to win a concession worth eleven hundred dollars. He shook my hand afterward like a man who’d won.

Twenty-seven minutes. That’s what this has taken. I keep looking at the top of his head while he reads. That’s not part of the job, so I make myself look back at the page.

“All right,” he says again. “What do you need from me?” He puts both hands flat on the table, one on either side of the statements, like a man agreeing to a set of shifts.

I close the folder.

I do it without thinking, which isn’t how I work. The photograph goes under the cover. I pick up the folder and put it in my bag. It hasn’t been used. In twenty years, I’ve never put that folder away unopened.

He watches me do it, and doesn’t ask why.

“There’s one thing,” he says.

“Go on.”

“Does this keep Fin out of it?”

There it is. Not does this ruin me? Not what happens to my career? Not am I going to prison? He’s taken a stranger’s terms in his own kitchen at one in the morning without argument. His only question is about his brother.

I have an answer for that. That depends on you is the line, delivered flatly because it makes every future instruction cheaper. Four words. I’ve said them hundreds of times. They’ve never failed.

“While you’re cooperative, nobody goes near your brother,” I say.

His jaw moves. He doesn’t say thank you. He gets up, drains the glass of water standing at the sink with his back to me, rinses it, and puts it upside down on the rack.

I just gave a promise to a man on behalf of an organization that doesn’t authorize me to give promises. I know that while I’m saying it, and I say it anyway. Then I gather four years of his life off his table, square the stack, and hand it to him. He takes it in both hands.

“One more thing and then I’m gone,” I say. “I’ll need your schedule. Not the published one. Yours. Practices, treatment, travel, the nights you’re home.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t manage what I can’t see. If I have to ask you week to week, we’ll both start dreading the call.”

He goes still again. It takes him about a second to understand the cost. He doesn’t flinch.

“It’s on the fridge,” he says. “Take it.”

I let myself out.

The car is where I left it, on the far side of the visitor bay under a light that’s been failing since fall. I put the key in the ignition.

I don’t turn it.

The dash clock reads 3:04. Then it reads 3:15. In between, I do nothing. My hands stay on my knees. The cranes are lit green down on the container yards. I grew up eleven hundred yards from them.

The water smells like fish at this hour, a smell daylight burns off. My father came off the container-yard shift smelling of diesel and salt. My mother came home at four in the morning smelling of floor wax. I skated on the outdoor sheet at the end of Corliss Street until I was nineteen. Then a man in a car handed me an envelope I didn’t understand. Everything after that has been this.

At 3:15, I open the account log on my phone. It wants four things from me: contact made, terms accepted, resistance noted, next contact scheduled. It’s a good system. I built most of it.

I look at the empty fields until the screen dims. Then I close it without entering anything and start the car.

Vera Lindqvist keeps offices in a shipping-services building on the north quay with her name on the lease and eleven employees on the payroll. Nine of them move freight for a living with no idea what else happens here. Her floor is the third. The window behind her desk is the only good view in the building.