Page 19 of Deacon

“Since when?”

“Spring.”

“They showed you pictures of me.”

“They did.”

“And you shook his hand, like you were fine with it all.”

“I did.” He folded his hands on the desk. “They want the building, Chelsea. They want it quiet and they want it for a long time. You were never the point. As long as the arrangement held, you were the safest woman in Salvation. I didn’t care what they did with the building, and I knew if I just left them to it, nothing would happen to you.”

“I don’t see how you could know that,” I said.

“You were just part of the terms. Their insurance, if you want to call it that.” He said it plainly, the way he’d read out a lease. “I read terms. I decided I could live with them.”

“You didn’t think I should know?”

“What would telling you have done, except cost me the lease?” He spread his hands. “This town was dead the day the mine closed. I bought what nobody else would touch and I kept those buildings standing for twenty years, waiting for anybody at all to want them. These men wanted the building, and I just turned a blind eye. No one else was going to rent it, Chelsea.”

The worst part was that I could see it. I could follow every step of his logic, clean as a column of numbers. That was what made me sick.

“Did you ever once think about telling them no?”

He considered the question. He gave it real thought. A lie would have hurt less.

“I thought about it,” he said. “But this is just business.”

There it was. He’d chosen it wide awake, at this desk. My father had put me on one side of the scale and the money on the other, and he’d looked at it with his reading glasses on, and the money had come out ahead.

I thought of him at my high school graduation, in the back row, clapping on time and checking his watch between names. I’d been so proud he came at all.

He said all of it so matter-of-factly. He looked tired, and older than sixty-one.

I took his office key off my ring and put it on the desk beside the photograph. “You can water your own plants in the future. I don’t want anything to do with your business,” I said, glancing back at the thirsty spider plant.

“Dinner’s still the first Sunday,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

He looked at the key and said nothing for a while. “All right.”

I’d spent my whole life waiting for my father to turn into somebody else. Somebody who’d call my bakery a business, who’d put me first even once. Standing in his office, I felt that hope go out of me, quietly, like a pilot light.

I finally knew him. That was worse than hating him would have been.

I left him sitting there with the key and the taped-up photograph, and let myself out.

The prospect’s car followed me down Main and out past the edge of town. I knew where I was going before I’d admitted it to myself.

The clubhouse gate rolled open before I reached it. Nobody asked who I was.

Deacon was standing in the lot beside his bike, like he’d been waiting there since I left. Maybe he had.

I parked and got out and walked straight to him.

Because he’d been the only one who was going to tell me what my father was getting into. Because he’d put men on my street before I knew I needed them. Because he’d stood in my shop an hour ago and turned into a man who frightened me, and he’d done it for me.

Because he saw me. He’d seen me across that counter for four years. And I was finished pretending that was a small thing.

CHAPTER 6