Page 152 of The Forbidden Center

The corner of her mouth goes. I feel it through her shoulder before I see it.

“I left at seventeen on a partial scholarship that covered about half of it. He didn’t try to stop me. Put two hundred dollars on the kitchen table and went out to work, and that was him being proud of me, and I knew it then and I know it now. He didn’t know another way to say it.” Two hundreds, folded once, under the salt shaker. I can still see them.

“You were seventeen.”

“I was seventeen and I’d already decided. That’s what that farm gave me.”

I roll the joint once, out of eighteen years of habit.

“I played hurt the entire time. You don’t get things looked at. Getting a thing looked at costs money and it makes it real.”

She turns her head. “You have never said that in my building.”

“No.”

“No,” she says, and leaves it, and goes back to looking at the wall with me.

“Then a team called me up and I walked into a room full of men, and that room is the only family I’ve ever had. Nobody in it cared whose kid I was. You had to be good. I was good. That was the whole price of admission, and I’ve never found another place like it.”

Said out loud, on my own floor, it sounds like something I got to have.

“Mack is my best friend. We’ll sit in a hotel room for an hour and say nine words to each other, and there isn’t a man alive who knows me better. That’s how it works in there. Nobody tells anybody anything and everybody knows everything.

“When my father died, Mack came. Stood at the back of a church outside Bandera in a suit he bought that morning, and afterward at the graveside I kept at him until he laughed. Out loud. At a funeral. I worked at it. I kept going until he broke.”

I feel her look at the side of my face.

“That’s me, right there. I’d rather make somebody laugh at my own father’s grave than stand there and find out what the quiet sounds like.”

The quiet’s here now, in my own front room, and I’m sitting in it on purpose. My hands want something to do. I put them flat on my knees and leave them there.

“Ruth’s had a key since the day I bought this house. When I came out of the second surgery she was in the chair, with a bag of her own food because she doesn’t trust hospitals. When her knee went, I drove her to every appointment and didn’t make one joke the whole way. Neither of us has ever said a word about what that is.”

“She would not thank you for saying it.”

“No. She would not.”

Astrid’s mouth moves about a millimeter, and it takes everything I have not to turn and look at it.

“I haven’t needed anybody since I was seventeen. I built it that way on purpose and it held up. Held up right through to a woman in a doorway who didn’t look at me.” My heart’s going like a third period we’re losing, and I keep my voice exactly where it is.

She goes very still.

“You know what you look like. You’ve known since you were fifteen and you’ve hated every day of it, and it’s the least interesting thing about you.”

Her hands tighten around her knees.

“Everybody who meets you knows inside a minute that you aren’t like other people.” I keep my eyes on the wall. “I knew it in a doorway while you were on your phone.

“The thing I did wrong was going over the top of you with your own daughter. I didn’t see it while I was doing it, and I’ve seen it every hour since Ruth said three words to me at my own table. I’m sorry for that. I’d take it back.”

“And the bed.”

“I’m not sorry about the bed.”

The room sits there with that in it. She doesn’t move away from my shoulder.

“She was on the floor in a house with four empty rooms and I had the money in my hand. I’d pay it again.” I look at my hands. “That’s the part that ought to worry you.”