Page 92 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Yes."

I put my hands on the table. Both of them, flat, the way my grandfather did before he said anything that mattered, and I have run this from Coldbrook to the coast and back and I still have to start it twice.

"On the first night," I say, "I told you a working practice. One error, out loud, before anyone sleeps under what you built. I said it was structural. I said a joint you will not admit to is a joint nobody checks."

"Every word of it is still in me. You were very boring about it."

"Yes." My hands stay where they are. "For twenty-one nights you gave me yours. Some of them were small and one of them was an elk, and on the thirteenth night you got two thirds of the way into the true one and stopped, and I did not ask, and I have run that back more times than any other four minutes of my life."

"Ghorlan."

"Tonight is mine," I say. "It is long. It has been going since I was fourteen years old and it will take a while and I am going to do all of it, and you are going to sit in that chair, please."

She sits in that chair.

"I am six foot eleven," I say. "I have been six foot eleven since I was seventeen and something near it since I was fourteen, and by fifteen I had a full working grammar for it. Hands out in the open. Quiet in doorways. Slow on stairs. Speak second in any room and speak level. Sit down before anybody asks you to. Do not stand between a person and a door, ever, not once, not in a shop, not on a sidewalk. Do not run, even for a bus, because a large man running rearranges a street." I turn my palms up on the table and look at them. "I have never once put that grammar down. Never at work, never in a bar, never at my own mother's funeral. Thirty years of continuous management, and I have called it manners my whole life, because manners is a word a man can live inside."

Her eyes have not left me.

"My grandmother said one sentence at this table twelve days ago. She said I have been letting people be afraid of me because it is easier than letting them past it."

"That's a hell of a sentence."

"She has four of those and she has been holding them since I was born." I put my hands flat again. "She is right. That is the whole of it. Fear is a thing I can manage. I am extremely good at managing it. I have twenty-three years of technique for it and it costs me nothing and it works on everybody, every time, and the price of it is that no person outside this house has ever had the smallest idea what I am."

The polyethylene goes in and out on the west wall.

"You lied about an elk to get onto a mountain," I say. "I have been lying about myself in every room I have ever stood in, without one word of it out loud, since I was fourteen. Yours had a diaphragm in it. Mine had twenty-three years."

She puts the glass down.

"So. My error." My throat does something and I go through it. "On Day 15 I walked down a mountain in the dark and left you asleep under a rock, and I told myself it was because they had made a monster of me and I would not stand in it. That part is true and it is still not the reason. The reason is that being made into a monster in front of four million people is the same trade I have been making my entire life, and it finally cost more than I could pay, and instead of standing there and letting one small person all the way in, when she was already doing the work of it, I went home to a house where I am understood, because that is easier."

"Ghorlan..."

"I am not finished."

"Okay."

"I never asked you to stay." My hands do not move. "Twenty-one days. I asked you to set a ridgeline and hold the end of a board and name your errors and get out of the rain. I never asked you for anything that was for me. I let you work it out from joinery, which is what I have always done with everybody, because work speaks and it costs me nothing, and it does not speak, Junie. It never has. It is the quietest thing in the world and I have hidden inside it my entire adult life."

The polyethylene breathes.

"That is my trestle-word," I say. "There it is. All of it, once, out loud, before anybody sleeps under this."

She stands up out of the chair.

"So ask me now," she says.

"Stay."

"For how long."

"There is a room upstairs with a window facing the creek and no roof over it worth the name until Thursday," I say. "There is a shop with thirty feet of clear span in it and a hundred and ten years of hay dust in the tie beams. There is a creek that wants a footbridge and I have been drawing that footbridge since I was nineteen. I want you in the house. I want your terrible garland on every structure I put up for the rest of my working life. I have wanted to say the word stay since the fourth night and I have engineered eleven conversations around the outside of it, and I would like to stop doing that now."

She crosses the kitchen floor.

She has to go around a waist-high stack of cedar shingle to do it, and she does not go around it gracefully, and she puts one hand on my forearm and one on the buckle of my belt and says, "Sit down, please, you're a skyscraper," and I sit down in the chair, and she gets into my lap and takes my face in both of her hands.