“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” I picked up the soldering tools again. “Jill’s not a plant either, all right? That I’m sure about.”
“You don’t think people sell out when somebody makes them an offer, huh?”
“Not Jill and not Scooter. Get a grip.”
Dodge was quiet for a couple of minutes. He stood there watching me work. Then he said, “One of these days you’re gonna work up the respect due to me. Once you grow up some and come to see things my way.”
“Whatever.”
“There you go again. Fact is, even when you know I’m right you won’t admit it. Too goddamn arrogant.”
“The problem’s not that I’m arrogant. It’s that you shove your nose into my business way too often. You’ve got to meddle in everything, whether it involves you or not.”
He was leaning on his arms against the bench, but at that he looked up at me with a gleam in his eye beneath his trucker cap. “Oh, I get it. You’re still sore about my cabinet project in here, all those years ago. When you were using this place as your little love nest.”
I kept soldering and didn’t say anything.
“Yep,” he said. “Cade sees it Cade’s way, through Cadey’s big blue eyes. Tell you what, I got tired of seeing the look on your brother’s face every time he knew you were in here messing around with that girl. You wouldn’t have seen that, though, would you?”
He waited to see if I’d reply, but I stayed silent. All I could think was I hated him more for saying that than I ever had for running me and Piper out of the shed.
“If I were Elias,” he went on, “I wouldn’t have been able to tolerate that shit. The way you treated him over that—I’d have had a mind to put a stop to it once and for all, any way it took. But nobody ever could get a rage out of Elias, and don’t ask me why. God knows I tried. Would have done him good, and God knows you had it coming, Cade.”
He held me in a kind of stare-down until I pulled the soldering gun’s plug out of the outlet without breaking eye contact. Then he shrugged and straightened up.
“You’ll think what you want to think, even when you’re wrong and you know you’re wrong,” he said.
Where Scooter and Jill were concerned I didn’t give it a second thought after that, not for a while anyway. Where Piper came in, I put it out of my mind. The project was consuming all my spare time and needed to be my priority. Sitting watch during those long, lonesome hours, watching the night through the window glass and perking up my ears at every sound—all of that made me feel paranoid enough without casting my own people as suspect. Every time I left the house to go anyplace, I felt jumpy. All of this was Dodge’s fault. New Hampshire had felt like its own kingdom to me, far apart from the spy-versus-spy political crap in Washington. It’s funny how the power of suggestion works like that. Just float the idea that somebody might be watching me, and I’m skittering away from my own shadow.
It wasn’t going to slow me down, though, as far as the project went. When I ventured out to the hardware store in Henderson, I made sure nothing about my appearance would attract attention. Grimy Levi’s worn soft and held up by a nicked leather belt, untied work boots, ball cap with the brim rolled tight, three days of beard. My T- shirt had the American Eagle logo across the chest, preppy when I bought it, but the tattered hem and the holes under the arms had long since made it work-shirt material. I looked like any low-wage construction worker who would have every good reason to be buying twelve boxes of nails at once.
I slid the boxes across the counter, told the cashier to add a pack of cigarettes and tugged my wallet out of my back pocket. As she rang me up, another customer plunked her purchase down at the end of the counter. In a quiet voice I knew right away, she said, “Hi, Cade.”
There stood Piper, looking at me with an embarrassed smile. Her hair was in a short ponytail sticking out the back of her cap, and her shirt had spatters of white paint all over it.
“Hey,” I said.
“What are you doing all the way down here?”
“Just…shopping. I was in the neighborhood.” I handed a twenty to the cashier. “You?”
“I live here now.” She pushed her one item forward: a toilet flush valve. “I got my own place after graduation. It needs a little work.”
“Paint and plumbing, huh?”
“How’d you guess.” She laughed quickly and handed over her credit card. “I’ve got the paint part down. I just need to figure out how to install this thing.”
“It’s not that hard. You’ve got to turn off the main water, and then once you drain it there’s two bolts at the bottom—” Her mouth had twisted upward with amusement. I said, “It doesn’t take long. You want me to do it?”
She lived near enough that she had walked over. She climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep to give me directions to her apartment. The drive was so brief I barely got a moment to consider the irony of it. Here I’d been mooning over the girl for months, stalking her even, and now here she turns up at the hardware store and jumps into my car minutes later. But when it happened like that, it just felt ordinary in spite of it all. It was only Piper, whom I’d known since I was born. She was just the girl in the crazy hat reading
Her flat was on the top floor of an old brick garden apartment building, three stories above the street. My boots clunked loudly against the stairs as I followed her. The apartment smelled like fresh paint, but I could tell it was all coming from the bedroom. The living room was simple but all in order: an old sofa and a couple of museum posters on the walls, and a little dinette table with two wildly painted chairs. She led me to the bathroom in the hallway, and I flicked on the light. The dotted shower curtain and pink rug had been shoved away from the toilet with its missing lid, obviously a project abandoned by someone confounded by it.
I got to work. She had the right tools around, just no idea of how to use them. As I worked she talked to me from the doorway, filling me in about all the details of her life the past few years. I could have predicted nearly all of it: a backpacking trip through France, a broken engagement, a chemistry degree, grad school on the horizon. She asked about my parents, then started on the rest of the family.
“How’s your son?”
“He’s fine.”
“And your girlfriend?”
Even the mention of Jill unnerved me. I didn’t like Piper conjuring her at all. “Don’t ask,” I said, brusque to the point of being rude. The chagrin of it made me realize the answer implied a breakup, but I wasn’t about to bring it back up to correct myself.
“I’m sorry,” Piper said. “I didn’t mean to pry. That’s the same answer I always give people when they ask about Michael.”
“You two split up?”
“We had different goals,” was all she said.
I flushed the toilet and watched the mechanism work, then slid the lid back on with a hollow clunk. “Fixed.”
“Thanks so much.” As I washed my hands, she added, “It’s hard to believe it was almost a year ago that I saw you last. We keep meeting under strange circumstances.”
“This isn’t as bad as last time.”
“Certainly not, no. I’m so sorry about Elias—really, Cade, I am. I was as shocked as anybody when I heard. How are you doing?”
I toweled off my hands. “I’m all right. Good days and bad days.”
“I see you got a tattoo. What does it say?” I held up my arm, and she read aloud clumsily, “‘
“‘Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.’” When her forehead creased up with confusion, I added, “John Adams said it during the Revolution.”
She smiled. “You’re so wonky, Cade. Even when you rebel, you’re wonky. But it’s sexy.”
I grinned.
“Well, do you want the grand tour? Or do you need to get back to work?”
“I’ll take the tour.”
“It’s not very grand, really. You already saw the living room. There’s the kitchen.” She pointed to a little
