I take a sip of my beer, set it down and mimic her posture. I feel, but don’t see, Kit and Greer exchange a look.“My roommate in college, Jasper, he brought me into the business.”
That’s not going to be enough for Zoe, who quirks that eyebrow again and signals me to go on.“Jasper’s a science guy,” I say, and pause to think about how to describe Jasper to people who don’t know him.“He’s the most focused guy I’ve ever met—by the time we were sophomores, he had his eye on Beaumont as the place he wanted to land, he knew he wanted to do R&D for a company with that kind of profile. He knew he wanted to search out new tech and bring it to the market.”
“That tells me exactly nothing about you.”
“Zoe, give him a minute,” says Kit.
“It’s all right,” I say, giving her a grateful look before focusing back on Zoe.“Jasper isn’t a great communicator. He sees the tech, or the science, and not always the people behind it. I’m good at that part.”
“Kit says you didn’t know a whole lot about her when you showed up here,” Zoe says, and I smile, because as much as she’s making me squirm, I’m glad as hell Kit has her.
“She’s right. I got a call to talk to Kit under different circumstances than are normal—I’m around here taking care of my dad, so my approach wasn’t very elegant.”
“It was fine,” says Kit.“I don’t like elegant, anyways.”
“Your dad’s salvage yard,” Zoe continues,“That’s a family business?”
“It is. My great-grandfather started it, a one building operation over on Main. He bought the land it’s on now, and my grandpop built the warehouse itself. My dad and him, they did a good amount of expansion over the years.”
“But you work in Texas,” says Greer. It’s not a question, but behind her statement is something tougher than anything Zoe has asked.
I shift in my seat, feel the weight of the silence while they wait for my answer.“Right, yeah.I’m not planning to take over for my dad. I think he’ll sell after a while.”
“That doesn’t bother you?” Kit asks. It’s not lost on me that I’m saying nothing about Beaumont, about what Kit stands to gain from joining the team. But somehow I feel drawn into this with Kit and her friends. It’s an important part of my having any chance of convincing her and them of anything I have to say.
I shrug, take another sip of my beer.“My dad, he brought me up in that yard, and my grandpop too, when he was alive. They taught me a lot about the business. But they never pressured me to take over, and I think my dad knew I had to get out of here after…” I trail off here, swallow uncomfortably. Probably I should not have gone down this route.
“After?” Zoe says.
I’m seized by a surge of confidence, or maybe of stupidity. I don’t have any reason to keep this a secret. In fact, I have good reasons to be proud of how I came out of what happened. So I lean back in my seat, ignoring the way my back, already a little sticky with sweat, rests uncomfortably against the vinyl booth.“I got sent to a juvenile detention facility for six months when I was seventeen,” I say, and Zoe sits back too, crossing her arms over her chest. I give them the facts as clearly and quickly as I can.“I had some minor prior offenses, for vandalism. But one night, I was out with some friends, and we were being stupid assholes and we tried to start a bonfire. We were too close to a building, a residential garage separate from the main house. There was a lot of flammable material in the garage, and—ah. An apartment up top.” That was hard to say, harder than I thought it’d be.“The tenant made it out, with some minor burns, but it went up quick, burned the structure down.” It’s hard to explain the way my mind still works around this issue, around what I’d done—it’s this razor-edged panic that slices across me, knowing that I was seconds away from killing someone. In court, they’d called itrecklessness toward loss of life. I’ve never forgotten that phrase. Sometimes, I still wake up in the night and hear it echoing in my head, though I can never remember dreaming about it.“I got sent in for arson.”
“What about your friends?” asks Kit.
I shake my head.“I took the blame. I lit it. None of them had any priors. It was an accident, but the cops felt there was enough gross negligence to treat it as arson. And they were right. So I went in to juvenile detention while my case was being processed, all that. Eventually, I got out with just probation. I didn’t have to serve any time in the correctional facility.” I leave out that things hadn’t looked all that good, really, until Richard had finally gotten involved. To this day I hated that he got to be the hero, when it’d been my dad that had been there for every court appearance, every visitation day.
“Was it—?” Greer starts to ask, but seems to think better of whatever she was going to say, closing her mouth and fingering the corner of her napkin.
“It was all right,” I say, but I’m not going to tell them most of it, about how sad it was sometimes, how lonely and scary it was waiting for a court date, about how there were these sudden, unpredictable outbreaks of violence, sometimes between people you thought were friends, about how much I missed my dad and the yard.“I got my shit straight in there. Studied a lot, kept up with my schoolwork as best I could. When I got out, I had some things to catch up on, school-wise, so I stayed here, finished up. Did a couple of years of community college and worked at the salvage yard. I made enough to pay back the family whose garage I burned down, paid the tenant’s hospital bills, the stuff insurance didn’t cover. Then I went to Texas for school.”
“Wow,” says Kit, and I wish I’d had a more noble story to impress her with. I’m proud of how I cleaned up, but it’s not easy to tell people that you’d been the kind of person to do something so incredibly stupid and dangerous. After a beat, she says,“But you could come back now, if you wanted. You could take over the salvage yard. You’re good at it.”
I smile down at her, and for a second it feels as if we’re the only two people in this room. I wish we were. I wish I could ask her if she holds it against me, if she’s even a little afraid that I’d once been capable of something so awful. Instead, I say,“I’m good at what I do now. And it’s not all that different from working at the salvage yard.” I reach into my pocket to pull out the small talisman I’ve carried with me everywhere since I was ten. I set it on the table. It’s a small, octagonal prism, pale green, a half-inch at its widest point.“I found this going through the tear-down we had of an old chimney. Basically it was a big truck full of bricks, and my job was to knock as much cement off as I could, save the best bricks. But about halfway through, I found this,” I say, setting my index finger atop it, pulling it back toward me.“It’s not worth a whole lot, actually. This kind of piece is pretty easy to find. But it doesn’t belong in a bunch of bricks. And it would’ve been easy to overlook. I just caught it in the right light.” I smile to myself, remember running in to show my dad, who told me I should go back through the pile I’d already done, make sure I hadn’t missed anything else.“Anyways, the point is, I think of it this way: Jasper and I, we sort through a lot of bricks, and we find the gems. We help them go somewhere where they can shine.”
“Kit’s the gem, huh?” says Zoe, suspicious as all hell.
“Kit’s the gem.” I believe it. I believe Kit’s getting crushed working in that basement office, buried under the pressures of other people’s research and data collection. I believe if she had money and access and independence, she could be more successful than she’s ever imagined.
“But—you’re not really thinking about this, are you, Kit? About going to Texas?” Greer asks.
There’s still no hesitation.“No. I’m not going to Texas.” She looks over at me, gives me a half-hearted smile.“But that was a whole lot better than anything you’ve said to me so far, Tucker.”
It’s another hour and a half before we leave the bar. The conversation had long since shifted away from work, and I was glad to have the spotlight off, to watch Kit as she interacted with her friends. The three of them told a long, winding story of how they all first met, something about a yoga mat, a hairbrush, and a goldfish in a bag, and they laughed so hard that I’d had trouble understanding some of what they’d said. But I didn’t care, because I like watching Kit laugh. She’d had to keep wiping her eyes and catching her breath, shimmying in her seat—everything about her in on the act of laughing, as though it’s not so common for her that her body’s accustomed to it.
As we step out into the night air, even cooler now from the pounding rain that came down while we were inside, I know two things for sure, and they don’t necessarily sync up. First, I know that tonight I made a good impression on Kit and the people she deems most important to her consideration of anything I’ve been offering her on behalf of Beaumont. Second, I know that Kit’s not ever going to leave Zoe or Greer easily. The three of them interact as a family, like they have the weight of a lifetime of shared experience between them. Usually, when I scout talent like Kit, young professionals who are living in the towns where they did a degree or a postdoc, they aren’t hugely tied to their geographic location. They may have some fondness for the place, or even good friends or a partner, but they don’t have the kinds of ties that make them want to dig in for a lifetime.
Kit is dug in. And Greer and Zoe are dug in right beside her.
“Hey,” Kit says, lagging behind while Zoe and Greer walk ahead. They’re taking a cab back to Kit’s house, and I’m glad she won’t be heading back there alone.“I’m so sorry about what I said before. About you being a—a delinquent. That was really insensitive.”
