I’d heard the name. I suspected everybody in Charleston had heard the name—it was the hotel near the historic waterfront, the one with the gas lanterns and the wraparound piazza and the resort-style pool out back. The kind of place I walked past on my way between shifts and admired in the abstract the way you admired things that had no particular relevance to your actual life.
I picked the phone back up.
That's a very fancy hotel, I typed.
They have good bourbon, he replied.And I have a suite with a balcony. You can see a piece of the harbor from up there, if you lean right. Free of charge.
I read that last part twice.
Free of charge.
He'd said it like a joke. Light and easy, the way he said most things. But underneath it was the thing I'd been turning over all morning—the way he'd recognized my poverty reflex at the donut shop, the way he'd saidmy treatbefore I'd had to navigate it, the way he moved around my money the way you moved around a bruise you'd noticed on someone you were being careful with.
He'd known since the donut shop, probably before, and he wasn't making it a thing. He was just—building the geometry of it around me so that the free things didn't feel like charity. So they felt like what they actually were, which was a man who had a balcony that faced the harbor and wanted to show it to me.
I thought about the Battery. The free walk I'd catalogued. The harbor at dusk when the light went gold.
The harbor from a balcony at The Palmetto Rose was the same harbor.
Same water. Same palmettos going black against the sky.
Just higher up.
Okay, I typed.Seven o'clock.
I set the phone down and looked at the clothes hanging on the back of my door and thought about what a person wore to The Palmetto Rose when she was a waitress from the Smoky Mountains who owned one good pair of boots and was ninety-four dollars short on rent and was going, anyway.
I thought about Dolly.
I thought:the boots. Definitely the boots.
18
TOMMY
Iwalked out of her building smelling like her.
That was the part I noticed first, and the part I didn't want to wash off. Some kind of soap she used—citrus, something herbal underneath—on the inside of my forearms where I'd held her in the bathtub. On the side of my neck where she'd kissed me at the door. On my shirt collar where her hair had brushed it. I caught it three times in the first half-block, and three times, I smiled like an idiot and didn't try to hide it.
I'd never been a man who walked out of a pretty girl's apartment in the morning and went on astroll.
Walking-out-the-morning-after, in my professional life, was an exercise in not being seen. Quick exit. Cab two streets over. Eyes on the windows above eye level for somebody who shouldn't be in them.
This morning, I walked out the front. I walked at a pace that wasn't anybody's pace but mine. I tipped my chin at an old woman watering her stoop ferns and she saidgood morning, sonand I saidmorning, ma'am,and I crossed the street with theother people who were crossing the street, like a guy with normal places to be.
It felt good.
It felt like the part of me that had grown up running a fence line with my brothers in the cool hour after sunup—a body that had a body's reasons to move, that wasn't going anywhere because anywhere was waiting.
I let myself enjoy it for two blocks.
That was when the bells started going off.
They weren't loud. They never were. The bells were the same bells they always were—the small rearrangement of a street's ambient pattern, the kind of thing the brain registered before the mouth could name it. A Tahoe parked at the far corner with somebody behind the wheel who wasn't reading his phone. A second Tahoe one block down on the cross street, same posture. A guy in a windbreaker on the opposite sidewalk who was not, on any day of his real life, a man whose footwear was that comfortable.
Three vehicles. Foot man. They weren't trying to be invisible. That was the message.We see you. We want you to know.
Well.
