Chapter 1
Thewindowlatchhadworked loose again.
I felt it before I opened my eyes — that thin line of cold air cutting across my face like a wire, the particular whistle of mountain wind finding a gap it shouldn’t have been able to find. July, 2005, in Harlan Creek, and I was sleeping under a blanket because I couldn’t keep a three-dollar latch in place.
I’d fixed it twice. Once with a butter knife and a strip of electrical tape, which held for eleven days. Once with the same butter knife and better tape, which held for six. The metal was warped in the frame, the kind of damage that needed a new latch entirely or a landlord who gave enough of a damn to replace it. I had neither. What I had was a room above a bar that cost me nothing because I worked the bar, and a window that breathed mountain air across my pillow whether I wanted it to or not.
I didn’t try to fix it again now. I lay in the dark for another thirty seconds — my alarm hadn’t gone off yet, but my body didn’t care about alarms, hadn’t since I was nine years old and learned that being awake before the house was awake meantbeing first to whatever was in the kitchen — and then I pushed the blanket off and put my feet on cold floorboards.
The room was barely a room. Single bed against the wall, a chest of drawers that had been here longer than I had and would be here after I left, and a small desk wedged under the window that I used for the bookkeeping work that actually paid. If I stood in the center and stretched my arms I could almost touch two walls. I’d measured once, in the first week, because I measure things. It’s what I do. Eight feet by ten. Eighty square feet of space that was mine only in the loosest sense — Rusty’s name on the lease, Rusty’s furniture, Rusty’s dead spider plant on the windowsill.
I dressed in the dark. Not because I was being careful, not because anyone was sleeping nearby. The light overhead was a bare bulb on a pull chain and it took half a minute to warm up to anything useful. Black jeans from the top drawer, soft enough to mean they were getting thin at the knees. Grey fitted t-shirt, clean, from the stack of four I rotated through. My one good flannel — green and black, still holding its shape — pulled on open over the t-shirt like a jacket. Everything functional. Everything chosen to need no choosing.
The mirror above the dresser was small and slightly tilted, mounted with a single nail that wanted to pull free of the plaster. I caught my reflection as I pulled my hair back: dark eyes, dark hair, a face that hadn’t had makeup on it in weeks and didn’t miss it. I looked — fine. The kind of pretty that registers in the peripheral, the kind that gets noticed by men at the bar in the specific way that means they’re three beers in and lonely, not that they’re actually seeing me. I didn’t mind. Being seen was overrated.
I twisted the hair tie twice, tucked a loose strand behind my ear, and turned away from the mirror.
The boots were by the bed where I’d left them. Brown leather, resoled once at a cobbler in Pueblo who’d charged me twenty dollars and told me they had maybe another year in them. That was eight months ago. I sat on the edge of the mattress, pulled the left one on, and reached for the right.
My heel caught the shoebox.
It slid out from under the bed with a soft scrape against the floorboards. The lid was still taped shut. I hadn’t opened it in months. Hadn’t needed to. Everything in it was memorized anyway: the photos, the report cards, the one birthday card that said Sadie-bug in handwriting I couldn’t match to a face anymore. A stuffed rabbit called Clover. Poor Clover had been through almost as much as I had. She had just one button eye left on her face, and even that was hanging by a thread. Eighty square feet and I kept my entire childhood in a Nike box under a borrowed bed.
I shoved it back with my heel. Hard enough that it hit the wall.
Bye bye, Clover.
Tied my laces. Stood up. Didn’t look at the floor.
The staircase behind the bar was narrow and unlit, and I took it with one hand on the wall, counting steps. Fourteen. At the bottom, the door opened into the back hallway, and then I was in The Timberline proper. The familiar smell hit me: stale beer, pine cleaner, fryer oil from last night hanging in the air like a ghost that wouldn‘t leave. The chairs were still up on the tables. The neon Coors sign behind the bar buzzed its low electric hum, the only light in the room, painting everything in flat blue.
I moved through it without turning anything on. I knew where the tables were, where the stools jutted out, where the loose floorboard was near the service end that would trip you if you forgot. I had this place mapped like a body maps a scar — without thinking, without choosing, just knowing.
At the back door, I stopped. Checked the deadbolt. Checked the lot through the glass — empty, dark, the treeline a black wall against a sky that was just starting to go grey at the edges.
Behind me, the staircase door was still open. I went back and pulled it shut. The lock was a sliding bolt that didn’t quite catch — another thing that needed fixing.
I slid it into place anyway. Heard the metal click, or almost click, against the housing.
Good enough.
Everything was always good enough. That was the trick of it — you set the bar at good enough and you never had to feel the gap between what you had and what you didn’t.
I turned toward the kitchen. There was coffee to make and a day to get through and sixty-three things that needed doing before the doors opened, and I was already doing the math on all of them before my boots hit the barroom floor.
***
Hector Briggs ran his logging supply business the way most men in Harlan Creek ran things — by instinct, by habit, and with a filing system that existed primarily in his head and secondarily in a series of shoeboxes that made mine look organized.
I had his receipts spread across the small table in The Timberline’s back room — my unofficial office, though nobody had ever called it that out loud. The table was meant for staff meals that nobody ate. I‘d claimed it my second week with a ledger, a ten-year-old adding machine I’d bought for four dollars at a church sale in Pueblo, and the unspoken understanding that this corner of the bar was mine between six and eight in the morning when nobody else wanted it.
The adding machine was a Casio with a cracked display and a paper roll I had to order online because nobody stocked themanymore. It printed in faded purple ink. The chunk-chunk-chunk of it working through a column of numbers was the most satisfying sound I knew — each line verified, each total confirmed, the world reduced to something that either balanced or didn’t. Numbers were like that. They didn‘t have moods. They didn’t change their minds. They didn’t promise things and then leave.
Briggs’s accounts for June were a mess, but the kind of mess I understood. He was overordering chainsaw chain by about fifteen percent — probably buying extra because he kept forgetting he‘d already placed the order — and his fuel costs were running high because he hadn’t updated his mileage rate since 1999. I made the corrections in pencil first, then ink, the way I always did. Two passes. Trust but verify, except I didn’t trust, so really it was just verify twice.
Three clients. Briggs, a woman who ran a craft store on the highway, and a retired couple who owned rental cabins outside of town and couldn’t make sense of their tax obligations. The three of them together paid me eleven hundred dollars a month, cash, no paperwork. Add that to what I made behind the bar — tips plus the room upstairs in lieu of hourly — and I was clearing just enough to put two hundred a month into the savings account at the credit union in Pueblo that nobody knew about. Two hundred a month. At that rate I’d have enough to —
I stopped the calculation. I always stopped it there. Running the full numbers only made the distance real, and I needed it to stay abstract. A direction, not a destination. Something I was moving toward, not something I could measure the gap to.
