“The newest partner gets the runs.”
“Yes.”
“Is that good or bad?”
I thought about it. I’d had a year to think about it and I’d never quite landed on an answer.
“It’s good,” I said. “I see the whole operation from the inside. I know every road and every property and every piece of equipment we have. It’s not glamorous. But I’m the only one who knows where everything is.”
“That sounds like a foundation.”
I looked over at her.
She wasn’t looking at me. She was staring out at the river. She’d said it like she was commenting on the road. Like she didn’t know she’d just put a word on something I hadn’t put a word on in a year.
I kept driving.
The turnoff was unmarked. I took it slowly because the truck’s suspension was older than I was, and the gravel kicked up in a way that made the truck sound like a junkyard.
The track went down through the trees and ended at a flat clearing maybe twenty feet from the bank. The river was wider here. Slower. There was a flat rock the size of a king bed about ten feet from the water, and that was where I went.
I killed the engine. The sudden quiet made my ears ring.
“This is yours?” she asked.
“It’s not anyone’s. It’s just where I come.”
We got out. She walked to the rock and put her hand on it like she was testing whether it was hot. Then she climbed up and sat cross-legged. I grabbed a couple of bottled waters from the cooler in the back of the truck—I kept plenty on hand because I never knew what the day would bring.
I handed her a bottle and she took it. “You always bring people here?” she asked.
“No.”
“Wells, you said.”
“He brought me. I haven’t brought anyone.”
She uncapped the water, took a sip, and looked out at the river. The water moved past us slowly, the way it did in July when the rains had stopped and there was no reason for the river to hurry.
“Tell me about you,” I said.
She took a long swig of water before answering. “I’m twenty-three. I have one sister, who’s twenty-six and married and has two children. I have two parents who are still married and live in the same house I grew up in. I work from a one-bedroom apartment in Charlotte that I’ve lived in for two years. I don’t have a dog because I’m not home enough, but I want one. That’s most of it.”
“That’s not most of it.”
“It’s the part you can write down.”
I waited.
She looked at the river for a while. I let her have the quiet. She wasn’t a woman you pulled things out of. She talked about things when she was ready.
“I had a boyfriend in college,” she said. “Sophomore year. We dated for eight months. He told me on a Saturday in February that he didn’t think we were going to last because I wasn’t, quote, easy to know. He said he felt like he was always reading me. He said it like it was my fault.”
“It wasn’t.”
“I know that now. At the time, I thought he had a point.”
“What happened after that?”
