"Yeah, I did."
CHAPTER FIVE
Rooster
"She stays as long as she needs to." Amara says it in the main room with the door open, and half the club's close enough to hear it.
That's the point.
What she’s really saying is that Mila is under her roof and if anyone has a problem with it, they can go see her.
Nobody's got a problem with it.
Nobody's looking at Mila at all.
Word's gone around the club in under two hours, the way it does.
Zorro found out from Razor.
Python found out from Zorro.
By four o'clock, a prospect who wasn't in that office could've told you the name of the town my mother lives in.
Ruby comes out of her kitchen with a dish towel in her hands and stands in the doorway.
She looks at me. Four seconds, maybe five.
Then she goes back in.
She doesn't put her hand on my back.
For years she's done that every single morning, on her way past the stove, half a second, and I never thought about it once until it didn't happen.
Now I'm standing in the main room of my own club with my ears ringing like somebody clapped next to my head.
I go in there anyway. Around seven, when the noise dies down, and the food's gone, and it's just her and the pans.
The can's on the shelf over the stove.
Lid on.
She hasn't asked me to open that can one time in six years, and I've never once mentioned that I do it.
Here it is at eye level with the lid seated down tight where somebody pressed it back on with the heel of their hand.
Ruby's got her back to me at the sink. She doesn't turn around.
She knows I'm in here—she knew before I came through the door, that woman knows who's in her kitchen by the sound of the floor—and she stands there with her hands in the water and doesn't turn around.
I don't take it down.
I don't know what happens if I take it down and I'm not going to find out standing in a kitchen at seven o'clock at night, so I go back out. She never says a word, and neither do I.
The main room's emptying.
Ruby's plates are going back to the kitchen two at a time, and nobody's holding a conversation, and I get through it and out the side door and across the courtyard.
It's cold enough now that the gravel's gone hard and the garage light's on.
