Some truths arrive in the body first and only later make their way to the mind.
My stomach has dropped to somewhere below the bar stool. Not nausea exactly—the disorienting sensation of a floor disappearing under your feet, the half-second of freefall before you find solid ground again, except the ground hasn’t come. My hands are on the bar and they look like my hands. Inside them, everything is shaking. I don’t know where to focus my eyes. I don’t know where to focus my thoughts.
The back door opens.
Kragen comes through, wiping his hands on a bar towel, already talking about the delivery—the Grim Dark came in three cases short again, Grulk is going to have opinions. He’s moving with the ease of someone in their own space, comfortable, present, and when he clears the end of the bar, he looks at me and stops talking.
“You okay?” he says.
He already knows. I can see it in his face—not exactly what happened, but that my response has shifted. He reads me the way I read wood grain. He always has.
“Yes,” I say.
I say it the same way I said that’s beautiful to Grulk—in my own voice, at the right volume, with my face carefully arranged.
He looks at me for a moment longer.
“Yeah,” he says. Not agreement. Something else.
He sets the bar towel down. Doesn’t move toward me. Doesn’t move away. He stays where he is at the end of the bar, and I stay where I am on my stool and the two regulars are talking at the far end and Grulk is drinking his Grim Dark and the bar is open and neither of us is moving.
I put my hands around my glass.
The scar on my hip is something no one had ever simply accepted before him. Everyone else had managed—either ignored it, which required effort, or addressed it, which required more. He just kissed it. Like it was simply part of me. Like there was nothing there that required handling.
I had thought:No one has ever done that.
I recall it in the new light, and I don’t know what I think.
He kissed it like it was nothing. Like there was no history in it, no damage, no story that needed to be discussed. I thought that was the truest thing anyone had ever done for me.
Now, I don’t know what it was.
That’s the thing. I don’t know. I can’t know.
“Kragen,” I say.
He looks at me.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I just… I think I’m going to head home. I’ve got an early morning.”
His expression shows me he knows my world has shifted, but he doesn’t try to stop me. He wouldn’t; that’s not who he is. He just looks at me with the expression he has when he’s receiving something he doesn’t fully understand and is choosing to hold it carefully until he does.
“Okay,” he says.
Gathering my things, I say goodbye to Grulk, who is warm and enormous and has no idea what he set in motion. A few words go to Walt. Then I walk out through the front door into the Missouri summer heat, and I sit in my car in the parking lot for a moment with my hands on the wheel.
The drive home is twenty-three point four miles.
I know every curve of it.
I drive.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kragen
I know before I’m through the door.
