Page 156 of Shatter

She's nineteen, a nursing student at FSU with a ponytail and bitten nails, and she's so nervous her hands are shaking on the rolling pin.

"Cold butter, warm hands." I nudge the block of dough an inch closer to her. "Overwork it, and you get a hockey puck. Aziza will throw it at your head."

"I heard that." Aziza's voice carries from the ovens.

The girl laughs, startled, and some of the stiffness goes out of her shoulders.

I watch her fold the dough, clumsy and careful, and I don't correct her.

She'll learn.

Somebody taught me once, standing right here, and she never asked me a single question I didn't want to answer.

My reflection floats in the steel of the mixer beside me, warped and stretched.

Blonde.

All of it, now, cut short to my chin the week after the funeral, the last of the copper swept up off the clubhouse bathroom floor while Tindra held the scissors and pretended she wasn't crying.

I still catch myself in windows sometimes and don't know who I'm looking at for a second.

Then I do.

By two in the afternoon, I'm at Dag's desk behind the room where they hold kirkja, with his reading lamp on and a stack of club ledgers at my elbow.

He hired me four days after the funeral without asking.

He carried a box of receipts into Hakon's room, set it on the bed next to me where I was lying staring at the ceiling fan, and said the club's books were a disgrace and he'd pay me twice what Aziza did.

I sat up for the first time in four days.

I've been untangling thirty years of Raiders finances ever since, and I'm good at it.

Nobody in this building has ever once asked me to make a number say something it doesn't.

My laptop's open beside the ledgers, a news site filling the screen:

Seattle Freight Executive Indicted in Money Laundering Scheme.

Under the headline, a photograph of my father being walked down the courthouse steps in handcuffs, his good gray suit rumpled, his face turned away from the cameras.

My thumb hovers over the trackpad and doesn't move.

The drive went to the FBI three weeks after Apalachicola.

Vanir mailed it from a post office in Birmingham in a padded envelope with no return address.

I read the article once, the morning it ran.

I haven't read it again.

My mother called Pierce's old phone the day of the funeral.

I was holding it when it rang, and I let it ring until it stopped.

My brother went into the ground in the cemetery on Old Bainbridge Road, under a live oak, twelve hundred miles from Mercer Island, with an entire motorcycle club standing behind me in the rain.

He'd have hated the heat and the bikes.