And if it was for his…No. I needed him to be steady, solid, secure. I needed it too badly to pursue that one. Too badly to wonder about the number of live tattoos he had. Even for a motorcycle thug.
Another of the things I’d never thought about was the way when we went home together it was always his home. He’d been inside my apartment a handful of times. If we had an afternoon together we went hiking or went back to his place. If we had an evening together and we decided to go out, we went where he wanted to go because there wasn’t anywhere I wanted to go. I knew his friends. He didn’t know mine. His house wards were set to know me. Mine weren’t set to know him.
I didn’t have friends. I had the coffeehouse. A few librarians—chiefly Aimil, who had been a Charlie’s regular all her life—was as far afield as I went.
It is halfway true that if you are involved in a family coffeehouse you don’t have a life. But only halfway. Mel had a life.
I’ve said before that Mel had been a bit of a hoodlum in his younger days, although nobody seemed to be quite sure how much, or maybe his War service had wiped earlier misdeeds off the record. He wasn’t old now but he’d had time to go wrong and then change his mind. There must have been signs he wasn’t going wrong right, though, even at the time. Some of his tattoos were for pretty strange things. Some of them I didn’t know the purpose of because when I’d asked he’d said “Um” and gone silent.
Anybody who spent a lot of time on or about motorcycles would have a couple of the regulation anti-crushed-by-flying-metal-or-running-into-trees-at-high-speeds wards, either pricked into your skin or on a chain round your neck or a secret pocket in your belt or the soles of your biker boots. He had those. But he also had a seeing-things-clearly charm that I hadn’t recognized when I saw it the first time: okay, a useful thing for someone on the wrong side of the law (or the wrong side of the battle zone) who needs to have his eyes peeled for trouble, but Mel’s wasn’t the conventional block-and-warn ward that most petty crooks used for the purpose.
(You could sometimes half-identify the variety of malfeasant you were dealing with by whether or not you could see that ward. Scammers, of course, kept it well hidden: wouldn’t do to have it dangling on a bracelet or tattooed on your wrist when you popped your cuffs at someone you were trying to schmooze. A couple of Mel’s old gang who had also changed their minds about being professional bad guys had it on the backs of their gonna-punch-you-in-the-nose hands, so the guy who was about to get punched would see it on the fist being held under his nose.)
Anyway. Mel still bought and sold motorcycles. He still drank beer with friends at the Nighthouse or the Jug. Wives and steady girlfriends (very occasionally boyfriends) were expected to show up if they wanted to. (Better yet, we were expected to talk. Of course the women who could talk about ignition mixtures and piston resistance were preferred, but you can’t have everything.) He’d bought a house in what had been Chesterfield but was now called Whiteout, the worst-Wars-hit section of New Arcadia, had it cleared and re-warded, and was slowly doing it over into something even my mother would recognize as habitable (although the motorcycle-refit garage on what had been the ground floor would probably have given her spasms). He loved cooking and Charlie’s but he wasn’t owned by them.
I felt like maybe I should be asking to borrow his survival textbook. Maybe the problem was that the first chapters in it were about running away from home at fourteen and lying about your age, and then being a biker bandit for a few years before deciding that the fact you always seemed to wind up frying the sausages over the fire for everybody was maybe a pointer toward a different way of life with better retirement options, which five years of the Wars had given him plenty of time to consider.
Mel would have understood why I drove out to the lake that night. He probably did understand without my telling him. I would have liked hearing him understand. But I didn’t want to tell him. Because I couldn’t—couldn’t—tell him what happened after.
But you don’t have to talk when you’re making love, and bodies have their own language. Also you don’t have to use your eyes so much. There are other things going on.
Meanwhile I was still reaching the wrong distance to pick up the edges of baking sheets and muffin tins or the handles of spoons, and fumbling them when I managed to grab them at all, and I walked into doors a little too often instead of through them. At least I knew the recipes I used all the time by heart and didn’t have to bother peering at print midmix or identifying the lines on measuring jugs. Nor had I lost my sense of whether a batter or a dough was going together right or not, or what to do if it wasn’t.
I could tell Jesse and Pat about seeing in the dark and let them tell me what to do about it. Or with it. As far as my strange new talents went it beat hell out of Unusual Usages of Table Knives. And maybe if I told them I could bear to tell the people at Charlie’s.
Nobody had to know anything about why I could now see in the dark. Including the dark of the day.
One day when Pat and John came in for hot-out-of-the-oven cinnamon rolls at about six-thirty-two, I tipped them onto a plate myself and took them out while Liz was still yawning over the coffeepot. “You have some free time soon maybe?” I said, trying to sound casual in my turn. They both shifted in their seats, trying not to point like hunting dogs. Not very many people, even at Charlie’s, are at their best at that hour, but it doesn’t pay to be careless. And Mrs. Bialosky was there, pretending to read a newspaper while waiting for one of her confederates to turn up to make a clandestine report. “For you, Sunshine, anything,” said Pat.
“I’m off at two,” I said.
“Come round the shop,” said Pat. “There are two desks in the entry, okay? You go up to the right-hand one and say Pat’s expecting you and they’ll let you straight in.”
I nodded.
There was a young woman at that desk with a nameplate and a sharp uniform and a sharp look like she should have had a rank to go on the nameplate, but what do I know? She hit two buzzers, one that opened the inner door and one that, presumably, warned Pat, because he came walking out to meet me before I’d gone very far down the faceless hallway Mel must have brought me out of the last night of the giggler’s existence on this earth, but it was so characterless I was ready to believe I had crossed one of those distance-folding thresholds and was now on Mars. If so, Pat was there with me. Maybe we’d been on Mars that night too. “What if the wrong person showed up first and said you were expecting them?” I said.
“I told them middling tall, skinny, weird-looking hair because it will have just been let out of being tied up in a scarf for working in a restaurant and you never comb it, wearing a fierce look,” said Pat. “I was pretty safe.”
“Fierce?” I said. I also thought, Skinny?, but I have my pride. The part about my hair is true.
“Yeah. Fierce. Through here,” and he opened a door and shepherded me through. This was, presumably, Pat’s office. The chair behind the desk was empty, but had that pushed-back-someone-just-got-up look. Jesse was sitting on a chair to one side of the desk. “Someone I want you to meet,” Pat said, nodding toward the other person in the room, who stood up out of her chair, and said in a rather stricken voice, “Hi.”
Aimil.
I looked at her and she looked at me. With my funny vision the sockets of her deep eyes and the hollows of her cheeks had a glittering dark periphery. “Okay,” I said, planning not to lose my temper unless it was absolutely necessary. “What are you doing here?”