I Ran Home With My Baby to My Brother's Biker Friends, and the Three Who Tormented Me Said I Was Theirs to Guard novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Key on the Dresser
Mason stitches her palm and the unsigned birthday cards come out; Dirk leaves a key without crossing the threshold; Dutch says Marcel was at the gate at six.
Zuri woke at six with her fist in her mouth and a look of deep personal betrayal.
I fed her the last of the formula from the diaper bag, mixed with water from the sink, warmed in a mug under the heater's air.
She drank it like a prisoner.
When I looked up, Mason Ekstrom was standing in the open door.
He had not come in.
He was holding a green metal box with a red cross on the lid.
"First aid," he said.
"From the tow truck.
"You've been bleeding on your sleeve for six hours."
I looked down.
I had.
"I can do it myself."
"With one hand?"
He had a point.
He set the box on the dresser, and waited for me to say yes.
He did not take one step farther.
"Come in," I said.
He came in and knelt in front of the bed.
He unwound the napkin from my palm so slowly that I stopped breathing.
The cut ran from the base of my thumb to the heel of my hand, deep at one end where the screen's edge had caught.
"That's ugly," he said.
"It is."
"It needs closing.
"I've got butterfly strips.
"I used to do my little brother's knees."
His hands were warm and calloused, and they held mine very still.
He cleaned it with a pad that stung.
I hissed.
"Sorry," he said.
"Keep going," I said.
He set the strips across the cut one at a time, pressing each end flat with his thumb.
His eyes stayed on my hand.
Mine stayed on the top of his head, on the sandy hair that stuck up at the crown.
I had known this boy five years.
He had been twenty-three, sitting in a tow truck on the Blatnik Bridge with its lights going, when my car died on the Duluth side and I couldn't afford a tow.
He had hooked up my Corolla and driven me up the Hillside to my mother's house without taking a cent.
All the way, he had said exactly one thing.
"Cyrus is a good guy."
Then he had stopped, and looked out at the road, as though he'd stepped on a floorboard.
"There," he said now.
He taped a square of gauze over the strips.
"Don't get it wet," he said.
"Thank you," I said.
"It's a hand," he said, and closed the first aid box.
He stayed on his knees a moment longer than he needed to.
"I have something," he said.
"It's going to sound weird."
"Okay."
"I've got a box in the truck.
"I didn't know whether to bring it in."
"What kind of box?"
"Cards," he said.
His ears were red again.
"Birthday cards.
"For you.
"I sent them.
"Five of them.
"I never signed them."
I had received five birthday cards in five years from nobody.
They arrived on the day itself, with no return address and a Duluth postmark.
They were plain ones, with a single line of printed verse inside, and I had kept every one in my dresser drawer in Fargo.
I'd left them there.
I thought of the drawer, with the cards under Marcel's old undershirts, and my throat closed.
"You sent those?" I said.
"Yes," Mason said.
"Why didn't you sign them?"
"You'd have sent them back," he said.
"I thought."
I looked at him, at the boy who had towed my car and never asked for money and never once, in five years, used my brother's name as a door into my life.
"I wouldn't have," I said.
He smiled, for the first time since the lot.
It changed his whole face.
"Okay," he said, and got up to go.
He stopped at the threshold.
"I'll bring you coffee."
A shadow filled the hall behind him.
"Mason," Dirk said.
He stood with something in his hand, outside the door.
He had not come in either.
He had not even looked at me.
He held out a small brass key, at arm's length, on his open palm.
Mason took it and passed it to me.
It was the key to the room's inner lock.
"Spare," Dirk said, to the floor.
"In case yours gets lost."
"You could have given it to me," I said.
"I could have," Dirk said.
He didn't move closer.
He said nothing else.
When I looked again, he was gone, and the hall was empty.
I set the key on the dresser beside the green box, and stared at it.
He had stood nine feet from my door, and he had not crossed the sill.
Nik shaved in the clubhouse bathroom across the hall with the door standing wide.
He had a towel around his neck and nothing on above the waist, and a body that had been built by years of hauling wrecked engines.
He leaned in the frame of my doorway, in no hurry, razor in hand.
"Morning, mouse," he said.
It was out before he'd thought.
I watched his face change when he saw mine.
It wasn't an apology.
It was the look of a man who had put his foot through a stair he'd walked ten thousand times.
"Sorry," he said.
"Habit."
"Break it."
"Yeah." He rubbed his jaw.
"I'll work on it."
"Work faster."
He grinned, a little crooked, and went back to his sink.
I carried Zuri down the hall to the bar, where a pot of coffee had been set out on a tray.
Mason had left a cup beside it with a spoon already in.
Dutch was at the long table, alone, with the lamp off and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
He had a paper map spread across the oak, of the harbor and the bay beyond it.
He looked up, and for a moment I couldn't read him.
"Sit," he said.
"I'll stand."
"Suit yourself."
He folded the map, slowly, the way you fold something you don't want read.
"He was here at six," Dutch said.
I didn't ask who.
"He came to the gate in his own car, off duty, in a good coat.
"He asked for you by your married name.
"I told him you weren't here."
"You said his name."
My voice came out thin.
"In the lot last night.
"You wouldn't say it.
"You just said it."
"Once," Dutch said.
"I said it once."
He took his glasses off his forehead and wiped them on his sleeve.
I noticed that his hand was not steady.
"He'll be back," he said.
"I told him he could come back when he had a warrant."
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