Chapter 5: Where He Lives

I found him that night on the dock, coiling a rope that did not need coiling.

The cameras had gone in for the evening, and the lodge windows glowed gold behind me.

I had a bandage on my knee and a glass of water I had been too nervous to drink.

"Where do you live?" I said.

Ray didn't look up from the rope.

"Is that what you came out here to ask?"

"My roommate says your paperwork isn't in the safe."

"Your roommate's a menace."

"She drove a bus for thirty years. She knows everything about everybody."

He laid the rope down and straightened up slowly.

The dock lamp turned the grey in his hair to silver.

"A big house on a hill," he said. "I mostly don't like it."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the true one."

"It's a quarter of an answer," I said.

"Nobody has asked me that in six years and wanted to know," he said. "They want to know what I do."

"What do you do?"

"I fix things that break on long roads."

I stepped closer.

He was a head taller than me, and I had to tip my chin up to look him in the eye.

"Lorna," he said, very low. "I'm trying to tell you the truth in an order you can stand."

"Then start with one that I can."

He looked at my mouth.

I was fifty-eight years old.

Nobody had looked at me since my wedding, and I hadn't liked it half as much then.

"I want to kiss you," he said.

"I have wanted to since you stood in the road with your sewing kit."

"You were showing off."

"I was."

"Then do it," I said. "Show off."

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