My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Ledger

Maeve reads one page of the pawn yard's lay-away ledger and sees the odd pay-out sums; Cormick catches her on the ice and lets go like he's been burned.

I went to work that night because nobody had told me I couldn't.

The hospital sits at the top of the hill, a long brick block with its lights on all night.

The pharmacy is in the basement behind a steel half-door.

My pharmacist looked up from the screen when I came in, in my scrubs, with my parka smelling of a stranger's house.

"Heard," she said.

That was all.

On a hill the size of Butte, everybody had heard before the sun came up.

She handed me the schedule-two count sheet and went to eat her sandwich.

For eight hours I did what I always did, and I counted pills.

I counted them twice and wrote the numbers and initialed every line.

While my hands counted, my head went back to the table and the paper and the pen that was still warm.

At seven I came up into the white morning with my eyes stinging.

A black truck was idling at the curb.

Enid sat in the passenger seat in her cardigan and a man's wool coat.

She leaned across and pushed the door open for me.

"Get in, love. We've an errand."

"Where's Cormick?"

"Where he always is," Enid said. "Away from the place you're in."

I got in.

She drove the way she did everything, upright and slow.

She took me down the hill to the yard behind the old railroad shops, where a chain-link gate stood open on rows of rusted machinery and stacked copper wire.

It was the crew's pawn yard.

A prefab office sat at the back with a space heater going and a clutter of desks.

"You'll need a house key," Enid said, taking one off a hook. "And a proper coat. That parka's a sieve."

"I have a coat."

"You've a parka that's seen too many winters, and I've a spare in the back." She pointed me through the door. "Get warm."

The office was empty.

It was one long room with three desks, a safe, a scale for weighing scrap and a wall of cubbyholes stuffed with yellow slips.

The big open book lay on the nearest desk.

It was the lay-away ledger.

I knew what it was without being told.

Everybody on the hill knew that book, because every family borrowed against the winter and signed their name in it.

I wasn't looking for anything.

I only looked because my eyes read columns the way another woman's eyes read faces.

The pay-out column ran down the right side in a neat clerk's hand.

First of November, $412.

First of October, $387.

First of September, $509.

They were odd sums, and none of them was round.

In a ledger for winter loans I would have expected hundreds or fifties.

I stood there with my hands in my pockets, and something small and cold went through me.

Four hundred and twelve.

Three hundred and eighty-seven.

Five hundred and nine.

I knew those numbers, and I did not know from where.

Behind me, Enid cleared her throat.

"That's not for your eyes, love," she said mildly, and closed the book. "Come and get the coat."

I took the coat.

It was a man's dark wool coat, too long in the sleeves, and it smelled of cedar and old tobacco.

We came out into the yard.

The sun was thin and bright on the ice, and the gravel was glazed solid.

Cormick stood at the far end beside a flatbed with a driver and a clipboard.

He had his back to me, in the black coat.

I watched his shoulders.

I don't know why.

I had been watching them in my head since the night before.

I stepped out across the ice, and my heel went out from under me.

I saw the sky tip.

A hand closed around my wrist.

It was a gloved hand, hard and sure, and it pulled me upright before I hit the ground.

Cormick stood in front of me.

He was closer than he had been since the card table.

I could see the gray in the red at his temples and the old white scar across his lip.

He had my wrist.

He did not let go.

One breath went by, then another.

I felt his fingers tighten once through the glove, as though his hand had decided something his face had not.

His chest rose and fell fast.

He was breathing like a man who had run up a hill.

His eyes were on my sleeve.

Then his hand opened and fell away as if my wrist had burned him, and he stepped back.

"The yard's icy," he said to the gravel. "Don't walk across it."

He turned and went back to the flatbed.

I stood holding my own wrist.

I told myself that he hated being touched.

I told myself he flinched from a bonded girl the way a man flinches from a stray dog he was made to keep.

It was a good explanation.

I turned it over three times, and I still felt the exact shape of his glove.

Enid came and stood beside me with the key in her palm.

She watched the man across the yard for a while.

"He doesn't eat in the kitchen when you're in it," she said quietly. "Did you notice?"

"I noticed."

"It isn't you."

I took the key from her hand.

"Then what is it?" I said.

Enid shook her head and looked at the headframe on the hill.

"It's not mine to say," she said. "Not yet."

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