Chapter 5: No One Decides for Me

On my fourth night at Cold Iron, I went down to dinner.

I did it on my own two feet, with one hand on the rail and the other pressed to my ribs.

Nobody had told me I could.

Rafe had told me to stay in the back rooms, and the kitchen was a back room.

I had checked.

Mabel was at the stove with her glasses fogged.

Twenty-odd bikers filled a table built from two church pews and a cable spool, and not one of them was quiet.

When I came through the door, every voice stopped.

A man with a shaved head put down his fork.

"That's her?" he said.

"That's Callie," said Mabel. "She's helping me, so be nice, or I'll put hot sauce in your beer."

"What does she do?"

"She tastes the gravy," I said.

Somebody laughed.

Otis didn't.

He sat at the end of the table with his bad leg stretched out, studying me over his beard.

"Sit," Mabel said. "You've lost weight you didn't have."

I sat at the end of a bench, between a bartender with a braid and a boy I took for the prospect.

Rafe came in last, from the garage.

His hair was wet, and a clean black shirt stuck to his shoulders, and I looked at my plate so hard I almost saw through it.

He took the chair across from me and said nothing.

Someone passed me the potatoes.

"So how's the leg?" the bartender asked.

"Mabel's good with a needle."

"She sewed my ear back on once," he said, and showed me.

Everybody had a Mabel story.

By the second one I was laughing, and my ribs hurt, and I didn't mind.

"What do you do, Callie?" the prospect asked, very politely. "For real."

I opened my mouth and had nothing.

"She's a hotel girl," Otis said. "Isn't that right?"

"That's right."

"Bridesmaid, too, I heard. Wrong car."

"Otis," Rafe said.

"I'm making conversation."

"Make it about the potatoes."

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