Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35443 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
At nine am on day three I start rethinkin' my plan and I send people into the kitchen to make food.
That's what gets the grumble.
Not the waitin'. Not the two days of holdin' still. Not the silence, not the watchin', not the slow crawl of hours that don't move the way hours are supposed to move.
No. It's the food.
It's the absence of women in a kitchen and every man in this room is feelin' it.
A few minutes later I hear the first one callin' home. Ya OK? Anyone come by? How's the kids… Voice pitched low, tilted toward the wall, like that makes it private. Like I can't hear every word bouncin' off this concrete.
I don't even stop it.
Because I wanna know too.
After that first guy hangs up, the others start callin'. One by one. Quiet and quick, like confession. Same answer comin' back every way around—no one called, no one came, everything's fine.
Each answer lands a little heavier than the last, not because the news is bad but because it ain't.
Because fine is a strange thing to be after all this holdin'.
Diesel calls last. We're sittin' close enough that I can hear Mama Jo when she picks up—that voice she's got, flat and warm at the same time, like scorched earth that still grows somethin'.
She wasn't here when it went down. He told her to stay home. All the women worth a damn were told to stay home, and every single one of them had the sense to listen and the spine to wait without askin' too many questions.
That's its own kind of loyalty. Quiet loyalty. The kind that doesn't get a patch but holds everything together anyway.
And she confirms what all the others said.
Nothing is happenin'.
We eat. We piss. We sit in silence that's neither comfortable or hostile.
Some guys talk a little.
Some of 'em sleep on the couch.
I don't sleep.
The night passes.
The morning passes.
The next two fuckin' days pass like bad debt—slow and ugly and never quite done.
And now I just gotta admit it.
I'm hesitant. But facts are facts and the facts are these—we maybe, possibly, by some grace of a God I don't entirely believe in and some dumb luck I definitely don't deserve… we got away with it.
Or it hasn't started yet.
Which is a thought I stuff down before it gets legs.
By the time that realization starts settin' in, our guard is fully down.
Not lowered—down.
Like a fence that got tired of standin'.
I watch it happen in real time and I don't stop it because I'm tired too, and tired is contagious as hell inside a closed building with too many bodies and not enough air.
People go home. Ones with somewhere to be, anyway.
Dusty's woman shows up—Giselle—and she doesn't ask questions, she just moves straight to the kitchen like she was always comin', like she knew, and within twenty minutes something's on the stove that smells like the opposite of everything the last two days were.
Then Mama Jo is here. And when Mama Jo walks through a door, the whole room recalibrates. She doesn't announce herself or make a show. She just sets her bag down and starts runnin' the table, and card games materialize around her the way order always does around a woman like that—naturally, without anyone decidin' to let it happen.
The music starts. Somebody cranks it and nobody tells him to turn it down.
Drinks flow. Real drinks, not the two-finger paranoid-sip kind we been nursin' for two days. The full pour. The fuck-it pour.
And just like that, it's over.
Well.
Probably not. I know that. It's not over. It's just gone quiet.
But we're dumb right now. Dumb and tired and hungry and lookin' for any version of normal we can stand in for five fuckin' minutes.
And it turns out that waitin' for a siege that takes its time showin' up is worse than the actual siege itself—'cause at least the siege is honest. At least the siege shows you its face.
The waitin' just eats you from the inside and never even has the decency to finish the job.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I already know who it is. I don't wanna look.
But of course I look. I always look. I will always fuckin' look.
It's a simple message, the way they always are. The way she's always been—sayin' the most with the least, layin' down one word like she's placin' a single stone across a river and trustin' me to know where to step.
Hi.
That's it. Just hi. One syllable. Two letters. Nothin' that would mean a goddamn thing to anyone who found this phone, anyone who scrolled through and read it over my shoulder—just hi, just a word so small it barely takes up space on the screen.
But she knows what it means and she knows I know what it means and honest to God, I need that right now.