Damaged Goods (17 page)

“Nonsense,” Jacob boomed. “She’s in the kitchen. Send her out.”

Melody poked her head around the corner, jerking her chin hard toward the dining room.

Silvie got up from the chair and smoothed her skirt, feeling
somehow underdressed anyway, and slowly walked out to where Jacob waited. His eyes lingered on her for a long moment. He said nothing, just tilted his face to the side and appraised her. Then a smile spread over his lips, even while his eyes stayed firmly fixed, making Silvie feel even smaller than she was.

“There’s my girl,” he said. The phrase became his calling card.
My girl
. He would call her that so frequently in the coming years that Silvie would consider it a second name, but the resolute firmness of that first declaration remained to this day.
My girl
.

“She needs a break from the books, I think,” Jacob announced. “An ice-cream cone is what she needs.”

“But she’s got schoolwork to finish,” Melody protested.

Silvie turned and looked over her shoulder to see her mother chewing her lip, wringing her hands, and Charlie behind her looking grim. Finally her mother relented with a meek shrug. “I guess she can go.”

Charlie neither relented nor stopped it. He simply stood in the doorway between the bar and the kitchen, a dark expression on his tired face. He kept shaking his head in a slow back-and-forth gesture that Silvie tried to puzzle out as she followed Jacob to his waiting truck. She thought about it many more times in the years that followed. He knew—Charlie knew.

Silvie tipped her head back and looked at the cleft in Hershel’s chin. She felt dirty. She’d never cheated on Jacob before. She missed his familiarity, his warmth. She missed the way he talked to her. She missed breakfast at Alison’s Café and the way Jacob always teased the waitresses. She missed his aftershave, and the way he smoothed her hair and twirled it around his fingers. It left a hard lump at the back of her throat, and she felt tears coming. But at least Hershel was more likely to let her stay now … to protect her.

“I’d better get in the shower,” she said, and slid from Hershel’s arms, wishing for something to cover her nakedness.

“Don’t go,” he said, pulling her back into bed. He peered at her with eyes blacker than she had imagined anyone’s could be. He
pressed his lips to her forehead, then her nose, and finally to her mouth. He thrust his tongue into her and explored. She let him, feeling helpless. Then he rolled on top of her and parted her legs, sliding inside. He was so much bigger than Jacob, and it took her breath away. He seemed to find new depths with each forward thrust, which she found invasive but not unpleasant.

After several minutes, Hershel groaned and fell against her, smothering her. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered.

He propped himself up on one elbow, gazing down at her. He gently smoothed the hair away from her eyes and kissed her nose. She smiled up at him, for no other reason than she’d never guessed that the quiet and sometimes curt man who’d rescued her on the highway would behave so tenderly.

“You do know it, don’t you?”

She laughed, despite herself. “I have to get ready for work,” she said. “It was your idea, remember?”

“What was I thinking? I could’ve had you in my bed all day, but instead I sent you down to the South Store to get a job. I will never cease to amaze myself. I must be the biggest moron roaming the planet.”

She slid out from under him. He let her go, watching as she crossed the room in the nude, hugging her small breasts to herself as if to hide them. Wishing she could do the same about her ass.

Hershel found Carl at the sale barn, his face bruised. The left side of his jaw was swollen to twice its normal size, and there were crusts of blood around his nostrils. Dark streaks stained his shirt. The man limped around as if he were eighty.

“What happened to you?” he asked. But even this discovery couldn’t dampen his jovial spirits. He felt like a new man.

Carl shrugged and winced as he hoisted a small box of canning jars onto his shoulder. “Couple of guys got me confused with someone else is all. I’m fine.”

“What guys?”

Carl carried the box to the end of a long aisle of household goods. “Just some new guys in camp.”

“Why would they confuse you with someone else?”

Carl dropped the box and turned to Hershel. “You never asked these sorts of questions before.”

“I guess there are lots of things I never did before,” he said to Carl. He smiled, unable to stop himself.

Carl stared, apprehensive. “You’re in a good mood.”

“Yeah, guess so.” Hershel thought again about Silvie and how she’d walked into the restaurant that morning while he waited in the pickup, making sure she was safely inside the building, as if she might be abducted in broad daylight. So what if he never asked these questions before. That was a different Hershel. He would ask after his employees if he felt like it. He’d take an interest in why the only person who seemed to still be here, taking care of things and tending to business after all these months, was coming into work bloody and limping. Hell, he might even call his mother.

“I filed a police report. It’s no big deal.”

“Good.”

“Kyrellis called,” Carl said.

“What did he want?”

“Wanted to know if you’d be down here today.”

He clenched his hands into fists. Perhaps the man had decided on a figure. “Wonder why he didn’t just call my cell?”

Carl sorted through boxes, marking their contents on the flap with a grease pen so that it would be easy to work through the items during the sale. He’d delivered the message and couldn’t be drawn into a conversation.

“He’s got a box that belongs to Silvie,” Hershel said, then wished he hadn’t.

“I’m really sorry about that fuckup,” Carl said. “It’s been bugging me.”

“Just did what you thought was right,” he said, and started toward his office.

He tried to hold on to his good mood, but it was sifting away like fine mist. He’d made a phone call that morning to Trent Campbell, a local auto reseller, to find out if Trent had parts he could use to get the Porsche running again. Trent was terse on the phone, claimed he didn’t have the parts and couldn’t order them. Hershel asked him if he had any cars to put through the next sale, and Trent laughed without humor. They’d worked together in the past, but how long he couldn’t pin down. A decade at least. Anything that stayed on Campbell’s lot more than ninety days went to auction. But the man was gruff today, stating that he didn’t think he’d be using Hershel’s services in the future. Campbell thought he’d made that clear already. When Hershel inquired why, the man simply called him a “first-rate asshole” and hung up.

The first thing Hershel did when he got to his office was go to the file cabinet, pull open the top drawer, and begin to search for anything that had to do with Campbell’s Auto Liquidators. He found nothing more recent than a two-year-old receipt for three cars. Campbell typically put the newer-model cars in reasonable condition through Hershel’s auction, and the others went to the salvage yard for parts. He stared at the paper. Was it really two years ago that he’d last sold cars for Campbell? That’s how he picked up Floyd, his Charger. Campbell had planned to part it out, but when Hershel saw the car, he talked the man into putting it through the sale. He could still remember the way it sat on the lot beckoning to him. The paint was oxidized, the weather stripping gone, the windshield cracked. But it was irresistible.

“It doesn’t run,” Campbell had told him. “I can get decent money for parts, though. It’s a classic. The front end will bring a thousand bucks.”

“Exactly,” Hershel said. “Someone will want it to restore.”

Campbell shook his head. “It’ll need to bring at least eighteen hundred or I’m better off parting it out.”

“It will.” Hershel felt his skin prickle as he relived the conversation. He bought the car himself for six hundred dollars. And then
he towed it to his house, where he restored it over the course of a year.

He looked down at the receipt. It was shortly after the date on that piece of paper that Campbell figured out that the newly restored Charger was the very same one he’d sold through Hershel’s auction—at a loss. The brazenness with which he had taken advantage of Campbell and their business relationship astounded Hershel now. Did he think the man wouldn’t find out? Why would he risk his business like that? It didn’t make sense. There had to be more to it.

Silvie watched a spider scuttle across the kitchen floor at the South Store. It had a large brown abdomen with a triangular design that reminded her of a Navajo blanket. The summer she turned eighteen, she encountered a spider just like that one in Jacob’s backyard. It had strung a perfectly symmetrical web in the space between his toolshed and a juniper bush. She’d watched it grow over the weeks, until it was monstrous in size, and though she had a particularly irrational fear of spiders, she left this one alone. It fascinated her, and it was confined to this place out in the open, honest about its intentions, not like the funnel spiders that tunneled along the walkway or under the decking.

One evening, as she waited for Jacob to finish up some work in his den, she sat in the garden sipping iced tea and watching the spider. A honeybee flew into the web, tearing it so badly that it was held in place by only two strands. The bee was nearly the size of the spider, but the predator pounced so rapidly that by the time Silvie was on her feet and bent over the scene it had already begun to spin its prey in circles. The bee fought hard, thrashing furiously, piercing the growing cocoon with its stinger over and over. It took minutes for the spider to finally subdue the bee—a fight that might have gone either way had the honeybee gotten just the right
angle on the spider. When it was over, the bee was unrecognizable in its thick white shroud. A mummy, though still alive, still trying to break free.

Jacob appeared behind Silvie, startling her.

“What’s so fascinating?” he asked, placing his hand on her hip, just above her buttocks.

“That spider caught a honeybee,” she said. “You should’ve seen it. It fought so hard, and it took forever for the spider to win.”

Jacob scowled at Silvie and said, “You didn’t cut it loose? You just watched it die?” He traced her face with his eyes, clearly disturbed by her willingness to stand by and do nothing.

Silvie studied the cocoon, still quivering with life, and wondered what was going through the bee’s mind right then. Terror? She had trouble reconciling her place in this event, her responsibility. Wasn’t this life? The weak overtaken by the strong?

Jacob gave her a hard swat on the butt. “What’s gotten into you?”

“You okay?” Karen asked, bringing Silvie back to the kitchen and the stack of dishes in her hands.

“Yeah,” she said, and dropped them into the sink before washing up.

“Order up for table three.”

Silvie dried her hands and collected the hot plates, balancing them precariously on her forearms as she stepped out into the warm dining room. The smell of freshly baked bread and the high-pitched whine of the espresso machine brought a smile to her face. The crowd was larger today and people were still coming in, dressed in fall fleece, their ears and noses reddened by the winter cold. They carried maps of Washington and Yamhill County wineries and discussed their routes. Where next? We can go out to McMinnville and circle back through Amity. Or up to Warden Hill in Dundee and then downvalley to Salem. Places with romantic
names that she’d never heard of and could not fathom—Oak Knoll, Vista Ridge, Sokol Blosser, Erath. They even chatted across tables with strangers about where they’d been that morning, where they were headed, and which wineries they recommended. She wanted to be like these people, walk in their world, experience life as they did. Unencumbered by the problems she faced, these were the kind of people magazines like
Western Living
and
Sunset
were written for. No doubt they had cloth napkins on their tables, crystal in their china hutches, maybe even sleek-coated horses in country stables. Their lifestyles were remote and fascinating, nothing like hers. Still, the bustle of people swept away all thoughts of Jacob or Hershel or Kyrellis. For the moment, she could imagine that she belonged here with these people, and it was a reprieve from the reality of her own life.