Chapter 15: Tuesdays and Thursdays

He got to Second Helping at a quarter to twelve and waited on the sidewalk instead of going in. A table for one on a Saturday meant ordering something, and he already knew what this lunch was going to cost him.

He had counted his money twice that morning. Three sandwiches, a coffee for himself, bus fare left over if he wanted it, which he didn’t. It was all folded in his front pocket, and he was going to be careful about how he paid.

He had come early on purpose, so that he would be at the door when they came up the street. That made the lunch his idea, and it kept it his.

The street had a hardware store, a laundromat, and a lot of parked trucks. A man went by with two dogs. After that the sidewalk stayed empty, and he watched it the way he watched everything: doors first, people after.

Rennie saw him from half a block off and waved with both arms. “Owen!”

He lifted a hand. “Hey.”

She ran the rest of the way. Vesper came along behind her at a normal pace, canvas bag on one shoulder, coat over her arm, and when she got close enough she smiled at him.

He had been hunted before. Hunted was loud, and it was simple, and he always knew what to do with it. This was the other kind, where nothing came after him and everybody was polite, and he could not tell from one minute to the next who had already decided something about him.

“Owen,” Vesper said. “Sorry we’re late.”

“You’re not.”

“I hear you’re buying.”

“I am.”

He took them inside and gave them the table by the window, on the side Rennie could see the street from, because that was the side she would want. Two other tables were full, a family with a stroller and an old man with a newspaper folded down to the crossword. Vesper took the chair that faced the door without appearing to check it.

She had the menu card in her hand before she had finished sitting down. He said it before she opened it.

“Does what you said still stand. About taking me on.”

She turned the card over and set it down flat and looked at him.

“I was starting to think you’d changed your mind.”

“I didn’t.”

“Good,” she said. “It stands. But if you’re my student, then you’re under the same rules as anybody else doing this work, and I don’t bend them for people I like.”

“Which rules.”

“Two of them matter most. You don’t hurt people. Not for money, not for a favor, not because they earned it. And you don’t do wrong with this work — not for anybody’s reasons, not because it would be easy. No exceptions in that one. After that, some of what you see stays where you saw it, until you’re a practitioner. It doesn’t go home with you. It doesn’t go in a message to anybody. You don’t say it out loud in the wrong room. I’ll walk you through that part when we get there.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not going to ask what the wrong room is.”

“I figure you’ll tell me when I need it.”

Vesper looked at him a second longer than the answer needed.

“Then we’ll put it on paper,” she said. “One page, your name and mine. We’ll both sign it.”

“Okay,” he said.

Paper didn’t cost him anything. He would sign it with Owen’s name, the way Owen’s name went on everything now, and long before a page in somebody’s drawer could turn into anybody’s problem he would be gone from this town. Whoever that name belonged to, he had no intention of leaving them anything to deal with.

The rest was arithmetic. He got stronger a meal at a time; that was the rule of the thing and there was no way around it. One meal in, one meal’s worth of strength, nothing skipped and nothing hurried, and nothing else he had ever tried had moved him at all. She was stronger than anyone he had come across since he got to this town. She could teach him. She could sign for him. That was not a thing he could do for himself, and it was worth more than the lessons. He had known what he was walking into since the first time she had looked at him, and he had done it anyway.

Rennie had the card up in both hands and was reading it with her whole face.

“You know what you want?” he said.

She sat up straighter, the way she did when she was copying somebody older. “What do you recommend?”

He put his finger on the top line. “That one.”

“Why?”

“More people order it than anything else on there.”

“Then I’ll have that.” She turned the card around to show her mother. “Mom. Can I?”

“Sure,” Vesper said. “I’ll have the same.”

He wrote the two of them down on the pad out of his back pocket, and his own under theirs, coffee and the sandwich he always got, and carried the pad up to the counter, because he knew everybody there and it was faster than waiting.

He paid while he was up there, out of his front pocket, in cash. It came to a little under what he had counted, and he didn’t let himself enjoy that.

Vesper had her wallet out when he got back to the table.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“I said.”

“You did.”

The sandwiches came out hot, and Rennie ate hers with both hands and talked through most of it, and Vesper let her.

“Is this where you work?” Rennie said.

“Some days.”

“Do you get to eat the ones nobody buys?”

“Sometimes.”

He finished his before either of them was halfway through. He was always about to be hungry again; that was the arrangement he had with himself now. Vesper didn’t ask him anything else while they ate.

When they were done, he took the plates up to the counter himself, because he worked there and it was what he did.

Behind him, Vesper said, “Rennie.” She didn’t lower her voice for it. “What do you think of him?”

Rennie didn’t do low. “He’s good,” she said. “Mom, your taste is fine. You always worry about your taste and it’s never wrong.”

He stood there with a plate in each hand. Then he gave it a second and went back and sat down.

Vesper looked at him the way she had looked at him all through lunch, and then she said, “Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“Two days a week, to start. Basics for a long time. You don’t touch anything real until you can hold what’s in front of you.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not in school,” she said.

He hadn’t told her that.

“No.”

Vesper didn’t say anything to that, so he gave her the rest of it.

“I’ll tell Ms. Tanner I found a job,” he said. “Something steady. She won’t ask past that.”

“She might.”

“She won’t.” Ms. Tanner had been trying to find him something to do with his days. She had stopped bringing up the school thing a while ago, which was not the same thing as being happy about it.

Vesper held on that for a second.

“All right,” she said.

Rennie got her coat off the bench and put it on backward and had to start over, and at the door she waved at him with the same two arms she had used on the sidewalk.

“Bye, Owen.”

“Bye.”

He stayed in the chair until they were a block off. Then he left and took the long way and did the numbers again on the way home.

Two days a week. Basics for months. A page he would sign and never have to think about again. Meals in between, which were slow, and this town, which was slower.

He walked faster anyway.