In Summertime Saga

Pancakes. The smell hit me on the stairs, batter and butter and the scrape of the spatula on the pan. Debbie was humming in the kitchen, low and tuneless, the absent sound she made when she thought nobody was awake yet.

I came in and she turned around and smiled. "Morning, sweetie. Pancakes."

"I can smell them."

She was in the bathrobe. The pink one, loose at the top, tied at the waist. Her hair was down and a little damp at the ends like she'd washed her face and skipped the shower. The collar had slipped to one side and the skin of her neck was bare and flushed from standing over the stove. She turned back to the pan and the bathrobe moved with her and I looked at the counter instead.

Morning light was coming through the window above the sink, hitting the tile backsplash, making the kitchen brighter than it deserved. The coffee was already made. She'd set out two mugs and a sugar bowl with a chip on the rim. A stack of pancakes sat on a plate beside the stove, golden, slightly different sizes. She added one more and brought the plate over.

"Sit. Eat."

I sat. She poured coffee. The mug she handed me had a cartoon cat on it wearing a top hat. I'd been drinking from it all week. Never asked about it. She'd never mentioned it. It was just my mug now.

The pancakes were good. Butter melting into the top one, pooling in the uneven spots, and I ate them with maple syrup from a bottle shaped like a log cabin. Jenny's door was closed upstairs. She didn't do breakfast. She ate cereal at dinner and slept until noon and the rhythm of this house was Debbie cooking for two and Jenny arriving for one meal and that meal was never this one.

"Did you sleep okay?" Debbie was standing at the counter across from me with her coffee in both hands, watching me eat. She did that. Fed people and watched them eat. The watching was how she took care of things when she couldn't take care of the actual things.

"Yeah."

"You've been going to the gym."

"Trying to."

She smiled. It reached past the circles under her eyes. "Frank used to go. Before." She said it carefully, testing whether the name would crack anything open. It didn't. She watched it not crack and her shoulders dropped.

I ate another pancake. She sipped her coffee. The morning was quiet and bright and ordinary. My arms were sore from yesterday's workout and the pancakes were filling a space in my stomach that had been empty since dinner and I was going to walk to Tony's Pizzeria after this and ask about a delivery job because I needed money more than I needed pride.

The doorbell rang.

Debbie set her mug down. Her face didn't change. She looked like someone expecting a neighbor or a package. She wiped her hands on the bathrobe out of habit and walked to the front door and opened it and started to say "Can I help-"

She stopped.

I was off the stool before I thought about it. The legs scraped the floor and I was in the hallway and Debbie's back was in front of me and the two men were on the porch.

I knew them the way you know a boss fight from a game you played three years ago on a laptop between loading screens. Fuzzy on the specifics, clear on the dread. I'd clicked through their dialogue. I'd read their names on a wiki. I'd seen screenshots of this exact scene on a walkthrough page I'd scrolled past because it wasn't the content I'd installed the game for.

The tall one filled the doorframe. He was leaning against it, one shoulder on the wood, his body angled so he could be inside the house whenever he felt like it and was choosing not to be yet. His face was long and narrow and he had a scar across the bridge of his nose, a puckered white line that pulled the skin around it tight. The scar hadn't been visible in the game art because game art is clean lines and flat color. This was skin. Real skin, with a real mark from something that had cut him across the face, and the skin had healed wrong and never been fixed because this man didn't fix things about himself. His eyes were pale and flat and pointed at Debbie like she was a wall he was looking through.

Dimitri.

The other one was behind him and to the left. Igor. Shorter, thicker, strong because he was big and hit people when told. His mouth hung slightly open like he was always about to say something and never getting there.

"Mrs. Cummings." Dimitri's voice was low, accented, unhurried. Her name came out like a number on a list. "The interest this month is five thousand."

Debbie's hand was on the door and her fingers went white on the edge of it. The tendons shifted under the skin of her wrist.

"I've been making the payments. I've been keeping up with-"

"Five thousand." He said it again the same way. She'd heard him fine and he knew she'd heard him fine and the repetition was for her benefit.

"I can get two thousand by Friday." The voice from the phone call was back. Tight. Controlled. The voice she used when she was holding it together because if she stopped holding, everything behind it would come out and these men would see it. "Two thousand by Friday, and then next month I can-"

"Two is not five."

Igor grinned. His teeth were crooked and the grin had nothing behind it. He was grinning because Dimitri was being hard and Igor got to stand near it while it happened and that was enough for him.

Dimitri hadn't moved. Hadn't raised his voice. He was still leaning on the doorframe, still looking at Debbie with that flat expression, and the flatness was worse than anger because anger would have meant he cared. This man did not care about Debbie or her two thousand or her kitchen or the pancakes going cold on her counter. She was a number on a list. A stop on a route. He'd come here and say what he'd come to say and leave and the five thousand would either appear or it wouldn't and either way he'd be back next month.

This man had hanged Frank. Had tied a rope around his neck and tightened it and stood there watching while Frank's legs kicked and his face went dark and his body stopped. I'd read it on a wiki. Eight words, maybe ten. A sentence between two paragraphs about quest progression. I'd read it and moved on because it was plot and plot was the thing between me and the next woman who took her clothes off.

The sentence was standing in Debbie's doorway. Tall, scar across his nose, looking at her the way you look at something you're deciding whether to break.

I walked up behind Debbie. Put my hand on her shoulder. I didn't plan it. My hand was there before the thought finished forming.

Dimitri's eyes shifted. They found me, registered me, moved past me. Back to Debbie. A brief pause on a piece of furniture.

"Your boy should stay out of this."

Every part of me wanted to hit him. Every part that had been twenty-six and six-one and a hundred and ninety pounds, that had swung on a bouncer once and connected, that had been in parking lot scraps and bar doorways and at least two situations that could've ended worse than they did. All of that wanted to step past Debbie and put a fist into the scar on his face and see what happened.

But I was eighteen. Five-nine. A hundred and fifty-five on a generous scale. My arms were sore from pressing an empty bar and the man leaning on this doorframe had killed someone by hanging and watched the body go still. His partner was built like a pit bull and standing close enough that his aftershave hit me, chemical and sharp, the kind you buy in bulk.

I had one point of Strength and zero Dexterity and no money and no weapon and no plan.

And I had died once because I didn't know when a room was too dangerous to be in.

"We'll get it," I said.

Dimitri's eyes came back. Slower this time. A mild surprise, a mild curiosity about whether I was going to say anything else. The look you'd give a small dog that just growled.

I held the look. My hand was on Debbie's shoulder and she was shaking through the bathrobe, a low vibration running through her whole body, and I held the look because dropping your eyes in front of a man like this is how you tell him what you are.

He studied me. Two seconds. Three.

Then he laughed. A short sound, mostly air, more through his nose than his mouth. The laugh that says what you just did was cute.

"Five thousand." He straightened off the doorframe. He was even taller standing upright. "By end of month. Or we discuss alternatives with Mrs. Cummings."

He turned. Igor turned after him, half a beat late, the lag of a man who moved when someone else moved first. They walked down the front path to the sidewalk. A black sedan was parked at the curb, nothing expensive, nothing memorable. Dimitri took the passenger side. Igor drove. The car pulled from the curb and turned the corner and the street was empty and a sprinkler was going in someone's yard, the chk-chk-chk of the rotating head steady and stupid against the quiet.

Debbie closed the door. She walked to the kitchen. Her hands found the counter and gripped it and let go and gripped it again. Let go. Gripped. Her fingers opening and closing on the granite like it should have been helping and it wasn't.

"Debbie."

She didn't turn around. Her back was to me and her shoulders had pulled up toward her ears and the bathrobe was bunched at the back of her neck where the collar had twisted.

I put my arms around her.

She went rigid. For a second the shaking got worse, her whole body tightening, every muscle doing what her voice had done on the phone and at the door and through every morning she'd smiled and said sweetie and poured coffee. She was trying to be fine.

Then she stopped trying.

Her hands came off the counter and found my forearms and she turned into me and pressed her face against my chest and she was shorter than me by a few inches and the top of her head fit under my chin and her hair smelled like her shampoo, floral, warm from the kitchen, and her heartbeat was hammering against my ribs. Fast. Panicked. She'd just opened her front door to the people who killed the person she loved and they were going to keep coming back.

I held her. I didn't say it was okay because it wasn't okay and saying it would insult her. I held her and her heart banged against my chest and the kitchen was quiet and the coffee maker clicked once as it cycled off and a bird was going outside the window.

Her fingers gripped the back of my shirt. Tight. She'd been standing upright since a funeral and nobody had offered her anything to lean on.

This wasn't her route. This wasn't the path to the shower scene or the kitchen seduction or whatever came after that. A woman was shaking in my arms and she'd made me breakfast every morning since I woke up in this body and her pancakes were good and every day her face looked a little more like it belonged to her again and she was paying a quarter million dollars to people who'd manufactured the debt out of a dead man's name.

She breathed. Long, shaky, almost tipping into crying but she wouldn't let it.

"I don't know what to do," she said into my shirt.

"I know."

"Frank always handled the money. He handled everything. And now it's just me and I don't-"

"It's not just you."

She went still against me. Her heart was still hammering. My chin was on top of her head and I was looking past her at the kitchen, the light in the window, the plate of pancakes sitting cold on the counter.

She pulled back enough to look up at me. Her eyes were wet and her nose was red and she'd bitten her bottom lip hard enough that the skin was white where her teeth had been.

"You're a good boy," she said. She meant it. That was the problem. She was looking up at me with red eyes and a bitten lip and she meant it completely, and I was wearing her dead foster son's face over a dead stranger's brain and neither of those people were good and neither of them were boys.

"I'm going to fix this," I said.

She almost smiled. The wrong smile. The one that says I love that you said that and we both know you can't. She patted my arm and her hand was warm and damp from gripping the counter.

"Eat your pancakes, sweetie. Before they get cold."

She turned back to the sink. Picked up a sponge. Started wiping the counter where nothing needed wiping, scrubbing the same spot in small circles because her hands needed a job more than the counter needed cleaning.

I sat back down. The pancakes were cold. I ate them.

Sixty days. That was my best guess. The rough math of a walkthrough I'd followed once without reading the text between the steps. Sixty days, give or take, from Day 1 to the warehouse. The warehouse where it all came to a head. Where Debbie and Jenny got taken and Dimitri held a knife over them and I was supposed to fight him one-on-one and break his jaw and end it.

Sixty days from now to the moment when the man who just laughed at me would be on the other side of a locked room and I would need to be fast enough to take a knife out of his hands.

I had one point of Strength. Zero Dexterity. Zero dollars. A vague memory of a boat called the Dink with Frank's money in it. A vaguer memory of an attic with a keepsake box that led to a lockbox at the bank that led to evidence that led to the mayor. A path through a conspiracy that I'd followed on a walkthrough step by step and hadn't read a word of because I was trying to skip to the next scene where someone took their clothes off.

I should've read it. I should've read all of it.

Debbie was still wiping the counter. Her back was to me and her arm was moving in those same small circles and the shaking had mostly stopped but her shoulders were up and her head was down and she was going to turn around in a minute and smile and offer me more coffee and the smile would be wrong and I'd drink the coffee anyway.

I looked at the doorway where Dimitri had stood. The morning light was hitting the front hall floor and the door was closed and outside the sprinkler was still going.

He'd looked through me. Past me. At me and then past me like I was a lamp between him and the thing he was actually talking to.

He wouldn't do that in sixty days. I didn't know how I was going to get there. I didn't know the chain of events or the training schedule or where half the quest items were or what order the steps went in. I'd skipped the instructions because the instructions weren't sexy and now I was sitting in a kitchen eating cold pancakes with syrup on my chin trying to remember a walkthrough I'd scrolled through half-drunk on a Tuesday night because a woman in a bathrobe had needed me to remember it and I hadn't.

I wiped the syrup off my chin with the back of my hand. I put my plate in the sink. Debbie turned around and smiled at me and the smile was wrong and her eyes were still red.

"More coffee, honey?"

"I'm good. I'm heading out."

"Where to?"

"Job hunting."

Her face changed. The wrong smile shifted into a different one, smaller, surprised. "A job?"

"Figured I'd try the pizzeria downtown."

She looked at me and her brow creased, trying to place what was different about the sentence. An eighteen-year-old she'd been packing lunches for was going to get a job without being asked. Her wet eyes blinked and she wiped her hands on the bathrobe and said, "That's... that's good, sweetie. That's really good."

"Yeah."

I grabbed my shoes from the front hall. Debbie went back to wiping the already-clean counter. Jenny's music was playing behind her closed door upstairs, bass through the walls, and the house was quiet otherwise.

I stood at the front door for a second before I opened it. The spot on the doorframe where Dimitri's shoulder had been was just wood. No mark. No scuff. He'd leaned there and told a woman her safety was worth five thousand a month and left nothing behind.

I opened the door. The morning was bright and warm. I walked down the front path to the sidewalk and turned toward downtown and the sprinkler two houses over threw water across the concrete in a fan that caught the light and made a small flat rainbow for about half a second before the arc swung back.

Tony's Pizzeria. Step one.