” Duke set down his bourbon. He looked at the door, then at Pete, then at the back wall where the old Harrisburg senator’s penant hung crooked above the emergency exit. “Pete,” he said. “Call Sandra Merchant’s number. It’s in your book.” Pete frowned. The social worker. “Yeah,” Duke said. Tell her I need a favor. Lily came out from under the table 17 minutes after Craig left.
She didn’t crawl out gradually, the way a frightened animal might test the air in stages. She came out all at once, a single decisive movement, and sat herself in the chair across from Duke, with the particular dignity of a child who has decided that whatever comes next, she is not going to face it from the floor. She was still pale.
Her hands were folded on the table. She looked at Duke directly, which was not what most adults did when they first sat across from him. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re welcome,” he said. Pete brought her a grilled cheese sandwich without being asked, and a second glass of water, and set them down gently before retreating behind the bar with the tactful quiet of a man who understood some conversations needed space.
Lily ate half the sandwich before she spoke again. “Are you a bad guy?” she asked. “Duke considered this with the seriousness it deserved. Depends on who you ask,” he said. She seemed to accept this as an honest answer. “Craig says bikers are bad guys.” “Craig says a lot of things,” Duke said. She looked at the patch on his cut, which he had moved from the back of the chair to the chair beside him.
“Is that like a club? something like that. Do you have to do bad things to be in it? You have to be loyal, he said. You have to show up for the people in it. You have to handle your problems yourself. He paused. Some guys in it have done bad things. Some haven’t. Same as most places. Lily absorbed this. She ate another triangle of sandwich.
My mom doesn’t know I’m here, she said. I know. She’s at work. She works the dinner shift at Applebee’s on Cameron Street. She said this the way children recite important facts carefully as though the accuracy of them matters. Craig is supposed to watch me when she’s at work. Duke said nothing. He let the silence do what silence does, which is give people room to say the next thing.
He gets different when she’s not there, Lily said. She looked at the table. Not always, but enough. Duke’s jaw tightened, but his face stayed still. He had heard versions of this before in his life. Not enough had changed. “Has he hurt you?” he asked. He kept his voice level, the way a man keeps his hands visible deliberately to signal something.
“Ly looked at her hands.” “Not like with hitting,” she said. “More like with the way he looks at me and the things he says. and sometimes he gets real close and I can’t. She stopped, looked up. I just couldn’t be there tonight. I just needed to not be there. Duke nodded slowly. You did the right thing, he said, running. She studied him.
Even if I ran into a biker bar, especially then, he said, “You read the room better than most adults I know.” Something shifted in her face. Not quite a smile, but the shape where one might eventually form. Pete returned to the bar side of things, and busied himself with glasses. Outside the rain had started, soft and persistent, streaking down the front windows, and turning the neon signs reflection into something watery and abstract on the wet sidewalk. Duke’s phone buzzed.
He looked at it, put it back in his pocket. “Sandra’s coming,” he said. Lily’s fingers tightened on her water glass. Who is Sandra? A woman who helps kids, he said. She’s good people. You can say everything to her that you just said to me. Will she tell my mom? Yes, he said. That’s her job. And that’s not a bad thing.
