Day 72. Strength 27.0. Stamina 25.9. Agility 15.5. Intelligence 18.7.
Tom's truck pulled up outside my house at ten on Sunday morning, and I knew it was his before I looked, because nobody else has ever pulled up outside my house on a Sunday.
He got out with a sheet of plywood under one arm and a Home Depot bag in the other hand. Luz got out the other side with a second Home Depot bag. Mateo didn't get out at all. I could see him through the back window in his booster seat with the tablet, not looking up.
"Colby told me," said Tom.
"I figured."
"He said you rode it home at noon." He looked at the bike, leaning on the wall by the garage door with the shield still bungeed to the rack where I'd left it. Then he looked at me. "He said your text sounded like you were lying on a floor."
"I was sitting on a floor."
"Okay." He put the plywood down on the driveway. "Luz. Get your brother. We're going inside, it's going to be a hundred and ten."
* * *
My house has had four people in it at once maybe twice since my parents passed away. One of those was the AC guys.
Mateo came in with the tablet and sat on the couch in the exact place my dad used to sit, and put his feet straight out in front of him because they didn't reach the floor, and went back to whatever he was doing. Luz walked round the living room looking at everything like a cop at a scene. The photos on the bookshelf. The TV, which is old. The dent in the wall by the hallway from when I was eleven and threw a basketball inside.
"Is that you?" She was at the bookshelf, pointing without touching. It was me at about seven with a front tooth missing.
"Yes."
"You were small."
"Everybody was small."
She thought about that, and decided it was true, and moved on to the TV.
Tom put the Home Depot bags on the kitchen table and took out four hose clamps, a box of short bolts, a tube of something, and a strip of rubber that looked like it came off the bottom of a door.
"The bungees," he said. "Colby sent me a picture. They're going to go. You hit one pothole wrong in the dark, the shield goes under your back wheel, and you go over the bars. I'm making you a cradle."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to." He didn't look up. "Get me a drill if you've got one."
I had my dad's. It was in the garage, in its case, where it had been for two years. When I brought it in, Tom turned it over and looked at the battery and said "That's a good drill," and I nodded, and he clicked the battery back in and set it down on the table carefully, with both hands.
* * *
He worked in the garage with the door up and the fan going, because he said the smell of the glue would give the kids a headache. I held things. He cut the plywood to the shape of the rack with a jigsaw he'd brought, and lined it with the rubber strip, and bolted on two little lips that the shield's bottom rim sat into, so it couldn't slide back. He measured everything twice with a tape he kept clipped to his belt, and every time he drilled a hole he blew the dust out of it with one short breath, like he was putting out a match. Then the hose clamps went round the rack bars and through holes he drilled in the board. It took about forty minutes. He was sweating through his shirt by the end of it, and so was I, and neither of us mentioned the heat.
"Okay," he said. "Put it on."
I lifted the shield into the cradle. The rim dropped into the lips with a small clunk. I pushed it backward, hard, and it didn't move. I lifted the back wheel off the concrete and let it drop, and the shield sat there like it had grown on.
"One strap over the top to keep it from bouncing out," said Tom. "That's it. That's all it needs."
"Thanks."
"Yeah." He wiped his face on his sleeve. "Okay. Now the other thing."
* * *
I'd left the folder on the kitchen table on purpose. I'd thought about that, on Saturday night, whether to put it somewhere or leave it out, and I'd decided leaving it out was the same as telling him, but slower. It was still the coward version. I knew that.
Tom sat down in front of it. I told it in order, same as at the tables. Haskell. The cardigan. The lawyer who didn't cough. The twenty-six hundred and the gear and the twelve months and no Two Pairs. The dental, which made him laugh once, quietly. I didn't skip anything I could think of.
He read the eleven pages while I talked, flipping back and forth, his finger going down the side. At the insurance page he made a small noise through his nose and kept going.
"Take it," he said.
I didn't say anything. I'd had my whole answer ready for every other thing he might have said.
"I'm serious." He closed the folder. "Twenty-six hundred a month. Gear. A dentist. You've got no car, you're riding a bike to work at four in the morning in a hundred degrees, and you're eighteen. If somebody offered me that at eighteen, I'd have signed it on the hood of their car." He shook his head. "Don't stay poor for us. Me and Ren and Colby, we'll find a fourth. There's always a fourth on the board."
"There's not always a fourth who..."
"No. There's not. That's fine. That's my problem, I'm the lead." He tapped the folder. "That's not what's bothering me."
He opened it again to page seven and turned it round so it faced me, the way I'd turned the receipt round for him on Wednesday.
"'Including those not reflected in Association records,'" he said. "What's not reflected?"
* * *
Luz had come into the kitchen at some point. I hadn't heard her come in, which almost never happens, and she was standing at the fridge reading the legal pad.
It's been up there since Day 2, under the chile pepper magnet my mom bought in Santa Fe. The top sheet's gone soft at the edges and the writing on it has been crossed out and written over so many times it's mostly ink. SHIELD, underlined twice. The money, crossed out and rewritten six times. And the boxed question, crossed out, with a line under it in pen that I wrote on Day 11 and never took down.
Luz read it out loud, slowly, the way nine-year-olds read things they've decided are interesting.
"'It has to be something I can't do,'" she said. "'Every stat. All four.'"
She turned round. "What does that mean?"
"It's a note," I said. "From when I started training."
"Every stat all four what?"
"Luz," said Tom. "Go check on your brother."
She went, but slowly, looking back at the fridge.
Tom didn't look at the fridge. He looked at me, for a long time, and I knew he'd heard it, and I knew he'd added it to Laveen, to me knowing where he was without turning my head, to the packet I'd read upside down at the tables in August and then answered three conversations off at once.
He didn't ask.
"I've got a nine-year-old," he said, finally. "I know what it looks like when somebody's holding something behind their back. You've been holding something behind your back since I met you."
"Tom..."
"I'm not asking. I'm not your dad, and I'm not Reyes." He stood up and pushed the chair in. "But whatever it is, that page there wants it. In fourteen days, with a lawyer. So somebody's going to know." He looked at the fridge, finally, for about a second. "Tell her first. Before them. She's earned first."
* * *
They left at noon. Luz said goodbye to the bike. Mateo said goodbye to nobody and walked to the truck with the tablet held out in front of him in both hands like a tray.
Tom stopped at the end of the driveway with the door open and the engine running.
"Colby's thing," he said. "The pickups. Say yes."
"He's going three miles out of his way."
"I know. He knows." He got in. "Let him. You keep a list in your head of everything everybody does for you so you can pay it back, and you can't, and it makes you weird. Just say yes."
He drove off down the street. I stood in the driveway in a hundred and nine degrees and looked at the bike with its new cradle and the shield sitting in it, not moving.
Then I went inside and texted Colby.
Yes. Thank you. Mon–Fri, 12:05 out front
LETS GOOOO
I stood in the kitchen after that, in front of the fridge, reading my own handwriting from Day 2.