The clubhouse sat on a gravel lot off a county road north of Billings, behind a chain-link fence with a gate that was never locked and never needed to be: a long low building, a repair shop with three bays, a row of bikes under an awning, and a flag that snapped in the plains wind. It was not what Ava had pictured from television. It was cleaner. There was a vegetable garden going in along the south wall because Petra said so, and a basketball hoop, and a dog named Sergeant who had opinions about everyone and had classified Ava, after one inspection, as furniture, friendly.
They gave her the small room off the back of the shop that had been a parts office — a bed, a door that locked from the inside, a window that looked out on the lot. Bull walked her to it himself and stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
"Rules," he said. "This ain't a cage and it ain't a charity. It's a roof the club keeps for people who need one — prospects on the road, brothers between lives. You're not the first and you won't be the last. You eat with us. You keep your phone on you. You go somewhere, somebody goes with you — not because we think you're a child, but because a man who cuts brake lines is still deciding what he does next, and I decline to let him decide it about you."
"And what do I do in return?" Ava asked. "I don't—" She stopped, and made herself say it plainly, the way she'd learned all important sentences had to be said. "I don't take things I can't pay for, Bull. It's not pride. It's how I know I'm still me."
He regarded her for a moment. "Good," he said, surprising her. "'Cause there's work. Shop needs a sweeper and a parts runner, and Bones says he's short a set of hands he can train. There's school — don't think I forgot the GED books; there'll be a schedule, and it'll be kept, because in this house everybody's schedule is kept. And when you're eighteen and the state's done with its opinions, we'll talk about what comes after. That fair?"
It was so fair it frightened her. Fairness implied a future, and the future was a country Ava had a tourist visa for at best.
She unpacked her empire onto the bed: the backpack, the zip bag with the photographs and the torn ticket, the library paperback she was going to have to return somehow and already owed two dollars on in her private ledger. She put Danny's photograph on the windowsill where the light would find it in the morning, the way she always did, in every place she'd ever slept — underpass, shelter, back seat — because a day that began with Danny's face was a day with instructions in it.
The text message came back into her mind at odd moments, uninvited: We know where you are, Wright. She thought about who they could be. She thought about Kyle Garrett, dead in a prison cell two years — Jordan had confirmed that much, quietly, in answer to her direct question: yes, the shooter is dead; no, that is not the end of it, because men like Garrett grow in families and in grievances, and his had both.
On the second evening at the clubhouse, washing dishes in the big kitchen after a meal she hadn't been allowed to skip, Ava found Rabbit watching her over the rim of a mug with the speculative expression of a boy deciding where a new sibling fits in the order of things.
"You really lifted it?" he asked. "The bike. Off him."
"I moved it," Ava said. "Four inches. Gravity did the rest and Reaper did the pulling."
"Four inches," Rabbit said, with deep respect. "You know what the road name for that is? Around here a prospect who did that would get called Crank or Lever or something. Four inches, and you a hundred pounds soaking—"
"A hundred and fifteen."
"A hundred and fifteen pounds of pure mechanical advantage," Rabbit agreed. "You want, I'll teach you to ride. Shop's got a little 250 we teach kids on. Bones'll kill me if I don't ask him first, but I'm saying it now so it's on the record that it was my idea."
"I can't ride," Ava said. "I've never even—"
"Nobody can ride," Rabbit said, "till about ten minutes after they start. That's the club's whole position on everything, near as I can tell. You show up, you try, you don't die, you show up again." He grinned at her, and it was the first time in the entire week that someone her own age had spoken to her like she was a person and not a situation, and Ava felt the dangerous warmth of it spread through her chest like light through a cracked door.
Attachment is the most dangerous substance on earth, she told herself, and dried the next plate, and stayed at the sink for the whole stack anyway, listening to the clubhouse breathe around her — the shop radio, somebody's laugh, the dog's nails on the floor — like a house. Like, God help her, a home.