Naja Aidt - Rock, Paper, Scissors

Luke and Thomas lock eyes. Once again Luke’s words are cool, measured. “Why didn’t she just move home to her rich family?”

“I don’t think she wanted to go home to her father, they weren’t on good terms. But I don’t know. There were others, after all. An aunt up north. A cousin. She must have been desperate. She was so young.”

“But she just took off?” Luke holds Thomas’s gaze.

“Yes. She did. I don’t know why. I’ve stopped wondering.”

“Have you really?” Luke asks. He’s so close that Thomas can smell his body. His sweat, almost resinous, and even a hint of something like jasmine, something very alluring, that seems to emanate from him.

“Have you really stopped wondering?” he repeats.

“No, you haven’t,” Alice says. “He hasn’t. You can’t! Imagine if it were you.”

Luke looks at her with an almost startled expression.

“What do you mean?”

“Imagine if it were your mother who left you when you were five years old, your father who beat you.” The look Alice gives him is at once sharp and quizzical.

“But my mother left me too,” he says, and now he sounds like a sniffling child.

“Still, you know what I mean. It’s not the same thing. You just didn’t want to live in the country with your stepfather,” Alice says. “My father left as well. That kind of thing happens, it’s normal. But seriously, it’s not the same as what Thomas and my mother went through. Wouldn’t you say?” She looks at Thomas, her eyes wide.

“I don’t know, Alice. I don’t know what it was like for Luke when he was a kid.”

“But where did you actually live when he was in prison? Mom never said anything about that.”

“He wasn’t in prison when we were little. They never caught him. It wasn’t until we’d moved away that he got locked up.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Thomas glances up at the trees. “Maybe he just got reckless. Maybe he was just older and had lost his grip. I don’t know.”

Alice goes quiet, disappearing into her own thoughts. She looks like someone who’s been given more information than she can grasp. The path veers, the terrain growing more and more barren; they’ve reached the tree-line above the parking lot. They walk for a bit in silence.

“In my opinion,” Luke mumbles, almost inaudibly, “those who run away are cowards.” Thomas wants to say something, something about how Luke himself ran away from his mother, something about how Luke shouldn’t say one bad word about his mother, but before he does Alice stops abruptly.

“Look! We’re already here! How strange, I thought we had a ways to go yet.”

There’s the parking lot. There’s the blue Opel glinting in the sunlight. Alice takes the keys and trots ahead. Thomas and Luke march side by side, unspeaking, and Thomas realizes they’re walking in rhythm. He climbs in the back seat. “Thanks for the hike, Luke,” he says. “It was a wonderful experience.” Luke nods, meeting his eyes in the rearview mirror. He puts the key in the ignition. They drive at a good clip back to the farm. Now and then, to equalize the pressure change, Thomas pinches his nose and blows air. The road declines steeply. And now exhaustion settles in. Alice and Thomas doze on the way home; sleep arrives to the faint accompaniment of rap music on the radio, sluicing into Thomas’s mild dreams. In them he’s swimming, he’s with a woman, he’s feeling the sun burning on his back.

As soon as they turn onto the graveled driveway leading to the house, they see commotion on the grounds. Maloney’s chopping firewood. His face is flushed, and he’s swinging the ax in broad arcs. Helena, Patricia, and Kristin sit drinking tea on the patio. The girls are chasing each other on the lawn with the water hose, and they howl — a shrill, lively, wonderful howl — every time they spray each other, a sound that reaches inside the car. As soon as they’ve parked, Alice rushes out and joins the twins. She peels off her windbreaker as she runs and tosses it on the grass, and the girls hoot as they spray her, their laughter only increasing. She wrestles the hose from Nina who then, with Maya, runs screeching around the house where Alice can’t reach them. She drops the hose and chases them. Thomas saunters over to Maloney, who’s standing underneath the lean-to of the woodshed. He cleaves a log with a single blow of the ax, and the split halves fall onto the flagstones, white and dry. He dabs the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. He’s soaked through.

“They put you to work?” Thomas lights a cigarette and parks himself on a large rock.

“No kidding. And here I was thinking I’d be lounging in a chair drinking beer all day. Didn’t think I’d be doing shit. But I had no choice. And you just took off. How was it out there in nature?”

As Maloney groans and chops firewood, Thomas describes the hike, though he doesn’t say a word about how hard it was for him, and he doesn’t tell him what they talked about.

“What do you make of Luke?” he asks instead, glancing in Luke’s direction. He’s removed his T-shirt and is sitting among the women. They’re all looking at him as he tells them something. Patricia tilts her head back and laughs.

“I don’t really know. He’s all right, isn’t he?”

“You think there might be something shifty about him?”

“Nah. That wouldn’t be my first thought. What do you mean? He gave me a bottle of schnapps as compensation for whipping me at craps that one night. After the funeral. Personally, I think that’s good of him.” Maloney sets his ax aside and gulps from a water bottle.

“I just can’t get a read on him.”

“But you don’t need to. He’s Alice’s friend. So what’s it matter to you? Jenny seems to like him quite a bit. He got Alice a job.”

Thomas stares at Maloney. “He was the one?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“She works for an escort service, Maloney.”

Maloney shrugs. “So what? She’s not a hooker. I mean, she’s got to earn a living somehow. Landing a job’s hard enough these days, especially when you don’t have any experience.”

Thomas sighs, shaking his head. He glances at the flagstones then turns toward the pasture. “I told her she can start working at the store next week.”

“What store?”

“Ours, of course. I want her over at the new branch, but we need to train her first. It doesn’t cost much to have an apprentice.”

“But Thomas,” Maloney eyes him. “Hello. We’ve got Peter. And it’s not exactly free, is it? An apprentice isn’t free.” Maloney has made eye contact, and he doesn’t look away. “What are you doing anyway? I don’t get this at all .”

“I hope to increase our profits once we open the new place.”

“When you open the new place. Besides, what kind of place is it? You haven’t told me shit.”

So Thomas has to explain to Maloney that he’s this close to buying the former porn video rental store. He has big plans with it, he says, and he intends to keep his promise: Maloney won’t have to spend a dime, but they’ll apportion the surplus revenue equally between them. The place will become part of their company, but he’ll be the one buying the property and doing the renovation. Maloney leans tiredly against the chopping block.

“I don’t know what to say,” he grunts.

“You don’t need to say anything. I’ll take care of everything. Including Alice.”

Maloney glances up at the sky absentmindedly. “It’s not exactly the best way to start out as a kind of stepfather, you know, if I’m supposed to boss the girl around every single day.”

“You won’t have to.”

Maloney looks at him sadly. “But Thomas. C’mon, man. We’re running this business together. It’s not like I can pretend she’s nothing more than air, can I? I need to show her the ropes.”