Not for Sale

On her first day as director, Nora Erdahl was handed the recommendation that could throw a motorcycle club out of its church, and by half past four its president was across her table, bringing her coffee.

The keys came on a ring with a brass tag stamped TRUST, and Irene Ashby laid them in Nora's palm like she was handing over a classroom.

"Front door sticks in the wet," she said. "Lift and push. The radiator under the window knocks until it's warm, and then it stops, and then it starts again around four. Nobody has ever found out why."

"Good to know."

"The rest of it is in there." Irene tipped her white head at the desk. One file. Manila, soft at the corners, maybe forty pages. "That is the whole of the Coldwater Community Land Trust, Ms. Erdahl. Eleven acres off Depot Road, one point three acres under a church, a declaration of trust you've already read twice, and five people who argue in a school library once a month."

Nora had read it three times. She didn't say so.

The office was two rooms upstairs in the old town hall on Main, rented by the month from the county, over the glass case where Ellery pinned its notices for the whole north end of the valley. The front room had a desk, a table with four chairs that didn't match, a filing cabinet with one drawer that worked, and a window that looked straight down the length of Main. Two thousand feet of street. Butcher paper gone brown in half the storefronts. A pawn shop with gold leaf on the glass and the lights on for nobody, and down at the far end, past the drugstore, the diner's one yellow window. Above all of it, on the ridge, the old foundry was holding the last of the sun like it hadn't heard the news.

Twelve years in Bozeman, she thought. Twelve years of easements and water rights and men in fleece vests asking whether there was some flexibility in the language. And she'd left it for this.

She'd left it for exactly this.

"Top of the file," Irene said.

Nora opened it.

Lease, recorded. The Coldwater Community Land Trust, lessor. The Coldwater Kings Motorcycle Club, lessee. The building known as St. Brendan's, Quarry Street, with the ground under it. Five years, renewable. Consideration: one dollar per annum.

Clipped to the front of it, in Irene's small square hand, a copy of paragraph nine of the declaration with one sentence underlined. Every lease the trust holds at the time of its first director's appointment shall be put to the trustees for confirmation within ninety days of that appointment, on the director's written recommendation.

Under that, a date. Four weeks from tomorrow. A Tuesday.

"You calendared it already," Nora said.

"I calendared it the day we signed your contract." Irene buttoned her navy cardigan to the throat, one button at a time, as if the conversation were a thing that should be closed properly. "I want your recommendation in writing before the meeting. I want it to be yours. Not mine, not the board's, and not anybody's who rides up Quarry Street on a Saturday night."

"It will be mine."

"I know. That's why we hired you." Irene picked up her handbag. "The lessee is coming at half past four to introduce himself. He asked. I told him I wouldn't be here." At the door she looked back. "I've known Deacon Cardenas thirty years. He is a decent man and a stubborn one, and he is very good at being the reasonable person in a room. You'll want to remember the last part."

Then she was gone, her shoes careful on the stairs, and the radiator under the window knocked twice like it had something to add.

Nora took off the camel coat and hung it on the hook behind the door. She pulled the two lacquer pins out of her hair, twisted the whole thick mess of it back up off her neck, and drove the pins in again. Oxblood silk blouse, buttoned to the collarbone. Dark trousers that fit like she'd paid to have them fit, because she had. Black ankle boots with a heel that had no business on a gravel lot and went on one anyway. She had dressed for the first day the way she dressed for every room where somebody was going to decide what she was before she opened her mouth.

She sat at the head of the table, not behind the desk. She opened a new legal pad and wrote the date at the top.

At four twenty-eight she heard the bike.

You heard it before anything else. A low, uneven thud coming up Main from the highway end, heavy as a tractor, and the glass in the front window hummed in its frame as it went under. The motor quit. Boots on the sidewalk. The street door, which stuck in the wet, didn't stick for him.

Two sets of boots on the stairs. One light for its size. One slow.

The first man through the door was enormous in the pleasant way of a man who had stopped worrying about it a long time ago. Sandy hair cut by somebody who wasn't a barber, a chipped front tooth in a wide grin, a ledger under one arm and a deed folder in the other hand. His leather vest said SECRETARY on the front.

"Ms. Erdahl," he said, like the name was something he'd been practicing. "Stefan Nowak. People call me Tap. I've got the club's copy of everything you've got, plus about four things you don't."

"Mr. Nowak."

"That's fine too."

And then the doorway filled.

He didn't so much come through it as arrive in it and stop, and the room seemed to tilt half an inch toward him. Six foot and then some, and broad with it — wide through the shoulders, a chest that stretched a plain black T-shirt tight, big arms, a body carried like weight he had put on purposely and kept. The leather cut over it was so old it had gone pale and soft, the patch on the back of it, she'd bet, worn nearly to suede. Black hair gone grey all through, thick, combed straight back to his collar, and shoved up into it a pair of drugstore reading glasses he had evidently forgotten about. A close-kept beard more grey than black at the chin. Warm brown skin lined deep at the eyes by a lot of years of wind.

He was holding two paper cups from the diner.

He looked at her. Not up and down. Just at her, steady and dark-eyed and unhurried, the way a man looks at a road he means to ride, and something under Nora's breastbone went still and then went hot, and she thought, very clearly, Oh, no.

"Ms. Erdahl," he said. His voice was low and rough at the bottom, like it had been left out in weather. "Deacon Cardenas. Thanks for seeing us."

"Mr. Cardenas." She stood, because you stood, and offered her hand across the corner of the table.

He set one cup down to take it. His hand was enormous and warm and callused across the palm, a knot of old scar over the knuckles where something had broken once and set a little wrong. He didn't squeeze. He didn't do the thing men did, the extra half-second to let her feel the size of him. He just held her hand like it was something he'd been handed to keep, and let it go.

She felt it all the way up her arm anyway.

"Sit," she said. "Please."

Tap took the chair at the far end and laid the deed folder flat and set the ledger beside it, closed, and put his forearm over it like a man resting it on a fence rail. Deacon took the chair directly across from her. It creaked. He set the second cup in front of her and turned it so the lid's mouth faced her.

"Black," he said. "Marla at the Ember said you came in at seven and asked for it black, and then you sat in the window for an hour reading something with tabs on it."

She looked at the cup. Steam came off the slot in the lid. It smelled very good. She hadn't eaten since a granola bar in the car.

She put two fingers on it and slid it back across the table until it stopped against his hand.

"Thank you," Nora said. "No."

Tap's ears went red. It started at his collar and climbed, fast, until the tops of them were the color of a stop sign, and he kept smiling over the top of it like nothing at all was happening.

Deacon didn't move for a second. Then he looked at the cup against his knuckles, and something at the corner of his mouth shifted, buried in the beard. Not offense. Something closer to approval, which was worse.

"Fair," he said. He picked the cup up and drank out of it himself.

She sat down. She folded her hands on top of the legal pad, so they'd stay where she put them.

"I want to say this once," she said, "so there's no confusion about it later. I've read the lease. I know what the club gave the trust in June, and I know what that ground is worth, and I know there are people in this town who think the trust owes the club for it. It doesn't. The trust owes the town. Your lease comes before the trustees on the thirtieth day of my job, and before that I write a recommendation, and I'll write it the same way I would for a feed store or a food bank. No favors. No discount on the process. No back door. Nobody from the club calls me at home, nobody buys me a beer at the Spoke, and nobody brings me coffee." She let that land. "And everything said between me and the lessee goes in the file. In writing. Including this."

She tapped the legal pad.

Across the table, Tap rapped twice on the wood with his knuckles. Light, flat, exactly two.

"Entered," he said.

She looked at him. He looked back, cheerful and scarlet to the ears, and she understood that she had just been agreed with by somebody's minutes.

Deacon set the cup down. He reached up, found the reading glasses in his hair as if he'd only just remembered where he'd left them, and brought them down onto his nose. Tap sat up about half an inch.

"Ms. Erdahl," Deacon said. "You done?"

"For now."

"Then here's mine, and you can write it down." He didn't lean forward. He didn't have to; across that table he was already closer than she'd planned. "The club doesn't want a favor off you. Doesn't want a discount, doesn't want a back door, and God knows doesn't want you on the phone at home. We gave that ground away so nobody in this town could ever say the Coldwater Kings were sitting on it. If we come up those stairs asking you to lean on the scale, we've thrown the whole thing in the creek." He opened one hand on the table, palm up, empty. "All we want from you is the truth. Whatever it is. Said in daylight, where everybody can hear it. You write that the club shouldn't have the building, you put your reasons on paper and you read them out loud in front of the trustees, and I'll pack the table and go. I said that to this town once already. I meant it then."

The radiator knocked. Down on Main a truck went by with its muffler dragging and the window buzzed and quit.

Nora found she was looking at his hand. The open one, on the scarred tabletop. The size of it, the thick fingers, the broken knuckle, a pale band of old grease worn into the skin at the side of one nail where no soap would ever get it out. It lay there completely still, and she had the sudden, specific, unprofessional thought of what that hand would feel like at the small of her back, spread flat, the whole width of it, just resting there. Not pushing. Not needing to.

She wrote Lessee: no request for favorable treatment on the legal pad in a hand that was mostly steady.

"Mr. Nowak," she said, without looking up. "You said you had four things I don't."

"Five, now I've seen your file," Tap said happily, and opened the deed folder.

For forty minutes they went through it. Book and page at the Ellery recorder. The certificate of insurance, which was current. The boiler inspection, which wasn't, by three weeks, and Tap had the appointment slip clipped to it before she could find it. A survey from 1961 that put the church's back wall eleven inches over a line nobody had cared about since. Tap knew everything without looking. Deacon said almost nothing. He read what Tap slid to him with his glasses down on his nose and handed each page across to her by its corner, so their fingers never touched, and every single time she noticed that they didn't.

She noticed other things. That he sat the way a man sits when his back has opinions about it, and still moved like a much younger one when he reached. That he smelled of cold air and leather and engine heat, and under that, faintly, cigarette smoke. That when he took the glasses off again to rub his eyes, there was a thin steel chain at the neck of his T-shirt that went down under it to something she couldn't see. That he looked at her when she talked. All of her, her face mostly, but once, when she stood to pull the boiler file from the drawer that worked, she felt his attention go down the length of her back to the curve of her hips in the fitted trousers and stop there, and then — deliberately, she could have sworn — come away.

When she turned around he was looking at the window.

Her face was hot. She sat back down and didn't let it be.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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