Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  But River doesn’t say a word, and her face falls a little in disappointment.

  “I guess he wanted to smash something up,” I say, and it’s paltry, but the best defense I can muster on the kid’s behalf. It’s ridiculous that I’m even attempting this, but it’s not all that hard for me to feel kinship with an angry adolescent.

  Dad scoots his wheelchair forward a little and peers up at River. “What happened to your hair?” He doesn’t ask this so much as exclaim it, his voice a boom in the awkward silence.

  River’s eyes snap to mine, in question, like we’re in this together. I shrug. “Better off answering him,” I say.

  “I—uh. I dyed it.”

  “Speak up!” Dad shouts, and I wince. This is awful.

  “I dyed it,” says River.

  “On purpose?”

  River only raises his chin in defiance. My eyes meet Kit’s over Dad’s head. The corners of her eyes are crinkled in amusement, but her mouth is set tight, fighting off a smile. I resist the urge to smile back. I’ve still got to play guard dog here, at least until the cops arrive.

  “On purpose,” River answers.

  “Well, it looks ridiculous,” Dad says, shifting in the chair. “And you’re trespassing. And you busted up my truck. What are you going to do about that?”

  River shrugs, and my dad rolls his eyes. “Reminds me of you,” he says to me, and Kit really does smile then. Fuck. “You got a job?” Dad asks, the force of his stare so strong that River looks back at him. Dad repeats the question.

  “No,” says River. “I’m only fourteen.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? I had a job when I was eight.” I have to duck my head to hide my laughter. Dad may have worked around the salvage yard when he was eight, but he says this as if he worked fifteen hours a day in a factory. Any minute he’ll break out the I had to make my own toys! speech he used to give me when I’d tell him what I wanted for Christmas. He did not actually make his own toys, I found out later from my grandpop.

  When the police cruiser pulls into the lot, I get a little shiver in my stomach. Jesus, I wish this hadn’t happened. It’s ridiculous, but I still feel sick as hell whenever I see a police car, in any context. River has kept his I-don’t-give-a-shit posture, but his skin is pale beneath his weird swoop of purple-gray hair, and I feel so sorry for him that I head over to the cop first.

  Lucky for River, it’s Sergeant McKay, an old buddy of my dad’s who’d been more kind to me than I’d deserved a number of times. He tells me he’s seen the kid around before, but never in this kind of trouble, so he’ll probably have to take him in. When I follow him back over to where River stands, I feel the kid’s dread as if it’s my own. I can still smell that police station, if I really think about it. My heart’s still hammering with adrenaline, maybe a little residual fear, and I can barely focus on the tense, awkward exchange going on between McKay, my father, and River.

  Kit saves me by speaking up, asking whether McKay needs her to answer any questions—she tells him she’s really got to be on her way. I see River’s eyes slide to her, a little desperately, like maybe she’s his one source of protection here, but just as quickly he’s looking back down at his boots.

  “You go on ahead, ma’am,” McKay says.

  Kit nods and turns to my dad. “Mr. Tucker, it was very nice to meet you. You have a lovely—uh—store?”

  “Come back any time,” he says, but he’s obviously preoccupied, and I step forward to walk with Kit toward her car, a shitty little silver hatchback. This answers one question relevant to my purposes for Beaumont—Kit’s probably not getting paid what she’s worth.

  “So,” she says, but breaks off, her brow furrowing in concern as she looks back at River.

  “He’ll be all right,” I say.

  “I mean, I know he totally wrecked your dad’s car, but he looks so young.”

  “Yeah. McKay is a good guy, though. He’ll make sure he’s taken care of.”

  She nods, hitches her bag higher on her shoulder. “Thanks for showing me the hardware.”

  “Well, you’re walking out empty-handed. That’s no good. You’ll have to come back.”

  The right side of her mouth lifts as she looks at me. Kit’s eyes, when you’re inside with her, look as dark as her hair, nearly black, but out in the hot sunlight, they remind me of the black cherry stain that used to be my favorite to refinish with back when I worked here—under all that darkness, they’re a rich, warm, glowing brown.

  “We’ll see,” she says, and I can see her making the effort to pull herself back in, to become the person I met last week—or maybe she’s making the effort to see me as the person I was last week. Her shoulders have stiffened, her chin has raised a fraction. But it’s the effort. It’s the effort that tells me I’ve made progress.

  Progress about Beaumont, I have to scold myself, as she drives away.

  * * * *

  My dad and I argue the entire way home, even as I’m helping him maneuver his goddamn gigantic rented wheelchair through the back door. “This house,” I say, my teeth gritted, “isn’t suited for this thing.” I’ve got to push him over the threshold so slowly to avoid scraping up against the woodwork, and this kind of care is so physically antithetical to the frustration I’m feeling right now that my knuckles have turned white around the handles.

  The day went downhill after Kit had left, things with River taking an unexpected turn that started this whole argument with Dad. And there’d been the frustrations of keeping up, of reminding myself of some of the more obscure tasks that needed done around the yard—I’d forgotten that you had to rotate which vents you opened on the second floor throughout the day. I’d forgotten that Thursdays were the days Dad did some online bidding through a private auction site, and he’d had trouble doing it himself one-handed. I couldn’t tell how much of my anger at Dad was about what he’d done, or about how overwhelmed I’d felt at everything I’d had to do.

  How did Dad handle this on his own, even when he was well?

  Sharon’s in the kitchen again setting plates out on the table. She looks up at me, and then down at Dad, and says, “I’m guessing today didn’t go so well. You went back too early, Henry.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s what, Sharon. I’ve heard it for the last fifteen minutes from this one here,” he says, thumbing back at me.

  “Oh, yeah?” I say, finally clearing the door enough to shut it behind me. “Why don’t you tell Sharon here about the new project you’ve taken on? Or, wait, that we’ve taken on, since I’m sure I’ll have to handle it most days, with you in that condition.”

  Sharon crosses her arms and looks down at Dad, who at least has the decency to seem slightly chastened. “All’s I did,” he says, “was help a kid out who’s in trouble.”

  I roll my eyes. “We caught a kid busting up Dad’s truck today, and Dad set it up with Sergeant McKay that this kid can work off what he owes at the salvage yard. Starting tomorrow.” It’s this part of the thing, the timeline, that’s really getting to me. It was a fight yesterday when Dad announced he was having a chair delivered that would let him come along to work. It was a fight this morning when he kept trying to do work that would risk injuring him again. Now we’re adding something else to the plate?

  “Oh, Henry,” Sharon says, turning toward the oven and peeking in. Jesus, something smells good. I need to hurry up and stop being so mad so I can stuff a bunch of food in my face and get on with the evening.

  “It’s not going to be any problem,” Dad says, wheeling up to his place at the table. “Three days a week, and only in the afternoons. His mother’s got him doing some summer school in the mornings.”

  “You aren’t getting it, Dad. Getting you better is the most important thing. You’ve got doctor’s appointments, physical therapy—”

  “I said I’d get all that done!”


  “No, I’ll be getting it done. I’m the one handling the yard, getting you back and forth to your appointments. And now I’m the one that’s going to be keeping an eye on a teenager with an appetite for destruction.”

  “He’s exaggerating,” Dad says to Sharon. I want to bang my head against the nearest wall. Instead, I cross to the sink to wash my hands, then start grabbing silverware for the table.

  “Go on and sit down, Ben,” says Sharon. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “No, Sharon. You’re doing too much for us here already,” I say, but as I’m setting out forks, she pulls out my chair and points to it.

  “Sit,” she says in that way she has, the way that makes you worry you’re about to get slapped on the back of the head.

  So I sit, and my dad and I stare at each other across the table.

  It’s lasagna, and thank God for the calming powers of cheese, because I start to relax over the course of the meal. Sharon’s taken up talking to Dad about how she’s changing out the electrical panel in her house, which distracts him, and soon enough the stress of the day feels a little less close, a little less compressing. I stand and clear plates, now that Sharon’s too wrapped up in debating the relative energy-saving virtues of sub-panels to stop me. While I’m loading the dishwasher, though, Dad wheels over and says, “Listen, I’m sorry about the kid.”

  I slide another plate in, not sure what to say. River is going to be a complication, but if I’m even a little honest with myself, I didn’t want to see a kid that young going in either, and if I’m really honest with myself, I know damn well why my dad made so much of an effort. A kid like River gets us both where it hurts. “It’s fine, Dad. We’ll work it out.” When I look back at him, I have a quick flash of him in a courtroom, fourteen years ago, holding his old ball cap in his lap, turning and turning it as he watched me come in.

  “All right, you two,” Sharon says, shuffling us into the living room. “There’s a ballgame on in fifteen minutes that we’re watching, so long as Henry can stay awake.”

  “I can stay awake,” he grumbles, and that’s all it takes for us to be good again, because if there’s one thing Dad and I do well, it’s forgiving each other.

  * * * *

  I skip the ballgame in favor of holing up in my old bedroom with my laptop, catching up on work I have for Beaumont. I missed a conference call today that I’d wanted in on, a monthly reporting session on new contacts we’d sussed out for the polymers division, an email marked “Urgent” from Jasper. He’s pressing me for a progress report on Kit already, and I send him a quick reply, Still doing my research.

  Last weekend I’d tracked down all of Kit’s publications and had been working through them as best I could in the time I had at night. Jasper’s better at the science itself—he double-majored in biochemistry and chemical engineering—but what I am is a good reader, good at picking out details that people overly focused on the data might overlook. When I’ve made it through eleven of Kit’s articles, I know the detail that matters most.

  Like most other publications in her field, all of Kit’s papers are multi-authored. In the eleven I’ve read so far, and in the six more I have yet to get to, she’s never listed first. The seven most recent papers, I suspect, are written by the same person—that may seem as if it’d be impossible to tell, but there’s a quality to these papers that reads differently than most journal articles in the field, a sort of wry, subtle humor that glances at the limitations of other research without directly engaging. The common denominator in all seven?

  E.R. Averin.

  Even if I wasn’t sitting up in my bed with these papers, tangible evidence of her genius all around me, I’d know Kit was smart as all hell, just from being around her at the yard. She had a way of looking over what I’d brought her, a cataloguing curiosity in her expression, and I got the sense she didn’t miss anything. Whatever she was holding in her hands got her full attention, and she devoted her senses to the task—she’d run the edge of her fingertip along the filigree of a hinge, tap one of her short nails against a switch plate while she held it up to her ear, then she’d look it over, again, as if memorizing it. It was transfixing, the attention she paid to small things, and a little disconcerting too.

  I’d bet all my savings on Kit having done the lion’s share of the work that’s represented in these papers, which means she’s seriously overqualified for the work she’s doing now. I know I need to draw her out a bit, to get her talking with me about what she does—it’s not going to be enough for me to exploit my connection to a salvage yard that she apparently finds fascinating. I need a way in to her work life—I need to get her talking.

  I pick up one of the papers published a couple of years ago in one of the more obscure metallurgy journals out there. This one had presented detailed experimental data on samples of high performance steel, the kind Beaumont uses to manufacture some of its parts for the oil industry. Last year, though, our steel division had started looking into some new research from Nature that was supposed to change the kind of composite steel we were using. I do a quick search and pull up the article, scanning it quickly. The details don’t matter to me at this point, because I suddenly know how to get Kit talking.

  I grab my phone off the nightstand and text her.

  Read a paper in Nature that says there’s an eight-unit cell crystal in a high performance steel

  I tell myself I’m only going to allow myself a minute to wait for a response. If there’s nothing, I’ll go out and watch the game with Dad and Sharon, see if she’s replied later. But it’s maybe thirty seconds before I see that she’s typing, her texts coming in quick succession, the first what I can only guess is a text-expression of outrage:

  !!!

  I’m smiling already.

  But their samples were electropolished, and they didn’t know the position of the particle in the foil. How could they know if it was on the surface or in the middle or on the bottom of the foil? They didn’t account for the natural oxide layer that forms on the sample, either. They were probably measuring the crystal structure of a surface layer and not of their particle.

  Two texts and I’m way outside my pay grade in terms of the science, but I don’t care. I’d read her texts about crystal structure all night—I’m that excited she’s talking to me. Another one, even before I start typing a response:

  They did all this fancy modeling to back up what they saw on the microscope, but their model is incomplete. They didn’t account for the position of the crystal, the surface layers, amorphous layers, or the shape of the particle.

  I’m typing back, telling her I’ve read her paper from two years ago, the one that’s dealing with the same stuff as the Nature paper, but before I press send her next message comes.

  Come back to my office Monday night, 7 pm. I’ll show you where they went wrong.

  I resist the urge to stand on my bed and pound my chest with victory. Instead, I text her back that I’ll be there.

  That’ll be okay, she writes, with your dad and everything?

  It’s a kindness, I think, that she checks about this, and I feel a strange gratitude for it and for her, for the distraction of these last couple of hours, immersing myself first in her world and then in this conversation. I’ll make it work, I type back. I stand from my bed, stretch my arms over my head. I need to get out there and get Dad ready for bed. I need to get some rest myself, especially since I’m going to spend a good portion of tomorrow dealing with a sulky teenager. I’m tucking my phone into my back pocket when it chimes one more time.

  I know what you’re doing, Tucker, it says. I just like showing people my microscope.

  I’m grinning, staring down at my phone, but I don’t respond. For the first time since I’ve met her, I think maybe I’ve got her on the ropes.

  Chapter 5

  Kit

  In the days since I sent Ben a text i
nviting him to my office, I’ve alternated between barely acknowledged anticipation and loudly proclaimed dread. When I meet Zoe and Greer for breakfast on Sunday morning, I blurt out the whole story—the fact that I called him about knobs, the visit to the salvage yard, the very fetching way he looks when in pursuit of a young criminal.

  “You’re screwed,” says Zoe, stuffing a huge bite of whipped-cream-topped waffle in her mouth.

  We’re at the Outcast Diner, one of our favorite spots in the brick-streeted historic district that’s adjacent to my neighborhood. Unlike at Betty’s, hipsters haven’t really caught on here, and other than the three of us, the clientele is mostly of the golden years variety, especially since we come early. We sit on mismatched wood chairs around a small table that Zoe’s stabilized with a stack of sugar packets. All around us, on the brightly painted yellow walls, are framed paper placemats that customers have drawn on over years. It’s a bit run down, the Outcast, but the coffee is hot and the maple syrup is real.

  “I’m not,” I say, taking a bite of my oatmeal.

  “But you wish you were,” says Greer, and Zoe cracks a laugh, so impressed by Greer’s unexpected dirty joke that she gives her a high-five. Greer blushes, because she’s adorable.

  “You guys aren’t helpful. Why did I do that? Now I’m going to have to talk to him again, and this time about his stupid job offer.”

  “Who cares?” asks Zoe. “You’re not going to take it, so let him say his piece, and move on.” She leans forward and raises her eyebrows. “And by ‘move on,’ I mean let him touch your…”