Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  Ben

  My week has gone from shit to sunshine since Jeff and Eric’s party, and that’s all because I feel back on track with Kit. By Saturday morning I was at her place, two coffees, a box of donuts, and my toolbox in tow, ready to hang her new pendant. When I’d finished the work—I might have drawn it out a little—she’d stepped onto the porch, then down to the sidewalk, then back into the house again, so she could see it from all angles. She’d clasped her hands in front of her chest in delight, and it’d been just about the most successful I’d felt in days.

  And then she’d asked me to come out tonight. “I mean, with me my friends,” she’d said quickly, her face flushing. “I told them about your job offer, and they want to meet you. Really,” she’d added hastily, “they’re more family than friends.”

  The side of me that’s working for Beaumont knows this is an opportunity. I’m excellent, I always brag to Jasper, at the kitchen table, at those moments when you’re meeting with a hire’s spouse or kids, when you’re trying to give them an insight into the new life you’re offering. It’s not quite the same, meeting up at a bar with Kit’s friends, but it’s something.

  But the side of me that has been picturing Kit in that green, silky top from the other night? That side’s just happy to get to see her again.

  The heat’s finally broken, but that’s only because it’s been raining since this afternoon, so by the time I get to the place now called One-Eyed Betty’s—it was a fish-and-chips place when I was a kid—my t-shirt is splattered with raindrops, my hair wet. I run a hand over it as I duck through the front door, scanning the room for Kit. Before I spot her, I hear a voice call out to me. “Ben Tucker! I can’t believe it!”

  Liz—that’s what I always called Elizabeth Trenton, before she became the I guess now-famous Betty—looks nothing like I remember her. She’s got her hair dyed jet-black and pulled into a tight ponytail, blunt cut bangs framing her face, and bright red lipstick painting her lips. When she walks over to me and smiles up into my face, I see that she’s got black eyeliner painted thick around her eyes, a little cat-eyed swoop to it at the edges. It’s such a shock to my system that I say, “Holy shit, Liz.”

  She laughs, swats my arm. In school, Liz was quiet as a church mouse, her hair a pale brown, her skin freckled and given to flushing, her glasses out of style, one lens thick and bifocaled, the other, thin and clear, just there for symmetry. She got a fair bit of teasing, a lot of kids calling her “three-eyes,” since everyone knew about the accident that had taken out her left eye when we were in second grade. Me, I never teased Liz. Our alphabetical homerooms all the way through high school meant I almost always sat next to her, and over the years we became friends.

  She fluffs her ponytail and winks at me, and I take in the space.

  “Damn, Liz, it looks great in here.” It’s full up, all the barstools and every table I can see taken, and there’s a robust staff milling about, carrying trays full of drinks and food, smiling and interacting easily with customers they seem to know. There’s certainly an aesthetic about the place—all the women working share Liz’s retro fashion, and the men have beards that probably require some kind of special hair product. Hipsters everywhere, but I’d noticed a lot of this in Barden since I came back—it seems to be a younger, more creative, more vibrant town than the one I’d grown up in.

  “I do a good business.” I’m happy for the way she says that, so unapologetically confident about her success. Liz used to be the type to immediately cover up all the A+s she got on her papers when the teacher handed them back. “What’re you doing back home?” she asks.

  “Ah, my dad had a little accident, so I’m helping him out for a while. It’s temporary.”

  It’s not that I’d mind catching up, hearing about how Liz transformed this former dump into an urban hangout, but my eyes are already drifting, looking around for Kit. I find her weaving through the crowd toward me, and I feel a quiver of anticipation go through me. She’s wearing slim, cropped jeans, and a simple loose black tank top, and I swallow past the lump of anticipation in my throat, the same one I got when I’d first seen all that smooth, pale skin on her arms and shoulders—the skin I try not to notice whenever I see her.

  But I always notice.

  When she smiles at me, her face looks flushed and happy, maybe a little nervous too. “Hi,” she says, and her eyes slide toward Liz’s. “Do you two know each other?” There’s a little something in that question. I wonder if maybe Kit feels a little—jealous? That’s probably too much to hope for. Probably she just feels thrown that she’s got me on her home turf and I’ve already found an advantage.

  “We went to school together,” Liz says. “First through twelfth grade. Did you know Ben was voted ‘Biggest Underachiever’?”

  Jesus. That’s not something I want her to know. But at least Liz has left out that it wasn’t really all through twelfth grade. Suddenly I think there’s a degree of liability in coming out to a local place with Kit, the off chance I’ll bump into someone who’ll run their mouth off. Jeff isn’t the kind of guy to ever bring up my past, but this bar isn’t such a controlled environment.

  “No,” Kit says, cocking her head at me. “That’s not a very nice designation.”

  “I was voted ‘Most Likely to Become a Pirate,’” Liz says, gesturing to her prosthetic eye. “Get it? It was not a very nice school.”

  “I guess not,” Kit says, a little huffily, and I like that she seems wounded and defensive on our behalf.

  Liz looks between us, a curious smile on her face, then tells us she’s got to get back to work. “You can put him on our tab,” Kit calls after her, and hooks her arm through mine. It’s so unexpected—and the feel of her bare skin against mine is so electric—that I can’t say anything for a second. I just stare down at our linked arms and try to seem nonchalant. “So. Underachiever, huh?” she says, leaning in so I can hear over the noise of the bar.

  “Oh, that’s—that’s not really accurate. Or it is, but…” I don’t know why I’m suddenly so rattled, so desperate to explain myself to her. “I had a little trouble with the law when I was young. Just—teenage stuff.”

  “A delinquent, I see,” she says, but she’s teasing me, and I enjoy it so much that I don’t even care that she’s teasing me about something that’s pretty awful from my past. “You ready to meet my friends?” She’s got a little mischief in her eyes. Maybe she’s had a couple of drinks, or maybe her friends have some kind of interrogation planned, and I’m walking right into it. At the moment I don’t care so much, because Kit is pulling me behind her, where I can get a good look at the curves of her body, and all I want is a cold beer and to sit right next to her for as long as she lets me hang around.

  She turns to look at me right before we reach a corner booth, and I have to snap my eyes up from where they were staring at her ass. I think maybe she notices, but I smile and she smiles back, and—shit, I wish I didn’t have to meet her friends right now.

  “This is him?” A tall, willowy blonde stands from the booth, her hand outstretched to shake mine. “I’m Zoe Ferris. I’m Kit’s attorney.”

  Kit rolls her eyes. “You’re not here in an official capacity, Z,” Kit says, and elbows her.

  Zoe has a firm handshake, a level, brown-eyed stare, and I’ll bet she eats people alive in a courtroom. “I’m Ben Tucker, Kit’s recruiter and sometimes-handyman.”

  This makes Kit laugh, and once Zoe’s done sizing me up, she turns back to slide into the booth beside a petite brunette, hair so short she’s basically all eyes, a pretty, dark blue color framed with thick lashes. “This is Greer,” Zoe says, pointing a thumb at her. “‘And though she be but little, she is fierce.’”

  “I ordered you a beer,” says Kit, sliding in across from Greer and patting the seat beside her. She’s different here, more relaxed, as if it’s normal for her to invite me to sit right down, as if
we’ve done this a million times before. Her smile is wider, her lips looser, spreading over her teeth easier. I think I might be staring at her mouth, which is not a good thing to do in front of these women. Fuck.

  “Thanks,” I say, leaning back and grabbing the pint. “All right. Let’s have it.”

  To my surprise, Greer starts first, and with an unexpected question. “Did your dad really find a skeleton wearing a Speedo in the salvage yard?”

  I almost spit my beer across the table, but I get it down before letting out a laugh. “You grew up around here, huh?”

  Greer nods, her eyes even bigger now, and Kit leans an elbow on the table, turning to me. “What’s this, now?”

  I wave a hand dismissively. “That’s all urban legend stuff. You’ve seen the yard, you know it can be a spooky place. Lots of kids, growing up, they came up with different stories about what goes on there. Famous one here,” I say, tipping my glass a little toward Greer, “is about Henry moving some old doors up on the second floor and finding a skeleton upright between two of them.”

  “With a Speedo?” Zoe says, her face a tableau of disgust.

  “I think that part of the story came up later,” I answer. “At first it was just a skeleton. By the time I was in high school, kids said my dad put the skeleton in a chair in his office, named it Carl, and talked to it about football.”

  “Gross,” whispers Greer.

  “It’s not true,” says Kit, defensive again, and I realize something about her in this, the way she inclines toward protectiveness. Kit is loyal to her core, and every good recruiter knows loyalty is the toughest nut to crack with a potential hire.

  But I don’t want to think about that now.

  “It’s not. But my dad, he eats that stuff up. When I’d have friends come over to the yard after school, sometimes he’d shout stuff to the back of the building. ‘Carl!’” I shout, and Kit’s already laughing at my spot-on Henry voice. “‘This kid out here is wearing a Redskins jersey! You hate them, right?’”

  That used to mortify me, but now I’m so glad my dad’s as embarrassing as he is, because these women are all laughing, and it’s the perfect icebreaker. Greer and I swap stories about the area, about where she grew up, which pool she went to in the summers, whether she preferred ice cream from Dixie’s Soft Serve or the soda counter at Rickman’s Pharmacy. Kit knows all these places too, and I’m seeing now the hard work she’s put into getting to know the city—she’s got almost native knowledge even though she’s only lived here for a few years. I’ve lived in Texas since I was twenty-one, and I still don’t know the kind of stuff I know about here—which mechanic will pass your car for inspection when you really need new tires but don’t have the money, or which high school kids are going to key your car after their team loses a ballgame at your home field.

  For the next hour, it’s easy conversation and laughter. I learn more about Greer and Zoe. Greer’s gone back to college this year, and Zoe’s taking a break from her work as a lawyer, though she’s cagey about that. The beer is cold and hoppy, and Liz’s—Betty’s, I guess I better get used to calling her—food is delicious. I convince Kit to eat a jalapeño popper even though she says she doesn’t usually eat hot things, and the noise she makes in her throat when she bites into it, her eyes closing in pleasure, forces me to shift in my seat, so turned on am I by the way she looks. I’m trying to be trustworthy, not-corporate Ben, and it’s working, but not if I become distracted, horny Ben. Not if I stare at her like I want to kiss her, like I want to taste all that spicy flavor on her mouth.

  My thoughts are interrupted by Zoe, who leans both elbows on the table and clasps her hands, as if she’s opening a negotiation. “So,” she says, looking back and forth between me and Kit before settling her eyes on me. “How’d you get into recruiting?”

  It’s not as off-the-wall as what Greer opened with, but it still surprises me—I came ready to answer Kit’s friends’ questions about why I was recruiting her, why she’d have a good life in Texas, why Beaumont would be a good fit. That’s kitchen table talk, but this is something different. To Zoe and Greer, at least, I’m Beaumont—me and the company, we’re the same.

  I take a sip of my beer, set it down and mimic her posture. I feel, but don’t see, Kit and Greer exchange a look. “My roommate in college, Jasper, he brought me into the business.”

  That’s not going to be enough for Zoe, who quirks that eyebrow again and signals me to go on. “Jasper’s a science guy,” I say, and pause to think about how to describe Jasper to people who don’t know him. “He’s the most focused guy I’ve ever met—by the time we were sophomores, he had his eye on Beaumont as the place he wanted to land, he knew he wanted to do R&D for a company with that kind of profile. He knew he wanted to search out new tech and bring it to the market.”

  “That tells me exactly nothing about you.”

  “Zoe, give him a minute,” says Kit.

  “It’s all right,” I say, giving her a grateful look before focusing back on Zoe. “Jasper isn’t a great communicator. He sees the tech, or the science, and not always the people behind it. I’m good at that part.”

  “Kit says you didn’t know a whole lot about her when you showed up here,” Zoe says, and I smile, because as much as she’s making me squirm, I’m glad as hell Kit has her.

  “She’s right. I got a call to talk to Kit under different circumstances than are normal—I’m around here taking care of my dad, so my approach wasn’t very elegant.”

  “It was fine,” says Kit. “I don’t like elegant, anyways.”

  “Your dad’s salvage yard,” Zoe continues, “That’s a family business?”

  “It is. My great-grandfather started it, a one building operation over on Main. He bought the land it’s on now, and my grandpop built the warehouse itself. My dad and him, they did a good amount of expansion over the years.”

  “But you work in Texas,” says Greer. It’s not a question, but behind her statement is something tougher than anything Zoe has asked.

  I shift in my seat, feel the weight of the silence while they wait for my answer. “Right, yeah. I’m not planning to take over for my dad. I think he’ll sell after a while.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?” Kit asks. It’s not lost on me that I’m saying nothing about Beaumont, about what Kit stands to gain from joining the team. But somehow I feel drawn into this with Kit and her friends. It’s an important part of my having any chance of convincing her and them of anything I have to say.

  I shrug, take another sip of my beer. “My dad, he brought me up in that yard, and my grandpop too, when he was alive. They taught me a lot about the business. But they never pressured me to take over, and I think my dad knew I had to get out of here after…” I trail off here, swallow uncomfortably. Probably I should not have gone down this route.

  “After?” Zoe says.

  I’m seized by a surge of confidence, or maybe of stupidity. I don’t have any reason to keep this a secret. In fact, I have good reasons to be proud of how I came out of what happened. So I lean back in my seat, ignoring the way my back, already a little sticky with sweat, rests uncomfortably against the vinyl booth. “I got sent to a juvenile detention facility for six months when I was seventeen,” I say, and Zoe sits back too, crossing her arms over her chest. I give them the facts as clearly and quickly as I can. “I had some minor prior offenses, for vandalism. But one night, I was out with some friends, and we were being stupid assholes and we tried to start a bonfire. We were too close to a building, a residential garage separate from the main house. There was a lot of flammable material in the garage, and—ah. An apartment up top.” That was hard to say, harder than I thought it’d be. “The tenant made it out, with some minor burns, but it went up quick, burned the structure down.” It’s hard to explain the way my mind still works around this issue, around what I’d done—it’s this razor-edged panic that slices acros
s me, knowing that I was seconds away from killing someone. In court, they’d called it recklessness toward loss of life. I’ve never forgotten that phrase. Sometimes, I still wake up in the night and hear it echoing in my head, though I can never remember dreaming about it. “I got sent in for arson.”

  “What about your friends?” asks Kit.

  I shake my head. “I took the blame. I lit it. None of them had any priors. It was an accident, but the cops felt there was enough gross negligence to treat it as arson. And they were right. So I went in to juvenile detention while my case was being processed, all that. Eventually, I got out with just probation. I didn’t have to serve any time in the correctional facility.” I leave out that things hadn’t looked all that good, really, until Richard had finally gotten involved. To this day I hated that he got to be the hero, when it’d been my dad that had been there for every court appearance, every visitation day.

  “Was it—?” Greer starts to ask, but seems to think better of whatever she was going to say, closing her mouth and fingering the corner of her napkin.

  “It was all right,” I say, but I’m not going to tell them most of it, about how sad it was sometimes, how lonely and scary it was waiting for a court date, about how there were these sudden, unpredictable outbreaks of violence, sometimes between people you thought were friends, about how much I missed my dad and the yard. “I got my shit straight in there. Studied a lot, kept up with my schoolwork as best I could. When I got out, I had some things to catch up on, school-wise, so I stayed here, finished up. Did a couple of years of community college and worked at the salvage yard. I made enough to pay back the family whose garage I burned down, paid the tenant’s hospital bills, the stuff insurance didn’t cover. Then I went to Texas for school.”

  “Wow,” says Kit, and I wish I’d had a more noble story to impress her with. I’m proud of how I cleaned up, but it’s not easy to tell people that you’d been the kind of person to do something so incredibly stupid and dangerous. After a beat, she says, “But you could come back now, if you wanted. You could take over the salvage yard. You’re good at it.”