Lions by Bonnie Nadzam Read Free Book Online Page A

space above your head like this.” She moved her small, thick hands over her own head as if she were smoothing down flower petals into a cap around the top of her skull. “Just like that. For safety.”
    â€œSafety?”
    â€œDon’t you have the sense,” the woman said, “that something wants to bargain with you?”
    Outside in the street the wind lifted the thin white hair off Marybeth Sharpe’s head as she rocked back and forth in her old wooden chair.
    â€œCan I get you some change?” Leigh asked.
    â€œTell me you don’t feel it. Almost knocked me back a minute ago. What was in your head just now?”
    Leigh picked up the check and looked at it without comprehending it, and set it back down.
    â€œIsn’t there anyone that you love?” the woman asked.
    Without thinking, Leigh felt Gordon’s hand in hers. She felt, without naming, an old song in a haunted place, a flare of heat in her chest, a key that fitted a door.
    â€œThree seconds of your day,” the woman said, again gesturing with her hands around her head. “Close it up. Do it regular. Morning and night.” She took the check and began rooting around in her giant brown purse. She withdrew two five-dollar bills. “Something is already engaged.” She stood and smoothed her T-shirt over the folds of her belly. “Something’s in there with you already.”
    Leigh held the check and cash and watched the woman leave. Outside in the street the woman made a U-turn and headed back toward the frontage road. Marybeth Sharpe waved at the car from her rocking chair.
    Leigh set the woman’s dirty dish and cup in the bus tub, slipped the five-dollar bills into her pocket. She opened the register and closed it. Folded the woman’s check and dropped it in the trash.
    â€œWhat was all that about?” Boyd asked. May had corrected his buttons.
    Leigh wiped her hands on her apron. “Looking for a tall man in a pair of stolen coveralls.”
    â€œOh, shut up.”
    â€œI told her he went north, that you chased him out of town with a hatchet. She asked if you were the one who killed the dog.”
    Boyd threw up his hands. Over breakfast alone he’d heard ten different versions of his own complicity in various crimes involving the stranger and his dog. “I didn’t kill the dog. I didn’t hang it, I didn’t burn it, and I didn’t run it over with my truck.”
    â€œLeigh,” May called from behind the counter where she was stooped with her head in the dishwasher. “Will you get Gordon or John and tell them I need someone to fix this thing again?”
    â€œI told you I would do it.”
    â€œDon’t you touch it Boyd Hardy.”
    He put his hands up, his beer bottle hooked between his thumb and forefinger. “Bring me another beer when you come back,” he told Leigh.
    May stood and looked at Boyd. “Did you give her a key to the bar?”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œI thought I was done for the day,” Leigh said.
    â€œGo go go.” May waved her hand. “But tell John we need him over here.”
    â€œI’m taking some of these sandwiches.”
    When Leigh reached the shop, Dock and Emery Sterling were there with John, as they often were. Emery ran across the shop in his welding helmet to greet Leigh, then walked back to the workbench stiff legged with his long sunburnt arms uplifted and flexed, the way he almost always walked, as if he were playing a game: pretend I’m stuck in a human body that can only move like this. He was always smiling, his chin wet with his own spit, and flapping his hands like big pink birds. He was the same age as Gordon and Leigh, and though in all his life he had never spoken a word, Dock and his wife Annie insisted he had a language. When from the bed he reached up to touch the ends of his mother’s bright hair, that was a word. When he threw back his white-blond head and