“Tommy will give you the gate code.”
Tommy, who had been very busy examining a motorcycle part he had no immediate need to examine, straightened up.
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll need it,” Jack said to Evelyn.
“Because once you have it, you can come in whenever you need to for whatever reason, day or night.”
He looked at her steadily.
“Do you understand what I mean by that?”
Evelyn looked at him for a long moment.
“Yes,” she said.
“I understand.”
She finished her coffee.
She put her handbag over her arm.
She stood.
And she shook Jack Walker’s hand with a firmness that made one of the younger members, Garrett Rhett, who had been trying to look like he wasn’t fascinated by any of this, raise his eyebrows slightly in surprise.
Then she walked back toward the front door.
The men in the room watched her go.
She opened the door.
She stepped back out into the white Arizona sun.
And the door closed behind her.
The room held its silence for a moment.
Then Big Lou said, “Are we doing this?”
Nobody answered immediately.
He looked around.
“We’re doing this.”
Jack said, “She’s 76.”
He picked up the wrench he had left on the workbench.
“She organized 31 years of accounts payable.”
Big Lou nodded slowly.
“She can handle the box situation.”
Jack didn’t look at him.
“Big Lou.”
Big Lou’s voice changed.
The edge of rhetorical protest disappeared, replaced by something more direct.
“That bruise.”
“I know.”
“Ryan.”
“Grandson. I know, Lou.”
Big Lou looked toward the front door where Evelyn had disappeared moments earlier.
“So what are we right now?”
Jack walked back toward the motorcycle he had been working on.
“We’re going to give her a walk.”
He picked up the wrench.
“And we’re going to give her a place that’s safe for her to be.”
He looked around the room.
“And then we’re going to pay attention.”
A pause.
“And then we’re going to see what we see.”
Another pause.
“And then we’re going to decide what to do about it.”
He looked over his shoulder.
“That’s what we’re doing.”
Big Lou nodded.
Decker, who had been quiet throughout, finally spoke.
“We should probably clean up the kitchen before Thursday.”
Several people turned to look at him.
“Just saying,” Decker said.
They cleaned up the kitchen.
Evelyn arrived at 7:58 Thursday morning because she had been arriving to places two minutes early for her entire adult life, and she saw no reason to stop now.
She had the gate code, which she had memorized rather than writing down because she was not a woman who wrote things down that she didn’t want found.
She parked her car, a 2009 Honda Accord with 94,000 miles on it and a crack in the passenger-side mirror that Gerald had always meant to fix.
And she came in through the front entrance with a canvas bag over one arm and her old black handbag over the other.
Jack was already there.
He was always already there.
She would learn this about him over time.
That he arrived before everyone else and often stayed after everyone left.
That the clubhouse was, in some fundamental sense, his responsibility.
And he felt that responsibility in a physical way.
As a weight he carried without complaint.
He showed her the office.