7. The Paycheck

She pulls open the envelope - bulky, worn at the corners - that he hands her, and her eyes widen.

'Dammit, Boyd, I didn't mean for you to give your whole paycheck.'

His eyes are shadowed, troubled - more troubled - and he frowns. 'Nothing would please me more than if that were so, but I must confess it isn't.' He takes a breath. 'My cousin Johnny...'

'Oh.'

She stares at the packet in her hands, feeling its thickness. They don't talk about Johnny but not in the same way that they don't talk about Bowman. She never minded Johnny all that much - she never really saw that much of him; and she can't say that she's either happy or sad at his survival, it's a simple fact that doesn't impact on her life. They don't talk about Johnny because they don't really talk about the things that happened before. She's increasingly aware that their relationship exists either side of a schism: Before Bulletville and After Bulletville.

Or maybe even earlier, she thinks sometimes, maybe it was the night when she stood on her porch with her shotgun and he offered her his apologies and she'd been too suspicious, too afraid to really believe him.

Johnny belongs to Before and she's content to leave him there but still she asks: 'How is he?'

Boyd's hands go into his pockets, shoulders hunching, bracing himself hopelessly against a torment that doesn't come from outside. 'He's alive.' He speaks it as though still existing in the world is not in itself a triumph.

'Johnny made his own choices,' she says sharply. His head tilts back, eyes opaque as glass; she feels a stab of irritation. 'He didn't have to go against Bo, but he would have one way or another. Everyone knew that.'

'Maybe another way wouldn't have got him shot.'

He still thinks of them, his men - and why wouldn't he - and he thinks of Johnny in the same way, but he isn't and she feels like screaming, but she hasn't seen what he has seen. She holds her tongue. She puts the envelope in the drawer where she keeps all of the important letters. 'Are you in for supper?'

There is silence. She looks at him and he's gone back to that glazed look he'd worn for the first weeks After, then he shakes himself and his hands come out of his pockets. 'I have a shift.'

Double-shift. She grits her teeth. If he wants to work himself to death to prove a point, then let him.

'There's some leftover meatloaf in the fridge,' she says, and walks past him, out of the kitchen. He can put it in the new lunch tin she'd picked up at the store because she can't stand the sight of him taking Bowman's.

She'd also found Bowman's baseball bat in the hall closet, beaten the tin with it until one was a flattened scrap of metal and the other was splintered, then put them both in the trash.

In the living room she takes the air deep into her lungs and thinks that she needs a cigarette, except that she's left both them and her lighter in the kitchen.

Then she notices that propped against her sewing machine there's a splash of colour: a mass of flowers, wild and untidy and beautiful, vivid in the shaft of sunlight, tied with a ribbon. She approaches them carefully and can catch their scent before she's near them - the heady distillation of warmth and light and joy. She picks them up, buries her face in the bright heads, drinks in their perfume and she can him moving around in the kitchen.