By a Charm and a Curse(28)

“Is that supposed to scare me?” he asks.

I shift my aim so that the gun is pointed lower and fire off three staples into the meat of his thigh.

“Asshole!” he yells.

I aim higher. “Next one goes in your face. Now go.”

He weighs my words, trying to see if I’m serious.

I am so serious.

Out of the corners of my eyes I see his brothers move in to strike. I let my hand squeeze the trigger, and the spring inside makes an audible groan.

Fabrizio yelps and claws at his cheek. His stubby fingers can’t get a good grip on the staple, and he gives up on trying to get it out himself. As he sidles past, never letting me out of his sight, he mutters, “I’m going, asshole, I’m going.”

At a nod from their brother, Antonio and Lorenzo release Emma. She stumbles against the side of the booth, sliding along it until she’s sitting on the ground. Toffrey jumps back into her lap, a growl that’s too small to be intimidating rumbling from his throat. The brothers glare at me as they pass, but they both follow Fabrizio like good little foot soldiers. Even so, I don’t drop the staple gun until he and his brothers are well and truly gone.

Toffrey chooses this moment to leap from Emma’s lap, dashing a few feet ahead of me before planting his short legs in the gray dirt and yapping at the retreating figures. I can’t believe I just did that. I’ll have hell to pay now in one form or another, but at the moment, I don’t care. Emma needed me.

Emma is still sitting on the ground beside the booth when I turn around, and Toffrey stations himself beside her. I drop the gun back into my tool kit and offer her a hand. The glazed look in her eyes slowly fades away as she returns to the here and now. She slides her hand into mine and lets me help her stand.

“You know them?” Bitterness tinges her words, sharp and cutting.

I let her go and back away, walking toward my tools. “Unfortunately. I work here. I know everyone.”

“They always like that?”

The alleyway the Moretti brothers disappeared down is now filled with carnival patrons, but I still can’t shake the notion that they’re hiding just around the corner, listening to what I say. “Just with me. When Leslie brought them on, they tried to get their dad hired, too. As a carpenter. Leslie told them we already had two carpenters, and the best she could do for him was something in custodial. They’ve held it against my mom and me ever since.”

She nods slowly as she digests what I’ve told her.

“Do you want to go back to work?” I feel stupid as soon as I ask her. Her face falls, a subtle dropping of her eyebrows, a small turn of the mouth. Of course she wouldn’t. She would likely want to never see that box ever again. I am an idiot.

She doesn’t answer me right away. Instead, she bends down and picks up Toffrey, scritching the darker fur behind his ears. One tiny leg twitches in midair.

When she talks again, her voice is smaller, all the anger leeched out. “No. No offense, but I kind of hate it in there.”

She’s paper white in the moonlight, and though she’s dolled up in a pretty dress and fancy jacket and has her makeup done, she still looks lost, like she doesn’t know what she should do next. I wish I knew what to tell her, but I sure as hell don’t know what she should do. I barely know what I should do. The sliver of life showing between the two booths roils with passing people and flashing lights. “Why don’t you come with me,” I say. “I just need to drop off my tool kit and then I was going to see my friend’s knife-throwing act, and we can return Toffrey to his owner on the way.”

The smile I’d seen a glimpse of earlier grows, no longer a shooting star but now dawn creeping over the edge of the horizon.

“I’d like that,” she says.

We slip into the crushing flow of people, letting them push us away from the box. Pia and Duncan’s tent looms ahead, and when we pull even with it, I take Emma’s hand and bring her along as I duck inside. I only want to drop off my tool kit there, but the tent is empty, and Pia is bouncing off the walls.

“Have you guys met Emma?” I ask as I tuck the tool kit behind a heavily embroidered length of drapery.

“Yeah, yeah,” Pia says, wriggling her fingers in my direction. “Gimme your hand, Ben. It’s been ridiculously slow tonight and I’m bored as hell.”

Without thinking, I give her my right hand.

“Gross, Ben,” Pia says when she sees the scabbed-over wound. “This is like giving me a book with pages torn out. What happened, anyway?”

A flush creeps up my neck as I think of how these two will make fun of me for hurting myself because I’d been distracted by thinking about Emma. That and hell would have to look like Wisconsin in December for me to admit that with Emma here next to me. “Just, you know, cut myself. While working.”

Pia’s brow furrows, each line a testament to her disbelief. “While you were working,” she repeats. She frowns at my hand for a moment longer, as though trying to solve some complicated problem, before dropping it and picking up my left instead. My hand sits face up in hers, while one of her oval fingernails traces the slopes and dips of my palm. Her hazel eyes open wide, and in her best whispery, faraway voice she says, “You’re going to have seven kids and live in a shack—”

“Damn, Ben,” Duncan says with an appraising up and down glance. “Keep it in your pants.”