One Foot Over the Line

WHEN Jeremy had gotten his first weekly paycheck in February, Craw had asked him if he wanted help setting up a bank account. Jeremy had said no, thank you, as long as there was a check-cashing place in the little town of Granby then Jeremy could get along just fine. He still had his little bible with the gouge out of the middle, and that would do him just like it had his daddy. In fact, that bible had been what let him get away after his daddy was killed, because if Gianni hadn’t left him that cash in there, Jeremy wouldn’t have been able to afford the bus ticket that let him blow town.

Not that the bible was the only place he stored his little packets of cash. There were the usual spots—in the mattress, in the pocket of the one sport coat he owned, in a plastic bag behind the toilet—all sorts of good places a con man would know to put money, and it was a good thing, too, because Jeremy wouldn’t have known what to do with Aiden’s gift otherwise.

About a week after Jeremy had mangled his hand, he was still on non-mill duty. He worked mostly with the critters and the dye vats and the drying room since the gauze over his healing hand was likely to get caught in the machine works, even if he could move pretty close to normal. He had just finished brushing the rabbits and cleaning the hair (lots of it since it was spring and they were shedding) off the brushes and into bags to be spun into some specialty lots, and when he turned around from the cage, Aiden was standing behind him, smiling fiercely.

Jeremy took an inadvertent step back flush with the rabbit cage, his ass pressing up against the wood. Usually when someone looked at him like that, he was about to be conned, or the cops were on his tail, or someone was looking to get him in the lunch line and he needed to come up with some swag, stat. It was the smile of someone who knew something Jeremy didn’t, and Jeremy felt a stab of betrayal. Aiden?

And then Aiden pulled his hands from behind his back and produced two brightly knitted brown-green-and-blue mittens, the kind with the ribbing around all the fingers, but that let the fingers and thumb see air, so that you weren’t trying to do stuff with wool over your hands.

Jeremy blinked at them, and Aiden huffed in annoyance. “Go on, take them!”

Blink. “They’re for me? Whatever for?”

Aiden’s jaw clenched, and Jeremy was suddenly back three months before when every question he asked about the mill made the boy look like he was going to whap him upside the head. “They’re a gift, dumbass! Same reason you gave me the hat!”

Aiden was, in fact, wearing the hat—and he’d been right. The felting and the blocking had made the thing smaller, and it hugged Aiden’s ears. It was, in fact, a little warm for spring, and the gold-tinted purple and cobalt blue looked more like autumn than spring, but Aiden was wearing it anyway.

Jeremy reached out with one hand, keeping the other behind his back, and stroked one of the half-mittens with a finger. Green, brown, and blue—he’d never really thought of colors before, but he liked these. The yarn Aiden had used was one of their sturdier yarns—100 percent wool, and it had gone through the expensive chemical treatment so it wouldn’t felt like Aiden’s hat. Jeremy figured it was wise to use that kind of yarn—it would last. But sturdy or not, it was still soft and giving underneath his fingertip, and he found he’d crushed it a little in between his thumb and forefinger before he snatched his hand away and put it behind his back with the other one.

“So,” Aiden said, impatience creeping into his voice, “take them!”

Jeremy shook his head. “Those are real nice,” he said, darting his eyes up to Aiden’s frustrated face. “They’re too nice for me. You give those to Crawford or Ariadne. Your dad, maybe.” He smiled ingratiatingly, anything to still the panic like one of the rabbits when a human was trapping them in strong arms.

Aiden scowled, grabbed Jeremy’s arm from behind his back, and pulled his hand up by the wrist. Jeremy wasn’t going to fight him, since his movements weren’t cruel, and he allowed Aiden to open his hand and put the mittens into it. Aiden forcibly closed his fingers over the precious little bits of wool then, and Jeremy clung to them as he stepped back. “If you don’t want them, you’re going to have to tell me honestly,” Aiden said, and Jeremy couldn’t tell from his tone whether or not he’d guessed the real reason Jeremy wouldn’t want them.

“They’re too nice,” Jeremy said weakly, because in his fingers they felt warm and soft and so well crafted. He’d dyed this yarn, he realized. He’d washed it and dried it and carded it and sorted it into roving and spun it. Aiden had taken the last step and created something with it, but Jeremy had helped—he’d helped make something real.

It was, perhaps, the only reason Jeremy didn’t chase Aiden down and spin a black lie. Jeremy had helped make these, and they were real. To lie to Aiden because Jeremy was afraid of strings made them a con, and Jeremy had worked so hard to avoid cons. He could have conned three times his paycheck, every time he went into the check-cashing place, but he didn’t. It was just like prison: you don’t shit where you eat. But in prison, he would have gotten a shiv in the gut. The penalty for fucking up here, in Granby and at Craw’s, was so much worse.

So Jeremy didn’t con anymore, and he had to take those pretty little half-mittens, because Aiden made them.

He put them in his bible, and stashed some of his cash in the pockets of his good pair of pants, the pair he only wore when they were going to Boulder, because Craw would take him and Aiden out to dinner when they did that, to a place where the girls all had big tits and tight T-shirts and seemed disappointed that none of the guys at their table cared to ogle.

The next time they went there, Aiden asked Jeremy why he didn’t look, and Jeremy looked at one girl and then back at Aiden and shrugged. “That shit gets bought and sold all the time,” he said, quietly enough so he didn’t offend the young lady. “I’m getting my shit sorted—I’m in no place to close that deal.” It was true enough. He’d always been amenable to sweetening the pot when he and Oscar had been on a con—with either sex—but now? When there was no con? When his johnson was not in the pot to be offered? He was starting to realize that Gianni’s shy smile had meant so much more to him than other smiles of the same sort from young women around the country. It was amazing what you figured out when you were selling yarn instead of blown sunshine, right?

“Twenty-two ounce rib eye, med rare, loaded baker with a salad to start. I don’t see you looking,” Jeremy said that last part to Aiden, so he didn’t have to give voice to any of the other truths running through his head.

“Aiden’s too young,” Craw rumbled.

Aiden rolled his eyes at them and put down his menu. “Sixteen-ounce prime rib, raw, garlic mash, and soup. I’m too young, Jeremy’s not ready—what’s your excuse, Craw?”

Craw eyeballed them both, looking bad-tempered, which was par for the course. “I’m gay, you morons—whole fucking town knows that!” And before either Jeremy or Aiden could answer, he signaled the waitress, and they placed their order. After that, Jeremy started talking about ways to publicize Crawford’s new line of yarn that he, Aiden, and Ariadne had been working on. Part of it was to cover any awkwardness, yeah, but part of it was because it was something he wanted to talk about. He got Craw being gay and not wanting the whole world—or even any of the world—to know or give a crap. There were personal things—the last girl or boy you kissed for real, the first of each, where you thought your daddy might be buried—these things should be kept in your bible. These were things that could haunt you in a con, or be used against you when a con went belly-up. Jeremy had been given a little room to keep his personal things. He wasn’t going to just barge into Craw’s room because they had some of the same stuff.

And Aiden and Craw just went along with it, following Jeremy’s reasoning until Aiden said he’d draw some posters up and maybe they could borrow a big silk screen from the art department and—

“Wait a minute,” Craw said, squinting at him. “Aren’t you out of school in two weeks? I could swear we have graduation to attend.”

Aiden stopped and laughed a little. “Yeah. I keep forgetting. You guys are coming, right?”

Craw shook his head. “Well, yeah, but an invitation would have been appreciated, dumbass!”

Suddenly Aiden looked panicked. “Fuck. I have them—I have them at home, done up and stamped.” He looked right at Jeremy. “Yours is addressed to Craw’s house, but you’re coming, right?”

Jeremy blinked at him, opening and closing his mouth. “I… don’t you gotta dress up fancy to those things?” he said after a moment.

Aiden shrugged and the waitress—God, she was pretty, with dark hair and a pouty little mouth and hooters that really weren’t too big for her tiny waist—arrived with their food. She looked hopefully at the three of them, trying to make conversation, and Aiden was too busy fuming at Jeremy and Craw was too busy digging into his chow, so it was up to Jeremy. He smiled at her and winked and called her “darlin’” and asked her to bring steak sauce and told her about yarn. She walked away laughing, and Jeremy got to his steak which was, thank God, still warm, and looked to see that both Aiden and Craw were glaring at him.

“What?” he asked, his mouth full of steak that was as melty as butter.

Aiden looked away, his eyes narrow with what looked like hurt, and Craw rolled his eyes at the both of them. “You’re coming to Aiden’s graduation, asshole. I’ll buy you a fuckin’ suit.”

A part of Jeremy relaxed then. It had all been taken from his hands. God, sometimes he just needed that, because making decisions in the honest world was not as much fun as they made it out to be in the joint; that was for damned sure.

“Well, fine,” he conceded, swallowing. “I just didn’t want to shame him, that’s all. It’s a big fuckin’ deal. The boy’s got to know we’re proud.”

Aiden perked up then and grinned. “Yeah?” he said happily. “What was your graduation like, Jeremy?”

Jeremy took another bite of his steak and tried not to mourn that it didn’t taste as good as the last one. “The guard walked by my cell at mail call and shoved an envelope in the slot,” he said, thinking about it. Wasn’t a bad memory. “I got a book that day too. Brave New World. You know, I didn’t understand that book at all? I asked if I could sign up for a college class just so I could ask someone who would know what that book meant.” That last bite of steak went down fairly easy, so he took a bite of loaded baked potato next, and then smiled up at Aiden, who was looking at him with bemused eyes.

“It’s about mankind fucking up his future by making identical humans to do identical jobs.”

Jeremy wrinkled his nose. “Now see? As long as people knit by hand, that ain’t ever gonna happen.”

Aiden and Craw both opened their eyes really big and asked Jeremy what he meant, and that’s what they talked about during the rest of the lunch. It was a good lunch, too, and afterward, when they got back to the mill that Jeremy was starting to think of as home, Craw told Aiden he’d buy them some silk screens so they could make posters, as long as Aiden would design them, and he told them both that he had a line on a large drum carder that was still dangerous but that did three times the work as the old trio, so they wouldn’t have to leave it on all the time, and that he’d probably ask them both to go to Philadelphia to get it.

They were grand dreams, pie-in-the-sky dreams, and while Aiden got all excited because he seemed to think they would happen, Jeremy got excited because they sounded like con man dreams, and he understood those. They weren’t disappointing if they didn’t come true—they weren’t supposed to come true. They were just the sort of dreams that got you to the next con.

Jeremy didn’t tell Aiden that when they got back to the mill, though. They helped Craw unload the dyeing supplies and the machine parts they’d gone to pick up, and Jeremy went to take Aiden home in the half-ton.

As soon as they pulled away from the mill, sitting on its small rural road of green grass dotted with happy alpacas, Aiden said, “So, Craw’s gay. What do you think of that?”

Jeremy frowned at him. “I mostly think it’s his own business. Why?”

Aiden shook his head. “I think you’re mostly right, that’s why. Just wanted to check.”

“What would you have done if I’d been an asshole about it?”

Aiden rolled down the window for some air, even though it was still chilly in early May, and thought before answering. “I think I would have been pretty disappointed,” he said after a few minutes. “You’re shaping up to be an okay guy. I’d hate to think less of you.”

Jeremy hoped it was too dark for the kid to see his face clearly, because although he was pretty sure he babbled for the rest of the trip to Aiden’s family’s house, he was damned positive that he smiled.

AIDEN’S graduation was almost Jeremy’s undoing. It was. He’d never smoked, because his daddy said it was the kind of habit that put people off and made them not trust you, just from the smell of smoke in your clothes, but he’d heard cons talk about trying to quit, and how something stressful would come up in their lives—getting arrested for one—and they would go right back to their old habits.

After Aiden’s graduation, Jeremy felt an almost overwhelming temptation to run out and sleep with the girl from the local coffeehouse and make off with her car, her cat, and her life savings.

It was just that everyone was so nice.

Jeremy got into the processional—he loved watching all the students come out in their caps and their gowns, looking all embarrassed and proud. He spotted Aiden right off—the boy had gotten his hair cut into something short that spiked over his brow—but his small, earnest face and pretty smile were like a searchlight, calling Jeremy’s attention. Listening to the rest of the ceremony was sort of boring, and when some girl stood up to sing a really sappy song—badly—Jeremy, Ariadne, and Craw met anguished eyes. You didn’t want to say anything mean, but God, you didn’t want to listen, either!

But after that Aiden actually got up to speak—because as much as Craw called him a dumbass, he was apparently smart enough to be the salutatorian—and Jeremy’s world narrowed to just that golden boy on the stage.

He was talking about… about all the stuff Jeremy had talked about. About making something real, and about not living your life to be like everyone else. He talked about how the things you made with your hands were as important as the things you made with your brains, and how dreaming was important but so was doing. Jeremy was entranced. It was like Aiden had taken everything Jeremy had learned between being a con man and an ex-con and a guy who worked at a yarn mill, and made it real, just by using words. And Aiden credited him—calling Jeremy a coworker—and Jeremy just blushed with pride. And then Craw grinned at him, and all that pride turned to horror.

Oh Christ. What if he fucked this up? He was having such a hard time just living a normal life—what if he fucked this up and let that golden boy down?

The thought alone was enough to send a wave of sweat washing through his body, suffocating him, turning his stomach to water and his bowels to ice. Although he sat through the end of the speech and tried to enjoy the pride in their boy (and he was the one with tissues in his pocket for Ariadne, who was sniffling against her husband’s shoulder) and then the recessional and all of the other business, it was all he could do to stop his own shaking. He thought he just might have calmed down enough to be a real human when they went to greet Aiden on the football field and tell him congratulations.

Aiden’s family was there—it felt like there was a million of them—Mom, Dad, brothers, sisters, grandmother, aunties—and in the middle of that crush of people, Aiden’s mom turned to him and said, “Hiya, Craw! Oh, and you must be Jeremy!”

She was a sweet, perfectly average middle-aged woman, with a happily lined face, faded brown hair, and pretty green eyes with gold lashes, almost like her son’s. She walked right up to Jeremy and hugged him and said, “We have heard so much about you. It’s really time we had you over for dinner. How about next week?”

It was damned near enough to send him screaming for a big city for some three-card-monte.

He pulled his con man’s smile out of his jacket pocket, though, and told her that next week would be a fine time to have dinner over at their house, and then accepted his hug from Aiden like he was a decent person and deserved that quick touch of heaven.

“Jesus, Jeremy—you’re sopping with sweat!” Aiden laughed as he pulled away. “You just got those clothes!”

Jeremy blushed some more. “Guess I got the one spot of sunshine in Colorado,” he said, that tight con man’s grin firmly in place. “You did real good, Aiden. Best speech I ever heard!”

Aiden’s grin was nothing but euphoria at a job well done. “Well, it was pretty easy, considering you did most of the writing of it at lunch that one day. You heard me give you credit, right?”

Jeremy shook his head and a real blush and a real smile chipped at the con man’s façade. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he mumbled. “The words were all yours.” He felt Aiden’s hand on his shoulder and he went to look up, but then Aiden’s sister wanted a hug and wanted to brag about how she was going to be valedictorian in two years and Aiden could chase her dust, and Jeremy was left blessedly alone.

There was a caravan from the high school football field to Craw’s house, because Craw had volunteered (with a lot of prodding from Ariadne) to host the after-graduation party, and Jeremy rehearsed his exit strategy in the car on the way over.

Of course he had an exit strategy. He was going to have to leave all the peanut butter behind, but he just might be able to put all the cash (and five months of working legit while Craw paid his rent and fed him once in a while had given him a surprising amount of that) in a small duffel and walk away. It was May. He could sleep in the small, clean alley behind the bus stop that night and hop on the bus in the morning. He’d done it hundreds of times before he was twenty; it was no big deal.

Jeremy walked into Craw’s pleasant, spacious farm house, where he’d been asked many times to sit down to dinner with Craw himself, or to lunch with all of them when Craw felt inclined, and smiled genially. He wandered the crowd, making sure he talked to everybody, hugged a sniffly Ariadne, clapped Craw on the back since the old bastard was too proud to be surly, and shook a lot of matronly hands with the world’s nicest family.

His smile was tight and shiny, spiffy enough to pop that dimple in the back of his cheek, and he tried very hard not to let Aiden see it. He was pretty sure Aiden knew what that smile meant.

He’d thought he’d done it too. Everyone thought he was at the party, having the time of his life, until he had his hand on the kitchen door to slip off across the driveway to the barn. He looked up to take one last scan of the room, his eyes prepared to stop extra long and sad on Aiden, when he realized that Aiden was across the room, glaring at him as he left.

Well, shit. Jeremy slid out extra quick, figuring he could be down the driveway and halfway down the road home before Aiden even got out of the room to look for him.

He underestimated Aiden’s determination.

He had all of his cash packets on the bed with his bible and was shoving them into the small duffel he’d had with him when Craw had taken him in, when Aiden barged into his room. Jeremy grabbed his bible and clutched it to his chest as he whirled around to confront the boy, and he wasn’t sure if it was for moral strength or protection.

“You’re leaving?” Aiden’s voice cracked on the word, and Jeremy tried really hard to find his smile. He didn’t think he succeeded, though—he was pretty sure it flitted back and forth across his face like a moth.

“Not leaving, just… just relocating. Finding a different place, someplace nice people won’t find me. You understand, right? I’m not the sort of person you have around nice people, and your family, they’re nice people. Need some distance, right? Aiden, you’ve got to admit, you don’t want me at your mom’s table. I mean, I’m good and all for a work buddy, but you don’t want me at your dinner table, not with little girls and nice ladies, and your grandma and such. She’s a real nice woman, you know, going to be one of those batshit crazy dames that wears pajamas and a feather boa in a few years—I’d love to hang out at the park with her and play chess and talk about boys she knew, but not at the table. Table’s the place for family—what are you doing?”

Aiden had taken the two steps into the tiny room necessary to be face-to-face, and grabbed the bible.

“Put it back, give your apologies to my mother, and get back in that room.”

“What?” Jeremy cried, honestly confused. “Give my what to your mother?”

“If coming to dinner with us scares you that much—” Aiden yanked on the bible and Jeremy was undone enough to let it slip from his hands while saying, “I’ve eaten in prison, dumbass! Your family doesn’t scare—” Oh shit. “—me.”

The bible fell on the ground between them, opening up to reveal the little box inside, and Aiden looked down at it and then looked up at Jeremy, more than bemused.

“I thought those things were only in movies,” he said, stooping to pick it up.

“So does everyone else,” Jeremy muttered, stooping to get it back from him. “That’s why daddy had one made for me when I was a kid.” Aiden beat him to the bible, and Jeremy just squatted there in an agony of embarrassment.

“You kept them in your bible?” Aiden asked, looking at the fingerless mittens, neatly folded next to his stack of big bills. “Why didn’t you wear them?”

“They’re too nice to wear,” Jeremy said miserably. “I didn’t want to wreck them.”

Aiden looked up at him, and his eyes were shiny and his face was tight and sort of scrunched up. “If you stay, Jeremy, I’ll make you more.”

Jeremy’s face felt scrunched up the same way. “There’s no need,” he said gruffly. He took the bible away from Aiden then and closed it, making sure the mittens were carefully stashed while he took the wad of bills and shoved it in his pocket. They both straightened up, standing close enough to each other for Jeremy to feel Aiden’s breath on his face.

“I… I’m not good enough for your mother’s table, Aiden. I used to sell bibles to women just like her, and those bibles were never going to show up. I… I don’t know how I can sit there and make nice conversation with her. It….” What was he going to say? It froze his bowels and made him want to throw up? No. He had some claim to being a man, after all. “It wouldn’t sit right,” he said lamely, and Aiden nodded and looked away.

“If I promise you don’t have to come to my house, would you put your shit away and come back inside?” he asked quietly, and Jeremy looked around wildly. His stuff was everywhere, piles of peanut butter and ramen noodles—there were mice that liked to live in the grain bins, and some of the ramen had fallen victim to them. There were open packages and little crumbs all over. And he couldn’t even remember where he’d been keeping all his cash.

“I… I need to clean up,” he said apologetically. “Maybe you should go back and—”

“I’ll go get the dustbin and a broom,” Aiden said decisively. “You can hide the cash while I’m gone.”

Jeremy looked at him with naked gratitude. “Okay,” he said, just so happy to have a plan. “I can do that.”

Aiden nodded, and swallowed, some of his earlier passion coming back to shudder in his voice.

“Jesus God, Jeremy. If I hadn’t gone to follow you, Christ knows where you’d be right now.”

“Waiting for a bus,” Jeremy said without thinking. “That’s usually where most escape plans end.”

Aiden widened his eyes. “I’ll have to remember that. Uhm, Jeremy?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you thought maybe about getting an apartment? Maybe if you made it a little harder to walk away, you’d find it a little easier to talk to us first.”

Jeremy blinked and looked around the room. It was tiny, yes, maybe twelve by twelve—but that still made it bigger than the cell he’d shared with the DWI guy, and a lot more inviting than the swelter of curtains he’d hid in the night his daddy died.

“But, if I did that, I wouldn’t have near so much cash,” he said, smiling his con man’s smile. Aiden was apparently not buying tonight. Who said high school didn’t teach you anything?

“The cash is to buy stuff with, idiot. What good’s the cash if you don’t have a home—” Aiden shook his head. “I’ll be back with that broom. Let’s hurry, or they’ll start to think we’re out here making out.”

Jeremy shook his head. “You got pretty girls in there—they’ll be more suspect. They’ll probably think I bound and gagged you and took your cash.”

Aiden stomped off then, swearing under his breath. It sounded like “Oh fuck no, I’m not having this conversation right now,” but Jeremy couldn’t be sure. He was busy looking around the tiny room, wondering if he could eat half a jar of peanut butter in one sitting so he could shove his cash in one of those.