Betwixt Read Free

number she knew by heart.
    “Hey,” she began after a few moments. “Yeah, they just left.”
    The person on the other end said something and Ondine sighed. “I don’t know, sad.” She switched the phone to her other ear,
     leaning toward the window. “Yeah, maybe that is just the thing. Tonight though? So soon?”
    She nodded. “All right. Call me at five. We’ll figure out what to do then.”
    She lay back down underneath the butterflies and watched the pieces collect.

C HAPTER 2
    J ACOB C LOWES WAS NOT AN UNFEELING MAN , but the eighteen-year-old punk holding the dishwasher’s nozzle irked him. There he was now, thick black hair falling into
     his eyes, spraying a plate. He worked too slowly. He smoked when Jacob wasn’t in the kitchen. Just then the room smelled of
     cigarettes. Dishwashers weren’t supposed to care, he knew — Jacob had been a dishwasher once — but this one made his knees
     watery with anger.
    That goddamned name. Nix. Who the hell had a name like that?
    “Nix!” Jacob yelled over the din of the industrial machine. The boy pretended not to hear him. “Nix Saint-Michael!”
    Nix looked up, then down again.
    Punk.
Jacob didn’t like the way Nix worked, eyes half closed, almost asleep, yet walking and waking. Holding the nozzle with one
     hand, with the other — barely — a ceramic plate you’d think was heavy as plutonium.
    “It’s clean, Nix. The plate is clean.”
    Nothing.
    In the beginning it had been that Nix was late. Now he was on time, but he moved so slowly that they were always running out
     of soda glasses. So now they were giving refills to save glasses, and Jacob didn’t want to give refills. This wasn’t a goddamned
Friday’s,
for chrissakes. This was Jacob’s Pizza. This was the oldest New York–style pizza establishment in once-groovily bohemian,
     now-gentrified Northwest Portland.
    “Am I talking to myself? I believe there is a dishwasher here named Nix Saint-Michael, who I am trying to communicate with.
     Earth to Nix. We need some goddamned soda glasses!”
    “Pop.”
    Nix spoke too softly for Jacob to hear him over the cranking hum and his thick black hair obscured his eyes, but Jacob could
     see what his mouth was saying and it pissed him off.
    “Excuse me?”
    “It’s called pop here,” Nix repeated under his breath. “Never mind. Just give me five, man.”
    “What do you think this is? A fucking old folks’ home?” Jacob ignored the correction. “I don’t have
five,
Nix. I don’t even have
one.
I need those soda glasses
now.
”
    Jacob Clowes was used to punks. He spoke the language, knew that Nix wouldn’t respect him unless he was a bit of an asshole,
     so he played it that way. He had been a punk himself. Apunk kid from Brooklyn who had moved out to Portland in the seventies. He had hated the rich yuppies once they started moving
     in during the eighties, but the businessman in him — the one whose daughter, Neve, now attended that liberal (but still freakishly
     expensive) private day school,
Penwick,
and whose wife, Amanda, a former experimental dancer/macrobiotic cook/Reiki healer who had discovered the joy of expensive
     wine — depended on Jacob’s Pizza.
    And tonight, like it or not, Jacob’s Pizza depended on Nix.
    Anyway, he kind of liked the kid. He knew Nix squatted up in the park. He knew there were dark scenes in the family, somewhere
     in Alaska. Nix wore long-sleeved black T-shirts, but Jacob could imagine the places where the boy cut himself. A lot of the
     kids he had hired over the years were into that kind of thing. He may not have been able to change them, but he helped them,
     gave them jobs, talked to them after their shifts, gave them rides home. Sometimes he and Amanda had them over for dinner,
     and some of the girls babysat for Neve a few times when she was a kid.
    There were always the ones that fell through the cracks, though.
    “Hey, punk. I told you to get those glasses through the washer ten fucking