"There's two kinds of people in a booth," Ansel said. "The kind that panics when the film breaks, and the kind that gets very still. The ones that panic, they grab, they yank, they make it worse. The still ones, they wait half a second, and they see where the break is, and they fix it. Being still isn't the problem. The problem is if you stay still. You understand?"
"I didn't do anything."
"Not yet," Ansel said. "Picture's not over."
* * *
His mother was awake when he got home at one in the morning, sitting at the kitchen table in her pink scrub top with a cup of Sanka and the light over the stove on. She had the night off. Somebody had called her. In Merritt somebody always called.
"Let me see," she said.
He let her see. There was a red scrape at the base of his throat where Royce Hadley's ring had caught him, and the beginnings of a bruise along his collarbone in the shape of four fingers. Linda Kowal was thirty-nine years old and had worked at St. Anne's for nine years and had seen worse things than a bruise every single night of those nine years, and she looked at it for a long time without saying anything, and then she went to the sink and ran the cold water and stood there with her back to him, holding the edge of the counter.
"Mom."
"I'm okay." She didn't turn around. "Give me a minute. I'm deciding whether to drive over to that man's house with a tire iron."
"Mom, he owns this place. The duplex. Prairie Holdings."
"I know who owns the duplex, Daniel."