The boys crammed around the table probably dreamed within the bounds of the town. Too many people from Repose never left it, visited the city and were uncertain in among so many spears of steel and glass, so much excess. Repose was small and it was friendly. Even Leah, who remembered that closeness as sickening-tight, sweet gossip and poisonous whispers, found herself inclined before she caught herself, toward the warmth that seeped from brickwork, the apparent safety in small streets. The boys had nothing worth telling, and she could tell from her place by the door that the only role they could think of for a woman was spread on a backseat, the heat blowing noisily from the front, or the cheap-seats to a family Christmas, cooking in a kitchen all linoleum, closed in by walls.
Not a role she intended to play. Their sight slid over her, and Leah knew she didn't fit. Too sharp, as if the city's angles left her like a blade. She knew she was being looked at, and she looked directly at the man who sat in a corner, who looked at her and whose eyebrows slid upward briefly, a wordless comment.
Repose had rubbed her wrong, backward. Leah's gaze was direct, she took a beer from the bar (oh, that was Repose, she'd learned to drink from the first man, expensive whiskey, smooth from years aging and she had never drunk after football games, surreptitious with cheap beer ) between two fingers and looking at the bar, seat to seat to seat, shoulder to shoulder with men who looked the way she remembered her father, she slid into the unoccupied space on the other side of the corner from the man who hadn't bothered, expensive perfume and cold air coming with her.