Page 125 of Lone Wolf

Evan took a moment with that one.

“And besides,” Lorilee said, “Hugh has plenty of money. He’ll be fine.”

“It’s not about him,” Evan said. “It’s about you. If you wreck him, make sure you want to carry that. Because you’ll have to live with it.”

“With what?”

“With the winning. Let’s say this diminishes him. You and he live together in the building. You’ll see each other all the time. In the elevator. At the mail slots. Plus if you win you’ll have to actually run the HOA.”

She breathed wetly. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“Open negotiations.”

“Talk to him?” she breathed. “Oh, Ev. Would you?”

Would he?

There was nothing he wanted to do less. Before he had time to clarify, she clung to him and wept with relief.

After a moment, he told himself to lightly pat her back.

And then he did.

Evan moved through the lobby swiftly. Joaquin had Neil Diamond on the radio and looked as miserable as anyone his age would feel listening to Neil Diamond.

At the elevator, Evan stood eye to eye with Lorilee’s augmented bust on the cling-wrap advertisement until she peeled apart, breasts widening. Then he rode up to the twentieth floor, doing his best to ignore the fluttering Post-its and flyers. Coming in hot down the hall to Condo C, he banged on the door.

When Hugh answered, he didn’t seem to read Evan’s mood, stepping back to welcome him in. “Mr. Smoak! So glad you swung by for a confabulation.”

He led Evan through the impeccably neat condo to two feminine love seats and a rose-colored couch with rolled arms and pronounced piping. The place bore the design imprint of Hugh’s deceased wife—fake plants, pastel watercolors on the walls, chenille throw blankets with excessive fringes— and Evan thought about him living here alone for the past decade and change, maintaining the condo and his wife’s memory in frozen suspension. The plastic fronds had been dusted and wiped down to hold a shiny luster and the blanket was perfectly folded over the back of one of the love seats, forcing Evan to imagine the grown man before him tending to these silly items with honor-bound constancy.

Election merch was fanned in neat display atop the brass-framed glass coffee table. Hugh gestured at the RIGHT-HUGH-OF-LEADERSHIP offerings. “Would you like a bumper sticker?”

Yes, if he could put it over Hugh’s mouth.

“Walters,” Evan said instead. “Sit down.”

Hugh sat.

Evan followed suit, the fringes of the blanket tickling the back of his arm. Taking a deep breath, he laid out the Lorilee perspective as best he could, painfully navigating the melodramatic minutiae. Hugh listened intently, his owl eyes pronounced behind black-frame glasses.

When he finished, Hugh’s face had taken on a sheen of sweat. “Ridiculous!” he said. “So this is how she reacted? Seizing power? What did she say I said again?”

“‘Get out of their way,’” Evan intoned, feeling absurd. “‘You’re taking up the whole hallway.’”

“Well.” Hugh’s glasses slid down his nose, and he knuckled them back into place. “I would never mean it that way. It most certainly wasn’t about her weight.”

“It’s still a piggish way to talk to a woman.”

Hugh looked down at his hands, studied his wedding ring. Evan glanced at the bank of silver-framed photographs on the mantel, Hugh and his bride through the years. He’d always known that Hugh’s wife had died, but he’d never connected the fact to Hugh’s emotional life. He considered it now— Hugh’s fussing over pointless regulations, the endless interactions over heating vents and pet regulations, all to stave off loneliness.

He wondered why loneliness was such a fearsome thing to so many people. That they couldn’t sit in it, learn its contours. It was that fear that let in assholes like Allman and Friedhoff to fill the hunger with empty calories until everyone was stuffed with emptiness instead of loneliness.

“Look,” Evan said, “you need to clean it up with her so that she can feel vindicated and declare some sort of internal victory. And then you can take over the HOA again so the rest of us can be spared around-the-clock electioneering and get back to our lives.”

Hugh’s eyebrows were thick and blunt where he’d clipped them. He spun his wedding ring a few times and nodded meekly.

“And Joaquin,” Evan said.