Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 20 of 60

Eduardo drove to the feed store at first light. He loaded sacks and stacked pallets and kept his hands moving, but the dream from two nights back kept coming back to him. The figure with the staff. His own face on it. The card the white-haired woman had turned over at the tea house. He worked through the morning and the picture would not settle. At noon he counted his week's pay in the truck. Cash. More than he had held honest in years. He looked at it and felt the pull he had felt when Danny leaned out the window. Not gambling now. Worse. The urge to spend it fast, to buy something loud, to prove he had it. The house sat waiting for that money. He did not trust himself to carry it home and set it on the table where he could see it after dark. He drove past his own gate and kept going, up the road to the wooden house with lanterns and moons carved into the eaves. Dream catchers hung from the porch. He had passed it a hundred times. He had never stopped. Dreamer opened the door before he knocked. She was small, dark-haired, barefoot. She looked at him like she had been expecting a knock but not from him. "I had a dream," Eduardo said. "Two nights ago. A man with a staff. He had my face. The road behind him was full of doors." "Come in." She sat him at a low table and poured water. He told her the dream. He told her about Danny. He told her about the cash folded in his shirt pocket and how the house whispered at night. "Who is not in the dream?" she asked. "What?" "You told me the man. The doors. The road. Who is left out." He thought. "Kiersten." "Then the dream is about her," Dreamer said. "The doors behind you are hers. You cannot carry the money into a house that still belongs to the man who lost her. Put it somewhere he cannot reach." "Where." "Not your pocket. Not your drawer. A bank. Someone else's ledger. Somewhere you have to ask permission to touch it." He sat with that. It was plain and it was hard. "What did your mother put in your hands," he said, because her eyes had gone somewhere for a moment. She looked at him. Quieter. "That is not your dream." He nodded and did not ask again. He drove into town before the bank closed. He opened an account in his own name, deposited every bill, and asked for a book he could not carry loose. The clerk stamped the page. He wrote the amount in his ledger that night at the kitchen table. The cash was gone from the house. The urge had nothing to grab. He slept without dreaming.