The Dull Roar of Hate

Three years is a long time to carry a grudge, but I'd managed it. I'd carried it like a stone in my coat pocket, picking it up every morning and setting it down every night, and I'd gotten so used to the weight that I honestly didn't know who I'd be without it. Avery Hollis, twenty-three years old, manager of the Beacon Hill Community Arts Center, keeper of one very specific and very well-oiled hatred.

The center used to be a Methodist church, back when that part of Portland had more people in it than pigeons. The pews were still there, the stained-glass rose window was still there, but the altar was long gone, replaced by a stage we used for community theater and choir rehearsals. I liked the building. I liked most of my job. What I did not like, what I had come to actively loathe with the patience of a woman who waters a poison plant every day, was the fact that every October, the Sanctus Choir of St. Anselm's came to my building and put on their biggest annual performance, and this year the man who directed that choir was the biggest mistake of my life.

Sherman.

Even thinking the name made my back teeth ache.

He'd been gone three years. No phone call, no note, no explanation. Six months of the best relationship I'd ever had, and then one Tuesday evening in March he kissed me on the forehead, said he had to take care of something, and vanished so completely that I eventually convinced myself I'd dreamed the whole thing. Except I hadn't dreamed it, because I still had his hoodie, and hoodies don't show up in dreams with that kind of collar stretch.

I found out later, through a series of events I still don't fully understand, that Sherman wasn't human. He was some kind of angel. An actual angel, wings and assignments and celestial paperwork, the whole deal. He'd been stationed near me for reasons I never got straight, and when his orders changed, he left. Just left. Like I was a posting he'd finished.

So when I took this job two years ago and discovered that the Sanctus Choir rented my stage every fall, I filed it away. And when this spring the choir announced its new director, I took it as a personal gift from whatever universe had been screwing me lately. And this year, the universe gave me one more present: a budget review. My name on the paperwork. My signature required for the funding release.

I cut it.

Kourtney, my assistant manager and the only person on earth who knew the whole Sherman story, watched me sign the memo with something between admiration and concern. She'd been at the center four years, she was twenty-nine and sharp as a box cutter, and she'd never trusted him, not once, not even when I was mooning over him like a fool.

"You're sure about this," she said, not really asking.

"He gets to vanish on me and then rent my building? No. No, I don't think so."

"It's gonna blow up in your face."

"Maybe. But it's gonna blow up in his face first."

* * *

He was in the back office at four o'clock on a Thursday, going over his rehearsal schedule, and I walked in with the memo and a face like a closed sign. He looked up, and I watched three years fall off him in about a second and a half. He still looked early thirties, which was a lie, because he was twenty-seven the last time I saw him and angels apparently don't age the way the rest of us do. Same dark hair. Same stupid face.

"Avery," he said, like my name was something he'd been rehearsing.

"Mr. Ambassador-to-the-chapel," I said, because I don't do reunions. "Here's yours. The funding for the Sanctus Choir's October residency is cut. Effective immediately. Rehearsal space, stage rental, piano tuning, all of it. You can thank the budget committee, which is me."

He read the memo. I gave him credit for that; some men would have kept looking at me. He read it twice, and when he looked up again his voice was very careful, the way it got when he was managing something big underneath.

"This is about me."

"This is about budget priorities."

"Avery."

"It's about a choir that was ghosted by its venue, Sherman. It happens in this business all the time."

He set the memo down flat on the desk, squaring the edges with one finger, and I could see him deciding not to argue the obvious. That was always his tell. Three years hadn't changed it.

"You signed this with a ballpoint that's out of ink," he said quietly. "You pressed so hard the paper's embossed. You want me to believe that's a budget decision?"

"I want you to believe you can file an appeal with the committee."

"And the committee is you."

"And the committee is me."

He stood up, and the room got smaller, or he got bigger, one of those. I left before he could say anything else, because I'd planned this part precisely: deliver the blow and walk. What I hadn't planned was him following me, all the way across the sanctuary, past the pews and out the side door into the parking lot where the light was going orange and my car was the only one left.

He caught up with me at the driver's door, and he was angry. Actually angry, which I hadn't seen from him since the one fight we'd had in year one of us, over his habit of disappearing for days without explanation. Ha. Funny how that one aged.

"Three years," he said. "Three years, and this is how you come at me? Through a funding memo?"

"How else would I come at you? You left no forwarding address. No phone. I checked, Sherman. I checked hard. You want to explain where you went?"

"I can't explain most of it."

"Try the part where you walked out mid-sentence."

"I got new orders." His voice cracked on the word orders, which was not what I expected. "Avery, I was assigned to you. Before you ever knew me. Watching, that was the job. I was supposed to stay at a distance and I didn't, and when the assignment changed I had no choice in it. None. I've spent three years trying to get reassigned back here."

"Assigned to me." I laughed, and it came out ugly. "So I wasn't even a person to you. I was a posting."

"You were the only thing in eight hundred years of postings that ever felt like a person."

I had the car door open by then, one hand on the roof, and I don't know what I meant to say. Something surgical. Something with a stem and a handle. But he stepped closer, not touching me, just close enough that I could feel the warmth off him, which was absurd, because he wasn't supposed to run warm.

"I still want you," he said. "That didn't leave with me. That didn't leave at all."

"There it is," I said. "There's the line. You practice that in the mirror, or does it come standard with the wings?"

"You can hate me and cut my budget and revoke my parking privileges, I don't care. But don't stand there and tell me you felt nothing, because I was there, Avery. I know what you felt."

The thing about being furious at someone for three years is that the fury becomes structural. Take it out and the whole building sags. I stood there with my hand on the car roof and my mouth open and nothing coming out, because the truth was I'd rehearsed this conversation a hundred times and in none of the rehearsals did he say that.

"Get away from my car," I finally said.

"I'll fight the funding cut. Through channels. Proper ones."

"You don't have channels. You have a deacon and a dressing room."

"Eddy will hear about this by tonight anyway." He stepped back, hands up, giving me the space I'd asked for without asking. "You can keep the memo, Avery. But I'm not leaving Portland again. Whatever you do to me next, do it while I'm standing in it."

I got in the car. I sat there with the keys in the ignition for a solid minute, watching him walk back toward the chapel doors, tall and calm and impossible, and I hated him so much my hands shook on the wheel.

Then I started the engine, and I drove home, and I did not cry, and if you believe that I've got a rose window to sell you.

I called Kourtney that night from my kitchen floor, where I was sitting with my back against the fridge eating cold rice out of a container, which is where I do my best strategic thinking. She picked up on the second ring because she always does, because she's twenty-nine years old and has the phone habits of a dispatcher.

"Tell me everything," she said. "You have the voice. The bad one."

"The one where I sound calm?"

"The one where you sound calm and you're going to do something insane."

So I told her. Not the parking lot part, not yet. I started further back, at the beginning, the part I'd never actually said out loud to her even though she knew the whole story anyway. I told her the real reason I applied for this job two years ago, when the center was hiring and I was working nights at a print shop in Southeast with ink under my fingernails and a grudge I fed like a houseplant.

"I didn't take this job for the arts," I said. "I took it because the Sanctus Choir does their October thing here, and I'd heard through the grapevine that Sherman was circling their director's job. I wasn't sure he'd get it. Then this spring his name went up on their website, directing. By then I'd already been the responsible manager for two years, and the rest was just timing."

"You waited two years?"

"You can't just cut a choir's funding in year one, Kourt. People notice. You have to build a reputation first. Be the responsible manager. Balance the books. Get on the committee's good side. Then you sign one memo and it looks like housekeeping instead of what it is."

"Which is what, exactly?"

"Which is me taking everything he built and making it small," I said. "He'd stand on that stage every October with two hundred people singing at him like he was something holy, and he'd let them, and the whole time he'd know what he was and never have told me. So now he gets to come back and find the stage gone. Rehearsal space gone. Piano untuned. I wanted him to feel it the way I felt it, which is walking into a room that used to be yours and finding out it never was."

There was a pause on the line long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped.

"Okay," she said finally. "I'm not going to lie to you, Ave. That plan was already bananas when I thought it was about the budget. Now that I know it's about a man, it's still bananas, but I get it better."

"That's support."

"That's diagnosis. Listen, the man followed you across a parking lot tonight. He's not going to file an appeal. He's going to show up. Where are you going to be when he shows up?"

I looked down at the rice and didn't have an answer for her, which is a bad sign for a planner.

* * *

The planning meeting happened the following Tuesday, in the center's back meeting room, which used to be a Sunday school classroom and still had a felt board bolted to the wall with nothing on it. I sat at one end of the table with the funding cut memo in front of me like a shield. Kourtney sat next to me. Eddy came in at four sharp, forty-six years old, silver at the temples, carrying a leather folder like it contained something heavier than paper. And Sherman came in behind him and took the seat directly across from mine, which I want it noted was not an accident, because there were six other chairs.

Eddy talked for twenty minutes. I'll give him this, he's good at it. He laid out the choir's history at the center, ten Octobers, standing-room crowds, the amount they'd raised for the neighborhood food bank last fall, which was honestly more than I expected and made the memo in front of me look a little different than it had on Thursday. Then he laid out what would happen without the residency, and it wasn't pretty. The choir's lease at St. Anselm's was tied to their outreach numbers. No October residency, no outreach numbers, no lease.

"We'd like to propose an alternative," Eddy said, and I did not see this coming, though I should have. "A joint fundraiser. Your center runs a fall program. The choir runs a fall concert. Combine them. One event, split proceeds, and the choir performs here in October as part of it. Everyone keeps face. Everyone keeps money."

"The center's fall program is a student showcase," I said. "It's not built for that."

"I'd help," Sherman said.

I looked at him. He looked back, calm as Sunday, hands folded on the table like a man at a job interview and not a man who'd been assigned to surveil me like a parking meter.

"The director of the choir, volunteering to coordinate with the woman who just gutted his budget," I said. "That's either very generous or very stupid."

"It's both," he said. "I know the building. I know the acoustics. I can cut your setup time in half. You don't have to like me, Avery. You just have to let me work."

Kourtney, the traitor, said, "That's actually a good deal," before I could say anything, and Eddy was already writing numbers on the legal pad he'd brought, and the vote was happening around me before I'd agreed to have a vote. Four people in a room, and somehow I lost three to one against myself.

So now I'm co-producing a fundraiser with the man I took this job to ruin. The universe has a sense of humor. It's just not a good one.

* * *

The late rehearsal was Thursday, a week after the memo. The joint event meant the choir got two rehearsal slots a week in my sanctuary again, which I'd signed off on because the deal required it and because I am apparently a person who signs things now. I stayed late that night to lock up after them. This was partly responsibility and partly because Kourtney had gone home and I wanted ten minutes in that building alone, under the rose window, where the light goes purple at nine in October and I can think.

The choir cleared out around nine fifteen. I heard the last of them clatter down the front steps, and I was in the third row of pews