Chapter 1 #2
"I'm going to tell her. There's a difference. I'm not going to stand in front of that woman and ask her for anything." I stood up. "If she says no, she says no, and I'm not going to work on her."
Preacher nodded once. "Fair."
"And nobody comes with me."
"Fair."
"And nobody calls ahead."
"Ah," said Roach.
I looked at him.
"Nobody calls ahead," I said again, slower.
"Right, so, in the interest of full disclosure and my ongoing personal growth—"
"Roach."
"There's a group chat."
There was a group chat.
Roach showed it to me in the lot with the guilty haste of a man producing a receipt.
It was called SALT DADDY and it had nine members and it had been active for four days and by the time I made it to the parking lot it had two hundred and sixty messages in it.
"Mags named it," Roach said, backing toward his bike with his hands up. "Mags named it. I only started it. Naming is a whole separate crime."
"Who's in it?"
"You want alphabetical or by how much they've said?"
"By how much they've said."
"Then it's Mags, Duckie, Bear, Mags again — she's got two phones, Jonah, she's got the tablet — Cane, technically, though Cane's only sent the thumbs-up nine times, Miss Ida's granddaughter, who I want to be clear was added, not invited—"
"Miss Ida's granddaughter."
"Wait. Back up. What's Mags said?"
"You don't want to know what Mags has said."
"Roach."
"Mags has said eleven things and nine of them are about your face," he said. "There's a poll."
"There's a poll?"
"It's non-binding."
"What's the question?"
"I'm not going to tell you the question."
"Roach."
"The question is 'over/under on how long he sits in the parking lot,'" Roach said, "and Bear's got eleven minutes, and I want you to know I took the under out of loyalty."
"She works at the bar three parishes over," Roach said. "That's how we knew where Wrenlee was, so you're welcome, and also I'd like credit at some point in my life."
I stood in the gravel with the whole church lot behind me and the bell up there in the dark being enormous and patient, the way bells are, and I thought about how it takes this town four days to organize a chat and a hundred years to say one true thing out loud.
"Roach."
"Yeah."
"What's the last message."
He looked at his phone. He looked at me. He put the phone in his pocket.
"Read it."
"It's Bear."
"Read it."
He got the phone back out. "It says: 'Somebody tell that boy to shave.'"
I got on the bike.
Behind me, four grown men failed to whisper.
It's a two-hour ride to Ste. Amélie parish if you take the highway and two hours forty if you take the parish roads, and I took the parish roads, and I'd like to pretend that was about fuel.
I thought about a lot of things on that ride. I'm going to be honest about only one of them.
I thought about the fourth verse of that hymn.
The morbid one. The one Miss Ida cut in '79 and nobody in this town has sung since, so there is not a living person under seventy who could have known the words, and something sat in a pew on Sunday morning in a building full of my people and sang all four.
That's what I want you to understand about why I got on that bike. Not the second chance. Not the seven years. I've had seven years to make peace with seven years and I made a kind of peace, the way you make peace with weather.
I got on the bike because something learned the words.
The bar was called Vergie's and it had a red door and a hand-painted sign with a pelican on it that had been repainted so many times the pelican had developed a look of profound personal grievance.
I sat in the lot for eleven minutes.
I counted the cars. Nine. I read the sign twice. I established, to a legal standard, that the pelican was in fact a pelican.
At minute seven I got out my phone and looked at the group chat, which had gone quiet for the first time in four days, because nine people were sitting somewhere in Marrow Bend staring at a screen waiting.
The last message was from Mags.
Whatever she says, boy, say the true thing back.
I put the phone away.
At minute ten a kid came out the red door with a bag of ice, saw me sitting on a bike in the dark, and went back inside without the ice, which I understood.
Then I went in.
I want that in here too. Eleven minutes, engine off, at nine forty at night, with the neon going in the window and my hands on the tank.
Then I went in.
It's a long narrow room, bar down the right, four tables, a pool table with a rip in it, and a jukebox somebody had unplugged and never plugged back in. Six people in there. A man asleep in the corner with his hat over his face in a way that suggested a career.
And behind the bar, with a rag in her hand and her hair up off her neck and her sleeves pushed to the elbow, Wrenlee Thibodeaux.
She was laughing at something the man at the near stool had said. Head back. Full sound.
Then she saw the door.
I have replayed the next part more than I'd admit to a doctor.
She didn't drop the glass. I know that's how it goes in a story.
She set it down. She set it down carefully, like a woman putting a sleeping baby in a crib, and she put both hands flat on the bar, and she looked at me across thirty feet of a room that smelled like beer and floor cleaner and somebody's cigarette they weren't supposed to be smoking.
Her hands were split across the knuckles. Both of them. Old scars, the kind that go white.
I hadn't ever seen that. Seven years ago her hands were fine.
Neither of us said anything.
The man at the near stool looked at her, then at me, then back at her, and then he picked up his beer and moved four stools down without being asked, which tells you something about how it must have looked.
The clock over the register was the kind with a second hand, and I listened to it go around one entire time.
She spoke first.
"You're standing in a doorway again," she said.
And God help me, that's the thing that got me. Not her face. Not the seven years.
She made a joke about it.