Chapter 3 #2
"We can't stop, there's two hundred and ten people in a church in five days."
"Then we lay it wrong on purpose."
"That's the second-best idea anybody's had today and I'll think about it," she said, "and the first-best is 'don't be here at all,' which we've also lost."
We worked another forty minutes in the dead strip and I could feel the whole time that we were standing in a room, which is a hard thing to explain about an open field.
Then she said, out of nothing:
"You never said one word against me."
"No."
"Seven years."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't have any."
"Everybody has words, Jonah. Everybody in this town has words about me and half of them made them up."
"I had feelings," I said. "I didn't have words. That's not the same and I wasn't going to hand people the feelings and let them do the translating."
"So you just carried it."
"Yes."
"For seven years."
"Yes."
"That's not noble," she said. "You know that's not noble, right? That's just heavy."
And I don't know what it was — the heat, or four hours of that woman's voice, or the fact that we were standing in a place something had chewed — but I put the bag down harder than I meant to.
"Say what you're saying."
"I'm saying you'd rather hold a thing than put it down, and everybody in Marrow Bend calls that being a good man, and it isn't, it's just a way of never having to find out what you'd say."
"You want to know what I'd say."
"Yes."
"Fine," I said. "You didn't leave me because you had to. You left me because it was easier to be the woman who ruined a wedding than a woman who'd have to explain herself, and you've been enjoying it."
She went white.
I knew it was wrong in my mouth. I've had a lifetime of things being wrong in my mouth, and that one I heard on the way out, and I said it anyway, which is worse.
"Enjoying it," she said.
"Wrenlee—"
"Say the rest."
"There isn't any rest."
"Yes there is." Her voice was flat and awful. "Say the whole thing you've been holding for seven years."
"I stood in a building for twelve hours," I said, "in front of my mother, and my club, and two hundred people, and every hour somebody came up and put their hand on my shoulder, and I said she'll be here.
Twelve times. Out loud. And the last person to do it was Miss Ida at seven o'clock at night, and she didn't say anything, she just took the flowers out of my buttonhole. "
Wrenlee's face didn't move.
"And you sat in the lot," I said.
"Yes."
"And drove off."
"Yes."
"That's it. That's the whole thing. There's nothing clever in it."
She turned away from me and stood with her back to me for a while and her shoulders didn't do anything at all, and then she wiped her face with the back of her wrist in one motion and picked up the bag.
"We're at four and a half," she said. "There's light till seven."
"Wrenlee."
"There's light till seven, Jonah."
At a quarter past five she said, without looking up, "For the record."
"Yeah."
"I have not enjoyed one minute of it."
"I know."
"Not one, Jonah. Not the first year, not the fourth. I worked in a bar where a man asked me every Friday for three years what a nice woman like me was doing in Ste. Amélie and I never once had an answer, because the answer was 'hiding,' and you can't say that to a man with a beer."
"I shouldn't have said it."
"You should have said something near it," she said. "You were reaching for a true thing and you grabbed the wrong end. That's allowed."
"That's more generous than I deserve."
"It's not generosity. It's economics." She dropped a handful and moved forward eight inches. "There's six and a half miles left and I can't lay them next to a man who's apologizing."
We worked in silence for the better part of two hours and I have never wanted so badly to be a man with a different mouth.
Around six-fifteen we came over the little rise past the Vachon culvert where the line turns south toward the water, and Wrenlee stopped so suddenly I nearly walked into her back.
"What."
She didn't answer.
The line was laid.
Ahead of us, running from the base of that rise south along the boundary as far as the light went, there was salt on the ground. Fresh. Bright white, unweathered, laid that day or the day before.
"Somebody helped," I said.
"Nobody helped."
"Wrenlee, somebody laid half a mile of—"
"Nobody can help," she said. "Nobody. It doesn't take from another hand. Delphine bled for four hours trying and it wouldn't hold a foot of it."
She went down on her knees at the edge of it and put her face about eight inches from the ground and looked along the band, sighting down it like a man checking a rifle.
"Wren."
"Hush."
"What is it—"
"Hush."
She got up. She walked twenty feet along it. She crouched again. She got up again and walked back, and her hands were shaking, and she stood there looking down at half a mile of perfect white salt in the last of the good light.
"It's the wrong hand," she said.
"You said nobody else—"
"It's laid left," she said. "The whole band. Every grain lies left." She looked at me and her eyes were enormous. "My family lays right. Four generations. It's the first thing you learn, it's the first thing you're hit for getting wrong."
"So it's somebody else's family."
"There is no somebody else."
"Then what is it?"
She looked back down the white line running south into the dark, neat and bright and patient, waiting for us to walk along it.
"A ward faces out," she said. "This faces in."
"Meaning."
"Meaning it isn't a wall, Jonah." She wiped her mouth. "It's an invitation. Somebody's set a table."