Chapter 5 #2
"You made me the flowers," I said. "You made me the part of the wedding that stands there and looks nice."
She put her face in her hands.
"I'm not forgiving you," I said.
"I know."
"I might, later. I want that said too, because I've watched men in this club say a hard thing at the top of their voice and then spend nine years pretending it was final." I made myself breathe. "I'm not there today. I might be there in a month. That's the honest inventory."
"That's more than I came in with."
"I'm not — Wrenlee, look at me. I'm not sitting here deciding whether to forgive you, because you didn't do it to me, and that's the thing I can't get out from under. You did it around me. Like weather. Like I was a house."
"Yes," she said, into her hands. "That's what I did."
"Why."
"Because I couldn't stand to be a woman who got to keep you."
I turned that over.
"Say more."
"There isn't more, Jonah, that's the floor of it.
" She had her hands flat on her knees. "I grew up watching four generations of women get used up by a thing nobody thanked them for, and I decided somewhere around eleven years old that the deal was: you do the work, and you don't get the other thing.
Nobody sat me down and told me that. I just never saw a counterexample. "
"Your grandmother was married."
"For nine years. He left in '74 and the family agreed to call it a heart attack."
"That's not—"
"I know it's not a rule," she said. "I know that in the front of my head.
But when I was standing in that church at ten forty-seven with a hole in my line, the back of my head said, there it is, that's the bill, and it was almost a relief, Jonah.
That's the part I can't get around. Some piece of me was waiting for it. "
The kid with the stick had stopped hitting the hubcap. The lot was empty. It was eighteen minutes past noon on a Sunday in a town that had already decided what it was looking at.
"I've got to say something and it's going to come out wrong," I said.
"You've been doing fine."
"I have not been doing fine, I've been doing loud." I made myself let go of the wheel. "The grovel's mine."
"What?"
"Everyone in this town has spent seven years waiting for you to come back and apologize to me. And I've been going along with it, because it was easy, and because a man standing quietly in a room he was left in gets a lot of credit in a place like this."
"Jonah, you don't owe me—"
"I never once came looking for you."
She stopped.
"Three parishes," I said. "Two hours. I had the address in 2020.
Cane gave it to me himself, wrote it on a receipt, and I put it in a drawer, and it is in that drawer right now.
" My voice was doing something I didn't like.
"I've had seven years to drive two hours.
And I told myself the reason was pride, and it wasn't pride, it was that as long as I never went, I got to be the man who was wronged. "
"That's not the same as what I did."
"No," I said. "Mine's smaller and it lasted longer."
We sat there.
"Can I ask you one thing," I said, eventually.
"Yes."
"And then I'll take you back and we'll go do the last six miles and I won't ask again."
"Ask it."
I looked at her. Dust on her jaw, salt still in the creases of her knuckles from Friday, forty years old, wrecked, in the passenger seat of a borrowed truck in a church lot.
"Would you have told me," I said, "if the line hadn't broken twice?"
She opened her mouth.
Then she closed it.
And she looked out the windshield at the church where I stood for twelve hours, and she didn't say anything at all, for a long, long time.
Which is how I got my answer.
I drove her back to the clubhouse and neither of us said one word for the whole four minutes it takes.
Roach was on the steps. He took one look at the two of us getting out of that truck and he did the only correct thing available to a human being, which was hold the door open and say nothing whatsoever.
She went in. I didn't.
I sat down on the second step and Roach sat down next to me, and after a while he said, "You want the good coffee or the honest coffee?"
"There's a difference?"
"The honest coffee's Duckie's."
"Then no."
We sat there.
"You going to tell me?" he said.
"No."
"Okay."
"It's hers."
"Okay."
"Roach, I've got about nine things happening in my chest and I can't name one of them."
"You want mine?"
"Sure."
"I think," he said, "that you found out you'd have been better off knowing, and that's the worst thing a man can find out, because there's nobody left to be angry at except a woman who was trying to keep you alive."
I looked at him.
"How do you do that."
"I was married before Teodora," Roach said. "Badly. For six years. You learn things and none of them are useful in the moment."
Inside, somebody dropped something in the kitchen and Bear said a word he does not say in front of Teodora.
"She's going to try to do the last six miles by herself," I said.
"Obviously."
"She's going to say something about not wanting me out there."
"Obviously."
"What do I say?"
Roach stood up and brushed off the back of his jeans.
"You don't say anything," he said. "You just be standing at the truck at five in the morning. That woman's had a lifetime of people accepting her explanations, Jonah. Be the first one who don't."