Chapter 5 #2
That was the word. Not okay. Not coping, which was what people said to her face, or holding up, which is what they said behind her back with their heads tilted.
Happy, in a metal bleacher, in a hot gym with the whole county in it, watching a boy she had fixed run the length of a floor with his hip square.
She let herself have it for the whole third quarter.
Somewhere in the fourth, Sawyer's Bend went up nine and the crowd got loud, and Peggy turned around and said something Laura didn't catch, and Tammy shouted something at an official that made the man in front of them applaud, and Kevin laughed with his head back.
And Laura thought, with no warning at all: Jake would love this.
Not the gym. Not the basketball. This — a district game in a nowhere town where nobody was filming and nobody wanted anything, an eighty-year-old woman with a thermos, a hot dog in a paper sleeve.
He had told her once, in bed, at two in the morning in the fourth year, that the last time he had enjoyed a football game was in high school, and that he had never said that to another living person, and that he'd deny it.
The thought went through her like a splinter going in — small, deep, and completely disproportionate.
She sat with it and let it pass, and it did pass, and then she went back to the game, and that was the difference between February and October. In October it would have taken the whole day. Now it took ninety seconds.
They walked out with the crowd at the end. Kevin walked Peggy Nolan out to her car without being asked, and got her whole medical history for his trouble, and stood there taking it patiently in the dark.
Tammy hugged Laura at her truck and said, low, "I'm not going to say anything."
"You're saying something right now."
"I'm saying I'm not going to say anything." Tammy held her by both arms. "Just — you had a good night. That's all I noticed. That's all I'm noticing."
Then Tammy drove off, and Kevin walked Laura the rest of the way to her car. Not in a way that was anything. He was going that direction.
The lot was emptying and the light on the pole was doing that orange thing, and he stopped a few feet back while she got her keys out.
"Can I say a thing," he said, "badly."
"That's a bad start."
"I know." He put his hands in his jacket pockets.
"When I came up that road last week I told myself the whole way there that I was bringing a table to a friend.
And that was true. It's still true." He looked off across the lot.
"But I've been standing in a gym for two hours and I want to be straight with you, because you've had about four months of people not being straight with you.
I liked being there tonight. That's all I'm saying.
I'm not asking you anything and I'm not going to.
I'd just rather you heard it from me than worked it out on your own in six months and felt stupid about it. "
Laura stood with her keys in her hand.
The honest thing — and she was, by then, in the habit of the honest thing — was that she had already worked it out. She had worked it out at the kitchen table over cold coffee, at the exact moment he asked his third question about her work.
And the other honest thing was what it had done to her.
Not fluttering. Nothing like that. It was steadier and stranger and worse: at that table she had been a person somebody was interested in, and she had forgotten that was a category she could still be in, and her whole body had noticed before her head did.
She was thirty-four. She was not dead. That was, apparently, news.
"Kevin."
"You don't have to—"
"I'm going to say two things and then we're going to go home." She turned to face him. "One. I'm not doing anything. Not now, and not in three months when the paperwork's done, and maybe not for a long time after that. I'm not in a place where I can even see that from here."
He nodded. "Okay."
"Two." She made herself finish it. "Thank you for saying it out loud instead of hanging around for a year being helpful."
Kevin laughed, one breath of it. "That was the other plan."
"I know it was."
"It was a real good plan."
"Go home, Kevin."
He went. She sat in her car for a minute before she started it.
Laura drove home the back way, with the window cracked because it was warm, and the whole way home she felt loose and easy in her body in a way she had forgotten was available.
She turned up Quarry Road at 10:40.
Halfway up, headlights came on behind her.
She did not think anything of it. It was a road; people used it. She watched them in the mirror out of habit, the way she had watched everything since March, and the car came up steady and stayed three back, and she made the turn into her own driveway and the car went on past.
Silver. Four-door.
She sat in her car with the engine off and her hands on the wheel and made herself think about it clearly, because the other option was standing in a dark yard being frightened.
It was a common car. That was the truth. There were plenty of them in this county.
But she had written a plate down on March 16, and she had written it down again on April 2, and she had it in a green folder in a drawer ten pages deep, and she had seen the last three characters of it for about a second and a half in her mirror on a road ninety minutes east of the city where she'd written it.
Laura got out of the car.
She stood in her mother's driveway with her keys in her fist and looked down the hill, where two red taillights were going away around the bend, unhurried, the way you drive when you are not running from anything.