Chapter 12
The papers needed a wet signature and two initials, and the notary in Sawyer's Bend had a stroke in the last week of March, which is how the whole thing came to happen in her mother's kitchen.
Susan Reeves laid it out on the phone with the flatness of a woman who has already lost the argument in her own head.
"Marital dissolution, final. It has to be executed in the presence of a notary, and the county's notary is in a rehabilitation facility in Cookeville, and the next one is a bank in Crossville that closes at four. Or." A pause. "Or he brings his and it's done at your table in forty minutes."
"He offered that."
"He offered four things and that was the least ridiculous of them." Paper. "Laura, this is the last document. After this you are not married to him."
Laura stood in her clinic with her hand on the pencil marks by the door.
"Fine," she said. "Thursday. Forty minutes. And Susan — you're on speaker the whole time."
"I was going to insist."
She spent Thursday morning being ridiculous about it, and she knew she was being ridiculous, and she did it anyway.
She swept a floor that was clean. She put the legal pads in a drawer. At midmorning she caught herself standing in front of her mother's closet with the door open, and shut it hard enough to rattle the frame, and said out loud, "No."
Then she went and worked until five, because she had a nine, a ten-thirty, and Brady at four, and Brady was down to one crutch he carried for no reason and she took it off him and put it behind the desk and told him he could have it back when he could show her a reason.
"That's stealing."
"Yes," she said.
He left grinning. She locked up at five-twenty and drove home and put the kettle on, which she did not want, and stood in her mother's kitchen doing an inventory of her own chest the way she would palpate a joint.
Seventeen days of nothing, and now nineteen. She had written nothing on nineteen consecutive lines.
She should have felt better every day. Instead the quiet had gotten heavier, and she had started sleeping in her clothes without deciding to, and twice this week she had gone out and moved the truck so it sat where the headlights would cross the back field if she had to leave in a hurry.
She had not told Tammy that part. She had not told anybody that part.
He came at six on the second of April, and it had rained all afternoon and stopped.
She heard the truck on the gravel and looked out and it was a truck, an actual one, ten years old with a dent in the bedside — not the car, not a car she recognized at all — and Jake got out of it in a canvas jacket, and a small white sedan came up the gravel behind him and a woman in her sixties with a case got out of that and looked around at the yard the way people do.
The notary's name was Charlene. She had driven up from Cookeville. She said the flowers on the porch rail were nice, which they were; Tammy had put them there in a coffee can.
They did it at the kitchen table, on the strawberry cloth, with Susan Reeves on speaker in the middle like a small plastic referee.
It took twenty-six minutes.
Laura had thought — in the two days she had had to think about it — that she would feel something enormous.
Instead what she felt was the specific, ordinary strangeness of doing paperwork with somebody you have slept beside for ten years.
He turned pages. She initialed. Charlene stamped things and said "and here, hon" more times than Laura could count.
Once their hands crossed reaching for the same pen and both of them pulled back like the pen was hot, and Charlene did not look up.
He had gone gray at the sides. That was new since February. And he had shaved badly, on the left, the side he could not turn his head toward.
At 6:34 Charlene said, "Well. That's the last of it," and packed her case, and Laura walked her out to the sedan and thanked her, and stood in the yard while the woman reversed carefully down the gravel and away.
Then she went back in. Jake was standing at the table with his jacket over his arm.
"I'll go," he said.
"Susan," Laura said to the phone. "You can hang up."
A pause on the line. "Laura."
"Two minutes. I'll call you back."
The line clicked off, and the kitchen was quiet, and she and the man she had been married to a few minutes ago stood eight feet apart.
"I'm not going to say anything," Jake said.
"You've fired Gary."
He went very still.
"Carol called you."
"Everybody calls me. It's a town of three thousand people and every one of them has my clinic number." She kept her arms crossed. "Why?"
He took a while with it. He had never taken a while with anything in ten years.
"You asked me one question," he said. "And I answered it, and then I sat in the garage half the afternoon and thought about why you'd want to know who hired a twenty-three-year-old four years ago.
" He looked at the floor. "And I couldn't get anywhere good with it.
So I went and looked at some things myself. "
"What things?"
"That's — " He stopped. "You told me to stay out of it and I've stayed out of it. I'm not going to stand in your kitchen and hand you a file."
Laura stared at him.
"You went looking and you found something and you're not going to tell me."
"You cut me off the morning after I put men on your street," Jake said, quietly, "and you didn't tell me why, and Susan wouldn't either, and I've had a month to work out what that meant.
" He met her eyes for the first time all evening.
"It meant I'm not safe to tell things to. That's the message. I got it."
Something turned over in Laura's chest.
"So what did you do instead?"
"I got rid of the parts of my life I don't trust," he said. "That's all. That's not for you, it's — " He rubbed his mouth. "It's not for you."
The rain started up again outside, small on the tin of the porch roof.
"Jake."
"Yeah."
"Are you eating?"
And he laughed, once, badly, and looked away.
That was when the back door moved.
It did not fly open. Nothing was kicked. There was a sound like somebody leaning on it, and then the scrape of a bread-loaf rock going across old linoleum in a slow arc, and then a rectangle of wet dark and the smell of the field.
Derek Mills came into her mother's kitchen.
He was soaked through. That was the first thing — hair flat, jacket black with rain, his sneakers ruined. He was holding a key in his right hand, holding it out a little, the way you hold something you are about to explain.
"It doesn't work," he said.
Nobody moved.
He looked at Laura and his face did something almost like relief.
"It's the wrong key. I've got the right one somewhere. I had it—" He patted his jacket with his left hand, still holding the dead key out in his right. "It was on the ring with the shop one. Somebody took the ring."
"Derek," Laura said.
"I've been out there eighteen days," he said. "I want you to know I never came in."
Laura's whole body had gone to a strange still hum. Somewhere far off she registered that she was not screaming, and that her hands had come down out of her crossed arms and open at her sides, and that her feet had turned out slightly, the way you stand a patient who is about to be unsteady.
"How did you get here?" she said.
"I parked at the church." He was looking around the kitchen now — at the table, at the papers, at the strawberry cloth — and then he saw Jake.
And his whole face changed.
"What is he doing here."
"Derek," Laura said again.
"No." He turned all the way to face Jake, and the key came down.
"No, that's not — that's not fair. You left.
" He said it to Jake with a kind of grieving outrage.
"You had eleven years and you put her in that house and you left her in it, and I'm the one who — " He stopped.
He was breathing wrong. "Eighteen days. In the rain.
Do you have any idea what she does? She's there at seven in the morning for a man with a bad back. Seven. Nobody knows that. I know that."
"Okay," Jake said.
It was the flattest thing Laura had ever heard him say.
He had not moved either. He was standing exactly where he had been, on the far side of the table, and there was nothing on his face at all, and she realized that he had gone somewhere she had only ever seen on a screen — the place he went with eleven seconds left, the thing that had made him worth two hundred million dollars.
"Don't you okay me."
"You're right that I left," Jake said. "That's true."
"Don't do that."
"Derek." Laura kept her voice low and even, the voice for a man on a table who is about to find out how bad it is. "Look at me. You need to go out the way you came in, and get in your car, and go home."
And he looked at her, and his eyes filled, and he said:
"Home?"
That was the word that did it. Later she would not be able to explain to anyone why that was the word, but she heard it and something in her went cold to the bone, because there was no floor under it at all.
"I don't have a job," Derek said. "I don't have — " His voice climbed.
"They took the phone. They took the car.
They walked me down the driveway like I stole something and he shook my hand.
" He was crying now, openly, twenty-seven years old and soaked to the skin in a dead woman's kitchen.
"Four years. And you know what he said to me at the end of four years?
I'm sorry it's like this, man. Man. He doesn't know my name. He has never known my name."
"He knows your name," Laura said.
"You know my name."
"Derek—"
"You made me coffee," he said, and took a step toward her.
Everything after that took a few seconds, and she would give her account of it more than once, and it never got any longer.
She moved first. Not away — she had a table on her right and a counter behind her and she had already worked out, in some cold back room of her head, that the doorway to the front room was the only line out.
So she moved for the doorway, fast, and he came across the kitchen after her, and he got a fistful of her sleeve at the elbow and it turned her.
She did not scream. She heard herself say "No" in an absolutely ordinary voice, like a woman correcting a dog.
And then she did the one thing a decade of putting her hands on bodies had actually taught her, which was that a wrist is a small thing with a lot of levers.
She got her left hand over his and turned it out and down, hard, against the joint, the way you would not do to a patient. He made a high noise and let go.
Then Jake hit him.
She did not see it start. She saw the end of it — Jake coming across that kitchen with the table shoved out of his way and Charlene's chair going over, and one short thing thrown from the shoulder that connected with the side of Derek's face and put him into the door of the refrigerator and then onto the floor.
It was not like the movies at all. It was fast and ugly and mostly noise: the fridge door banging, a magnet and a photograph going down, somebody's chair, and Derek Mills on the linoleum on his side with blood coming out of his mouth.
Jake went down onto one knee and put his forearm across the man's shoulder and pinned him there, and said, in that same flat voice, "Stay down. Stay down. Stay down."
Derek was trying to get up. He was crying and saying something with no shape to it.
"Laura." Jake did not look up. "Phone."
She was already dialing.
She called Randy Boggs's cell, not 911. He picked up on the second ring and she gave him the address in a voice she did not recognize as her own — clear, slow, the way you give an address when you are the person who has thought about giving it. Nothing else. He said "Now," and hung up.
It took four minutes for the county to come up Quarry Road, and they were the longest minutes of her life, and almost nothing happened in them.
Jake knelt on her mother's kitchen floor and held a man down.
Derek stopped fighting after the first minute and lay there and wept with his cheek against the linoleum.
Rain on the porch roof. The refrigerator humming.
The papers still on the table where a notary had left them, and a coffee can of flowers out on the rail.
At one point Derek said, "I only wanted her to know somebody was there."
Nobody answered him.
Laura stood with her back against the counter and her phone still in her hand and looked at the three of them in that room — herself, her husband, and the man who had been in her calendar for two years — and what she felt, mostly, to her own astonishment, was tired.
Then the blue lights came up the hill and went around and around the kitchen walls, across the yellow curtains her mother had made, across the wall of school photographs in the front room, blue and dark and blue and dark.
Randy came in first with his hand on his belt and a deputy behind him, and after that it was procedure.
They took Derek Mills out at 7:26 in the evening. He did not resist. At the door he turned his head and looked back at her, and Laura made herself look straight at him, because she was not going to be a woman who looked away in her own house.
Then the yard was full of men with flashlights, and someone was asking her whether she wanted the ambulance for her elbow, and someone else was photographing the back door, and Randy was saying that the DA in Cookeville was going to have a very easy week.
"You'll want to sit down," a young deputy told her, twice.
"I'm all right standing."
She was, too. Her hands had started shaking a while after it was over, which was correct and which she had expected, and she stood at her mother's counter and let them do it and did not apologize to anyone for it.
Randy took her through it in the front room with a legal pad on his knee. When did he come in. What did he say. Did he touch you. Where. Did you say no. Say it again for me.
"He came through the back door," Laura said. "It was bolted. There's a rock against it — there was — because I've been putting a rock against it since October."
Randy stopped writing.
"Since October."
"Yes."
He looked at the pad for a second. "Laura, I want you to say the next part slow, because it matters more than anything else in this whole file. When he came through that door tonight, did he say anything about the door."
Laura thought about it, and got it exactly right, because she had been getting things exactly right her entire working life.
"He held up a key," she said, "and he said, it doesn't work."
Randy wrote that down and underlined it twice.
And at some point in all of it Laura turned around and Jake was standing on the other side of the kitchen with his knuckles split and his shirt wrecked, not talking to anybody, watching her.
Just watching her. Not moving toward her. Not saying a word.
Waiting.