Chapter 15 #2
"I want to be careful here," Jake said, "because there's a version of this where it sounds like grief.
And grief's real, and it's not why. Plenty of men lose the thing and don't do this.
" He rubbed his mouth. "The reason is that I have been treated like a special case since I was fifteen years old, and every single person around me was paid to make it true, and somewhere in there I stopped believing that anything I did was going to actually cost me.
Not consciously. I'd have argued with you.
But underneath it — no. I didn't think it counted. "
"And now?"
"Now I know exactly what it costs," he said. "It costs this. Sitting on a truck beside you being allowed to talk for an hour. That's what it costs, and it's the correct price, and I'd like the record to show I'm not complaining about it."
Laura looked at her own hands.
Ten years. It had taken ten years and a national humiliation and nine months apart for him to say four true sentences in a row.
"That's the first honest thing you've said since Pittsburgh," she said.
"I know."
"I waited three years for it."
"I know."
They sat with that.
And then she said it, because she had known for days that she was going to and had been waiting for the right hour, and this was the hour.
"I'm going to tell you a condition," Laura said. "And before I do, I want to be extremely clear about something, so you don't get it wrong, because getting it wrong is the thing you do."
"Okay."
"This does not buy you anything."
He turned his head.
"It's not a test you pass and then you get me. There is no arrangement here." Her voice was steady. "If you do it, I might still say no. If you do it and I say no, you don't get to feel cheated, because you were told. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Say it back."
"It doesn't buy anything," Jake said.
"All right." Laura took a breath. "End the machine."
He was completely still.
"All of it," she said. "Not the parts that embarrass you.
Not the parts Gary built — you've done that, and I know what it cost, and it isn't what I'm asking for.
I mean the whole apparatus of being Jake Hayes in public.
The show, if they'd have you back, and they will.
The shoe people, who are already circling again, because Carol told me.
The appearances, the equity, the foundation with your name on it, the woman in Nashville with the draft statements.
The whole business of being a man other people make a living managing. "
"Laura—"
"I'm not finished." She turned to face him.
"Every single thing that went wrong in ten years came out of that machine.
It's how a twenty-three-year-old got put in my house.
It's how a girl in the Gulch bought a piece of your wall for four thousand dollars a month and nobody in your organization noticed for fourteen months.
It's why a man you paid knew for a month and decided I didn't need to know.
It's why, when I finally told you one true thing on a Tuesday morning, there were men outside my clinic by the afternoon — because you had a machine, Jake, and it does what it does, and you'd have had to be a different man not to use it. "
The street was empty. Somewhere down at the bank a car door shut.
"I am not going to spend my forties standing next to it," Laura said.
"Not for you. Not for anybody. And I need you to hear that this isn't punishment.
If you keep it, I understand completely, and I'll be all right, and I've got a life here that I like.
" She held his eyes. "But that's the condition.
Not less money. Not fewer appearances. Gone. All of it."
She stopped.
"Then what am I?" Jake said.
And it was not a protest. She heard that immediately — it was an actual question, from a man who had been asking himself some version of it for two and a half years and had never once had an answer that fit.
"I don't know," Laura said. "That's yours to find out. That's not my job and I'm not going to do it for you." A beat. "But I'll tell you what I think, and then I'm done talking."
"Tell me."
"I think you're a thirty-six-year-old man who's good with people and knows more about that game than anybody in this county," she said, "and there are forty-five boys on a field two miles from here every fall with two volunteer coaches and no money, and every single one of them thinks the thing that happened to you cannot happen to them. "
Jake did not say anything for a moment.
Then: "Yes."
"You haven't thought about it."
"I don't need to think about it," he said. "Yes."
"Jake—"
"You told me it doesn't buy anything. I heard you." He was looking straight at her. "Yes anyway."
Laura slid down off the tailgate and stood in the road, because she needed to not be sitting next to him.
"Then that's the hour," she said, which was true; it had been ninety-five minutes.
He got up. He got his keys out. And at the door of the truck he stopped, and for one second she thought he was going to ask when the next one was, and something in her chest went tight with the wanting of it.
"Goodnight, Laura," Jake said.
Then he drove west, and she stood in front of her own clinic in the dark until she could not hear the truck.