Chapter 4 #2
She crossed the porch and stood in front of my chair with the storm behind her and the netting moving and she said, "I'm going to sit down here, and if that's a problem you should say so in the next three seconds, because after that I'm not going to be interested in your opinion."
"It's not a problem."
"Say it faster next time."
"There's gonna be a next time?"
"Don't be charming," Delphine said. "You're bad at it and it works anyway and it's very annoying."
She sat down across my lap and put both hands on the sides of my face like she was checking a piece for damage, and she kissed me with the rain coming down on the tin roof, and it was not a hurried thing.
Nothing that night was hurried. That's the part I keep. Everything about me for fifteen years had been throttle and mileage and make the next town, and this was the first thing in a decade and a half that had nowhere to be.
Her hair came down when the pen went. I found that out with my hand and she laughed against my mouth about it, and the laugh went into me and sat somewhere under the sternum and stayed there for weeks.
The porch was eighty-eight degrees. We got wet through with the heat of it and neither of us cared, and there was a point where she pulled back and looked at me and said, "You're shaking," and I said, "That's the porch," and she said, "That's not the porch, Bishop," and I said, "I know."
I carried her the four steps to the cot, which was a decision, because that cot was assembled in the Carter administration.
It complained. Loudly. In the middle of everything, at a moment when I was not in a position to negotiate, it made a noise like a heron being stepped on.
Delphine froze. Then she started laughing, one hand over her face, the whole body of her going with it.
"Don't," I said.
"It screamed."
"I know."
"It screamed like it knew us."
"Delphine."
"Take me to the other cot."
"The other cot's worse."
"How is it worse?"
"It's my uncle's."
She laughed so hard she had to put her forehead on my shoulder, and I held on to her while she did it, in a hurricane lamp on a screened porch on the edge of the bay, with the whole state trying to get in through the netting, and I thought: oh, no.
That's what I thought. That exactly. Oh, no.
Because I'd come nineteen hundred miles for a dying man and a debt I didn't want, and somewhere between a laundromat in Mid-City and a flooded road I had picked up something I was going to have to carry out of here, and I have never once in my life been able to put a thing down after I'd carried it.
Later, the storm went from a wall to a rumor. The rain got thin. You could hear the bay again.
She got up at some point and went and stood at the screen with a blanket around her, looking out at nothing, and I let her be there a while and then went and stood behind her.
"It's beautiful," she said. "I hate that it's beautiful."
"Why?"
"Because it's going." She nodded out at the dark.
"There was an island out there in 1938. There's a whole set of survey plats in my annex, Bishop — thirty years of the same coastline getting redrawn, and every time it's smaller, and every time somebody signs the new one like it's just a correction.
" She pulled the blanket up. "That's the thing about this state.
It's the most documented disappearing place on earth.
We've got beautiful paperwork on the whole vanishing. "
"That's grim for a Tuesday."
"It's Thursday."
"Is it?"
"It has been Thursday for one hour and eleven minutes," Delphine said, "and I want it noted that I know that, because I always know that, even now, even here, and it's the single least attractive thing about me."
"It's not."
"It's in the top three."
"What's number one?"
"I alphabetize other people's bookshelves without asking."
"That's a felony."
"It's a service," she said, and leaned back against me, and I put the blanket around both of us and we stood there like that until the frogs got confident again.
She was lying along my side with the netting up over both of us and one bare foot hanging off the cot, and she said, into my chest, in a voice that had gone soft in a way her voice does not go:
"What was it, though."
"What?"
"The consignment. In 1821, a man in Barataria puts a lot in a warehouse and calls it a consignment.
What is it?" She lifted her head. "It's not gold.
If it were gold your family would've spent it in 1890.
You don't hire four generations of custodians to sit on gold.
You hire them to sit on something that only gets worse with time. "
I looked at the ceiling of a camp my grandfather built.
"My uncle used to say a thing," I said. "When I was little. If I asked. He'd say, it's not what they took, it's what they wrote down."
Delphine went very still against me.
"Say that again," she said.
"It's not what they took. It's what they wrote down."
She didn't say anything for a long time.
"Delphine."
"I need daylight," she said. "I need daylight and I need my ledger and I need you to not say anything else tonight, because I have a shape in my head and if you talk it'll go, and Bishop—"
"Yeah."
"I don't want it to be the shape."
She put her head back down.
The rain quit around three. I lay there listening to the frogs decide it was safe, and my uncle was nine miles and four days away, dying in a bed in Marrero, and I still had not gone to see him.