Chapter 7 #2
I put my hand over his mouth, which was the funniest thing either of us had done in a week, and he laughed against my palm, and then he stopped laughing, and then it wasn't funny anymore, and everything after that was quiet except for the two of us and a light going pink and off across the ceiling.
He came apart afterward.
I don't have a better way to say it. There wasn't a warning.
We were lying there in the dark and I had my hand on his chest and I could feel his heart coming down, and then it didn't come down, it went the other way, and his whole body went rigid, and then he made one sound — one, low, awful, out of the middle of him — and that was it.
He cried for a long time.
I didn't say it's okay, because it wasn't. I didn't say he loved you, because he'd know that better than me and it would have been a thing I said to end a moment I found difficult. I didn't say anything at all for the first six or seven minutes.
I just kept my hand where it was, and let the man have it.
When he could talk he said, "Sorry."
"Don't."
"I don't do this."
"I gathered."
"I haven't since—" He stopped and did the math and I watched him arrive somewhere and get quiet about it. "Ninety-six."
"Then you're due."
"That's not how it works."
"It's exactly how it works. It's a drain, Bishop. You can go a long time not using it, but the water goes somewhere, and where it goes is your shoulders, which by the way feel like a countertop—"
"Delphine."
"I'm serious. I've been meaning to say something. I've been touching you for two days and I keep thinking, this man's back is a piece of furniture."
He laughed and it came out wet and terrible again, and then better on the second go.
"Twenty-nine ninety-six," he said.
"What?"
"You asked. Ninety-six was my mother." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "I was eighteen. And I did it once, at the house, in the back, and my aunt Ines found me and she sat down next to me and she said, finish up now, cher, people are looking."
I sat up.
"She said what?"
"She wasn't being cruel. That's the thing you have to understand about here.
She meant it helpfully. She meant, there's a room full of people who need something from you and you're the man of that house now and this is a thing you do in the yard and then you go back in.
" He shrugged, lying down, which is a hard thing to do.
"And I was eighteen and I thought, okay. That's the instruction. Got it."
"Bishop."
"And I got it very well," he said. "I've been getting it for twenty years."
"Then you're due," I said again, "and I'm going to keep saying it."
He laughed, wet and terrible, and put his arm over his eyes.
"He asked if I'd eaten," he said. "That's the first thing.
Dying, and he asked if I'd eaten, and I lied, and he knew, and he called me out, and that was — Delphine, that was us.
That was the whole relationship. We only ever had one bit and we did it twice, fifteen years apart, and I'd do fifteen more for another one. "
"Tell me another one."
"What?"
"Another Rene thing. Small. Doesn't have to mean anything."
So he did.
He told me about a man who fought a priest about garlic for forty minutes.
About a dimmer switch and a dying bulb. About being nine and getting his hand slapped away from a cabinet and being told the cabinet was for hurricane things.
About the church money coming four weeks a year.
About a roux you're not supposed to rush.
He talked until almost two, and somewhere in there the crying finished on its own, the way it does when nobody's watching it happen.
And around one thirty, out of nowhere, in the dark:
"You know what he said about you?"
"You told him about me?"
"Sister Agathe told him there was a woman in the hall. He guessed Broussard in about four seconds." Bishop's voice had gone easy. Wrecked, but easy. "Said Thaddeus wrote everything down. Said he'd have written down his own funeral."
"He would have. There's a whole page in '64 where he itemizes a cat."
"He what?"
"He itemized a cat. Line item, monthly, cat — provisions. Forty cents."
"That's a business expense?"
"He worked in a warehouse. That cat was staff."
Bishop laughed properly, all the way, the first one since Marrero.
Then he said, "He told me to marry you."
The window unit rattled.
"When?" I said.
"About twenty minutes before he stopped making sense."
"So it might've been the twenty minutes when he was still making sense."
"It might've been."
"Hm," I said.
"Hm," Bishop said.
And neither of us said anything else about it, and both of us lay there in the dark absolutely awake, and the neon went pink, and off, and pink, and off, At three forty I gave up on sleeping and got up and put the coffee maker on, and that woke him, and he lay there watching me stand in a motel kitchenette in his shirt swearing at a four-cup Mr. Coffee.
"You have to hold the switch," he said.
"How do you know that?"
"Every motel between here and Arizona has that exact machine. You hold the switch for four seconds. It's a test."
I held the switch. It worked. I was furious about it.
"Bishop."
"Mm."
"If we get it today—" I stopped. Started again, because I wanted the sentence to be right.
"There's a version of today where we get it and I don't get you.
Where the book comes up and you get on a bike and go be a road captain in a dry heat, and I get a career-defining acquisition and a very good story. "
He didn't say anything for a second.
"That's not the version," he said.
"You don't know that."
"No," he agreed. "But I know I'm not gonna find out at three forty in the morning from a woman holding a coffee switch. Ask me again tomorrow when I've slept and buried a man and we'll both mean it more."
"That's an evasion."
"It's a postponement."
"Those are the same thing in a smaller hat."
"They are not," Bishop said, "and I want the record to show I've been up for forty hours and I still caught that."
At three fifty the alarm went and we got up and went to find a book at the bottom of a bay.