Chapter 4 #2
I go on Saturday morning. I tell myself it is because I have a book to return — the Berry I have been keeping at the turnout — and because the library is open until noon, and because I have been an absent reader for eight days and that is the kind of disrespect I do not extend to the people I owe. These are the reasons I give myself.
The reason I do not give myself is that I have not slept again since Knox left the garage, and that the small green Neruda has migrated from the nightstand to my jacket pocket, and that there is a sentence on page seventeen of that book that I have, in the last two days, started reading out loud to myself in the dark, and that I cannot continue being a coward in front of the mirror about why.
I park. I go in. The bell jangles.
She is at the desk.
She looks up. She sees me. Her face does the thing it does — the spots high in her cheeks, the small surprised softening at the eyes — and then she puts the pen down she is holding, and she stands up, and she comes around the desk to meet me.
She does not run. Nora has never run a step in her life.
She crosses the carpet at her careful particular pace and she stops two feet in front of me and she looks up at me.
She says, "You came back."
I say, "I came back."
She nods. She does not ask me why I have been gone.
She does not ask me where I went. She does the most generous thing a person has ever done to me in twelve years of being a person worth keeping at arm's length: she does not require me to explain myself.
She just looks at me with her hazel-or-green-depending eyes and she lets it be the truth that I am here.
She says, "I have a book for you."
I say, "I bet you do."
She does not laugh. She smiles. It is a small smile, but the corners are warm.
I am about to say something else.
The bell on the front door jangles.
I see her face change before I have turned around.
The spots in her cheeks go down by half.
Her shoulders draw up a quarter-inch, almost imperceptibly.
Her chin tips down. Her hands, which had been at her sides, drift up to meet each other at her waist, and her fingers find each other and lace themselves together the way mine used to find each other behind my back at fifteen when Grady's truck pulled into the driveway.
I turn around.
The man in the doorway is in his middle forties.
Tall, but soft tall — the height of a man who has never had to use it.
Light brown hair cut by a barber who charges in three figures.
A pale blue button-down rolled to the elbows.
A pair of khakis with a knife-edge crease down the front of each leg.
Wedding ring. Loafers. Watch worth what the brothers and I together make on a good month.
He has the kind of face that looks generically handsome from across the room and that, up close, has a meanness around the mouth you can read in two seconds.
He is looking at her.
She says, the smallest crack in her voice I have ever heard from her, "Graham."
He says, "Lenora."
He walks into the library like he owns the floor.
He walks past me without seeing me — and I will tell you the truth, the immediate truth I will not pretty up for the page: I clock his approach the way I would clock a man crossing a parking lot toward a woman who was not expecting him.
I have moved one step to my left without consciously moving.
I have put my body in a particular angle to him.
I have moved my right hand out of my jacket pocket.
I have done these things automatically. They are below thought.
He does not see me do them. He has no eyes for me. He has eyes only for her, and his eyes are not the eyes of a man with good news.
He stops three feet from her.
He says, "You will not return your sister's calls.
You will not return your mother's. Your father has been having chest pains, Lenora — did you know that?
Did you ever think to ask? Your aunt is flying in for the reunion next weekend and you have not RSVP'd.
I have driven six hours from Richmond on a Saturday morning to come and find out what is wrong with you, and the answer I am finding —" he glances around the empty library, at the carpet, at the wingback chair I sat in for thirty hours in May, at the mural of the sleeping fox on the back wall — "is that there is something deeply wrong with you, and that this town and this little hobby of yours have made it worse. "
She says, "Graham. Please. Not here."
"Where then, Lenora? Tell me. You will not pick up the phone. You will not come home. Where then."
She does not answer.
He reaches forward.
He puts his hand on her upper arm.
He does it the way Grady used to do it to my mother.
He does not yell. He does not strike. He does not raise his voice.
He just closes his fingers — too tight, his knuckles going white at the top — around her thin upper arm where the cardigan sleeve ends, and he uses his grip to angle her slightly toward him, and he lowers his voice and he says, "Lenora.
You are coming home for the reunion. We will discuss the rest in Richmond. You are embarrassing the family."
The switch in my chest does not flip. I want to be clear about this because of what happens next.
The switch does not flip. The switch is already on.
The switch has been on since the moment I saw her face change in the doorway, since the moment I saw her shoulders draw up, and the click of it was so quiet I did not hear it happen.
I am across the carpet in three steps.
I do not say anything. I have learned, over twelve years, that the loudest thing you can do in a room with a man like this is not say anything.
I come up behind his shoulder. I am taller than him.
I am wider than him. I let him notice me by the change in the air pressure first — the way the hair on the back of your neck stands up before you hear the noise — and I see his eyes flick to mine in his peripheral vision, and I see his fingers, the ones around her arm, tighten just slightly in surprise.
I close my hand around his wrist.