Chapter 6
Rhett
I am at the lumberyard with Boone on a Tuesday morning when Hawk's text comes in.
It is one line. Library. Now. Quietly.
I do not say anything to Boone. I do not have to.
Boone has been a brother for eleven years and he can read the way my face changes from a hundred feet away, and he is reading it now from three feet away across the bed of his truck.
He says, "Go." I say, "Yeah." I am on the bike inside ninety seconds.
The lumberyard is on the east edge of town.
The library is on the west edge of town.
I make the distance in four minutes that should be six.
I do not run any red lights. I have, in the last month, become a man who does not run red lights.
This is one of several small things about me that has been changing, and I do not have time to think about it right now.
I park around the corner from the library.
I walk up to the front door at a pace that, from the outside, looks like a man on his way to return an overdue book.
Inside my own chest the engine is at full throttle.
Inside my own chest the engine has been at full throttle since I read the word quietly in Hawk's text.
Quietly is the word the brothers use when they do not want me to come in loud.
Quietly is the word that means the wrong move here is going to make it worse.
I open the door.
The bell jangles.
She is at the desk.
Her sister is six feet from her, on the patrons' side of the desk.
I know it is her sister before any introductions.
I have not seen Pauline Forsythe in my life and I would know her on a street corner in another country.
She is the same height as Nora and the same coloring as Nora and the same family bone structure as Nora, and she is none of the same person.
She has the precise particular polish a woman wears the way a soldier wears a uniform — not for vanity but for identification.
Linen pants. Silk blouse. Pearl studs. Hair in a clip with not one strand out of place.
Sandals that cost what I make in a week.
She is taller than her sister by half an inch and she is wearing two-inch heels to be taller than that, and she has positioned her body, when I walk in, between Nora and the rest of the room.
Not in any way she is doing on purpose. In a way she has been doing her whole life so naturally she does not know she is doing it.
She is leaning forward at the desk. She has her right hand flat on the counter.
Her left hand is gesturing. Her voice is the polite quiet voice of a woman who has never in her life been told to lower her voice in a public building, and the voice is saying — I catch this, in the half-second before she registers me — Lenora.
We are not asking. We are telling you. You will come home for the weekend.
You will let Mother see you. You will let Graham apologize for whatever it was he —
Hawk is at the back of the periodicals corner, leaning against the magazine rack, pretending to read a copy of Field and Stream. He looks up at me as I come in. He does not nod. He just lifts his eyes. I lift mine back. We do not need to do anything else.
I look at Nora.
She is behind the circulation desk with her hands clasped at her stomach, the way she does when the room has gotten too loud.
Her chin is dropped about half an inch. Her shoulders are up about a quarter-inch.
She is making herself small the way she does, the small precise contraction she has perfected since she was twelve, and she is not — and this matters, this is the thing I have come to read in her — she is not crying.
She is not shaking. She is not as small as she was when Graham closed his fingers around her arm.
She is in some intermediate place, some place I have not seen her in before, and she has the look of a woman who is trying to decide whether to step out of the small place or stay in it.
Pauline has not stopped talking.
Pauline is doing what people like Pauline do, which is run forward over silence with words, with the steady careful pressure of a polished interrogator, because Pauline knows by long instinct that if she just keeps talking long enough, Nora will eventually nod the small careful nod she has been nodding her whole life, and then the matter will be closed and Pauline will have won.
I do not yet exist in Pauline's peripheral vision.
I take three steps into the library and stop in the doorway between the entry and the main floor.
I do not go any further. I do not move toward the desk.
I do not put my body anywhere between the two of them — that is not the thing I am here to do.
I plant my boots on the carpet just past the doormat, where Nora can see me from the desk if she lifts her head, and I wait.
Nora lifts her head.
She sees me.
Her eyes meet mine for exactly one beat — long enough to know I am there, long enough for me to give her the small steady nod I have been saving for this purpose without knowing I had been saving it.
I say, quietly, from the doorway, just loud enough to carry across the carpet:
"You don't have to go anywhere."
Pauline's head snaps around.
I do not look at Pauline. I keep looking at Nora.
I say, evenly, "You don't owe anyone an explanation, Nora. This is your library. Your town. Your life."
I do not say anything else. I do not need to.
Pauline has turned all the way around. She is looking at me with the look I have seen on the faces of women like her my whole life, which is the look of a woman trying to place a man like me on a social hierarchy she carries in her head and finding I do not fit anywhere on it.
Linen pants. Pearl studs. Clean white blouse.
She has gone, in the half-second since I spoke, from being the most powerful person in the room to being a woman in the wrong building, and she has not yet decided how she is going to respond.
I can see her recalibrating in real time.
The pearl studs. The clenched left hand. The line of her mouth.
She says, very cool, very polite, "I'm sorry. Can I help you?"
I do not answer her.
I am not here to talk to her.
I am still looking at Nora.
I see what happens next. I see it in real time. I see it for the rest of my life.
Nora unclasps her hands.
She lifts her chin.
She lets her shoulders drop. Not in a slump.
The other direction. Down out of the small contracted place she has been holding them in, down to where they are supposed to sit, and her chin comes up the same quarter-inch hers had come down, and her hands come up off her stomach and rest, light and steady, on the counter in front of her.
Both hands. Palms down. Fingers slightly spread.
She does not look at me again. She does not need to. She looks at Pauline.
She says, in a voice that is quiet but is — and I will tell the truth — is steady in a way I have not heard Nora's voice be steady since I have known her:
"I am not coming."
Pauline says, "Lenora —"
Nora says, "Pauline."
The single word. The use of her sister's full name in that tone — quiet, level, certain — does something to Pauline that two minutes of arguing would not have done. I watch Pauline's mouth open and shut on no syllable.
Nora says, "I am not coming to the reunion.
I am not coming to Richmond. I am not coming home.
This is home. Clover Ridge is home. The library is home.
I have a life here. I am not hiding. I am not having a breakdown.
I am not embarrassing the family. I am — Pauline, I am living.
I am living for the first time in my whole life, and you came here today to talk me out of it, and I am asking you, please, very politely, to leave my library. "
She does not stutter.
I am noticing this. I am noticing it the way you notice that a song has changed key.
There has not been a single soft hiss on a single s.
Not on Saturday. Not on sister. Not on stay.
Her voice has come up from some lower clean place she has not been allowed to use in twenty-six years, and it is — God help me — it is the same voice I heard her use on the teenagers in the periodicals corner the day I met her.
The library voice. The voice she uses when somebody has stepped onto her carpet and is breaking her rules. The voice that does not negotiate.
Pauline has not moved.
Pauline says, very slow, "Lenora. Have you been —"
"Pauline. Please leave."
"Lenora. I am asking. Have you been —"
"Pauline."
Pauline closes her mouth.
She looks at me. She looks at Hawk in the periodicals corner. She looks at Nora. She looks back at me.
She picks up her purse off the counter.
She straightens her blouse.
She says, with the small clean dignity women like her never lose because they never allow themselves to lose it, "I will tell Mother you are well."
Nora says, "Please do."
Pauline turns. She walks across the carpet at her two-inch-heel pace.
She stops in front of me at the doorway.
She looks up at me — barely up; she has the heels — with a careful, level, cold look I will respect to the end of my life because it costs her something to give me that look on her way out of a room she has just lost.
She says, "I do not know what you are, sir, or what you think you are doing in my sister's life. But I am watching you. My family is watching you. If anything — and I mean anything — happens to my sister, you and I will be having a very different conversation."
I look down at her.
I say, "Yes, ma'am."
I say it without irony. I say it the way I would say it to any mother of any daughter. I say it because — and I will admit this with no warmth — Pauline is not entirely wrong to say it. A version of her instinct is the right instinct. She has just used it for the wrong purpose her whole life.
She nods, once. She walks out.
The bell on the door jangles.
The door swings shut.