Chapter 64 Seen — Ii
Tonight’s was standing on the bottom step of her own building with a twelve-year-old wrapped clean around her middle, being seen.
The crowd thinned by inches, as a small-town crowd does, nobody quite willing to be the first to go home and miss anything.
Somebody had made coffee, because this is Halford and somebody always makes coffee inside of ten minutes of anything.
Earl got to her before I did, and I watched him not say one word, just take his cap off his own head and settle it down onto hers, which is close to the most a man like Earl is able to say out loud, and she laughed and cried at the same time and let him leave it there.
Marcy talked enough for the entire block, which was a mercy dressed up as a nuisance, because it meant Birdie didn’t have to say anything at all.
Fran brought out pie that nobody had asked for.
The found family closed in around her, a wall of them, and past their shoulders she found my eyes again, and this time I crossed the street.
“So,” I said, when I got to her. “That happened.”
“I left a customer standing at the register,” she said. “At Hollis. Mid-sale. Just walked out and left him holding his rebar clips. Earl’s going to dock me a whole afternoon.”
“Earl put his own cap on your head.”
“Earl’s a soft touch and I will deny under oath that I said so.
” She was shaking still, faintly, the wire not all the way gone dark yet, and she saw me see it, and for once in three years she didn’t hide her hands from me.
She held one up between us, unsteady in the porch light somebody had flicked on, and looked at it like it belonged to a person she was only now getting introduced to.
“They’re all going to know now,” she said, quiet, under the cover of Marcy’s noise, and the fear in it was real, realer than anything a fire ever put in her voice.
“The whole — everybody. Tomorrow, at the store, and the day after, and forever. There’s no putting her back in the box now.
The scared lady. She’s gone. They saw her go. ”
“They saw,” I agreed.
“I don’t know how to be seen, Wes.” Her chin was doing the thing Theo’s had done at the window, up and shaking both at once.
“I built three whole years so that nobody ever would. I don’t know how to just be the person who did that, out in front of people, at the diner, in the seasonal aisle, for the rest of my life. ”
“You don’t have to know how tonight,” I said.
I didn’t reach for her hand. I let it stay up there between us, unsteady, hers to do whatever she wanted with.
I looked at her, and I said the true small thing, the only kind I have ever had to give her.
“Be seen by the two or three of us who already love the shaking hand. Start there. The town can wait its turn.”
She put her hand into mine. Not hard and gone, as she had on the sidewalk before the stairs.
She left it there this time, shaking, and let me have it, and up the block the last of the light went off the river and out of the brick, and somewhere downtown a man sat with a box full of the truth and a lawyer’s card he hadn’t yet called, and none of that was tonight’s, because tonight she had let herself be held on Larch Street in front of God and Marcy Petit and her whole watching town, seen, and terrified of it, and staying anyway.