Chapter 2 #2
"I've got—"
"You've got a plate now." She put it in my hands. "Sit on the step. I'm ninety, I've earned the right to make grown men eat."
I sat on the step.
"She was up at four," Onyx said.
"I know."
"You know because you were up at four."
"Onyx."
"I'm just observing the timetable." She lowered herself onto the step beside me with the usual sound effects. "You going to throw her out?"
"In three days."
"Mm." She looked out at the yard. "Your daddy would've thrown her out on the first night."
"Then why does everybody keep telling me to keep her?"
"Because your daddy would've thrown her out on the first night," said Mama Onyx, "and been dead wrong, and known it by Thursday, and never said so."
I ate the plate.
I found her at the intake channel at two in the afternoon, and I opened with a mistake.
"You've got three days."
She didn't look up from the sonde. "I need four."
"You've got three."
"Then I'll give you a worse answer in three.
" Now she looked up. She'd tied her hair back with what I'm reasonably sure was electrical wire.
"That's not a threat, it's arithmetic. Tide's on a semidiurnal cycle with a strong diurnal inequality here, so a full record is four days minimum unless you want me extrapolating, and I don't like extrapolating in front of strangers, it's tacky. "
"Three."
"Four."
"Three."
"Three and a half," she said.
"Three and a half."
"I'll take the last afternoon in half-hours and go without sleep on the third night, which is my problem and not yours, and you'll get a defensible record instead of a decorative one.
" She held out her hand. "That's my final.
I've got nothing else to trade, I'm eating your food and sleeping in your box. "
I looked at the hand.
"You negotiate like a hostage situation," I said.
"I've been in one of those, and honestly it was less work."
"You have not."
"Nine days outside Matamoros. It was a misunderstanding about a well."
"A misunderstanding."
"They thought I was there to take their water and I was there to tell them it was already gone." She wound the tape without looking at it. "By day four we'd sorted it out and by day six I'd fixed their pump, and on day nine they gave me a chicken."
"What happened to the chicken?"
She looked up at me with an expression of pure and total innocence.
"Doctor."
"It's a long drive," she said, "and there's very little to eat on it."
"You ate a diplomatic chicken."
"I ate a gift," she said, "which is the correct thing to do with one, and I would appreciate it if that stayed between us, because I've been in this town nine hours and I've already gathered that poultry here is a legal category."
I shook the hand. It was cold from the channel and there was a callus across the pad of the palm from the staff gauge, and I noticed it, and I've thought about that noticing quite a lot since.
"You want to know what's actually going to happen," she said, while I was still deciding how to leave.
"No."
"You do."
"Doctor—"
"Nobody here calls you Emmett."
It came out sideways, not as a question, and it stopped me flat.
"No."
"Why?"
"Because a road name's something you earn and a first name's something you're given, and I've got more use for the one I earned."
She wrote something down. I want to be clear: I said one sentence about my own name and the woman wrote it down.
"Are you taking notes on me?"
"I take notes on everything. It's a condition." She capped the pen. "Also you're wrong. You've got exactly one use for a first name, and it's that there should be one person allowed to say it, or you're not a man, you're a municipal function."
Then she went back to her sonde like she hadn't done anything.
I stood there in the smell of low tide for about four seconds.
"Three and a half days," I said.
"Yes."
"Then the gate's that way."
"You're going to have to find a third thing to say to me," she said. "Statistically."
I went and stood in the intake channel that evening after she'd gone, and I looked at the gauge she'd staked into the mud.
It was a good piece of work. Set plumb, keyed into the bank with two pins so a tide wouldn't take it, with the zero referenced to something — she'd scratched a benchmark into the concrete sill, a small neat triangle with a cross in it, the way surveyors have been doing it for two hundred years.
My father made his marks with a nail.
She made hers with a symbol that means something to strangers.
I stood there a long time working out why that bothered me, and the answer I came to was that he'd been keeping a secret and she was leaving a message, and that those are the same act performed by two entirely different kinds of person, and that I had spent six years being the first kind.
I told Cash about it that evening, which was my second mistake of the day, and he laughed so hard he had to sit on a pallet.
"A municipal function."
"Shut up."
"She called you a municipal function." He wiped his eyes. "Ruin. Brother. Light of my life. Do you understand that you're going to marry that woman?"
"I'm going to bury you."
"Sure. But first." He held up a finger. "Marry."
I threw the rag at him.
"You want to know the actual reason I voted to keep her?" He caught it. He'd been waiting to say this, I could tell, he'd had it loaded since eleven in the morning. "It's not the joke. I know you think it's the joke."
"It's always the joke."
"It's usually the joke." He folded the rag, which he never does. "Ruin — you haven't argued with anybody in six years."
"I argue constantly."
"You rule. There's a difference and everybody in this town knows it but you.
" He set the rag on the bench. "Pike doesn't argue with you, he complains and then complies.
Malachi doesn't argue, he documents his objection so history knows he was right.
Bishop doesn't talk. I make jokes because it's the only delivery system left that gets through your skull. "
"And her?"
"She came off that buggy and told you your gasket was the wrong hardness inside of ninety seconds," Cash said, "and you listened. I watched it. You put the wrench down."
"That's not—"
"Brother." He picked up the rag again and handed it back to me, which was somehow the worst part. "You've been the only man in the room for six years and it's making you stupid. She's three days of not being alone. Take the three days."
He walked off across the yard, whistling, having said the single most useful thing anyone said to me that entire month, and by dinner he was back to being unbearable about it.
He was right, obviously. He's always right at the exact wrong moment. That's the trade — I got the pipe, he got the mouth, and six years in I still don't know who got robbed.