Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
LENNOX
There is nothing in this house.
That's the first thing, before the doors and the water and the man. I woke up at six because the light comes in that window like a slap and I lay there for a while doing what I've done in every room I've ever been put in, which is read it.
You can read a room. Four years of sitting in one taught me that. My mother's living room told anybody who walked in exactly who she'd been — the ceramic rooster, the church directory on the side table, forty-one photographs on one wall and every single one of them me.
This room has a bed and a dresser and a lamp with no shade.
The closet has two wire hangers in it.
So I get up and I go looking, because he didn't tell me not to and because I have never once in my life been able to sit still in a house I don't understand.
Living room: a couch, a chair, a television on a milk crate. No books. No mail on the counter, which is the part that stops me — everybody has mail. Everybody has a stack of it somewhere going soft in the humidity.
Kitchen: one plate in the drying rack. One cup. One fork.
Bathroom: soap, a razor, a bottle of aspirin, and a towel that has been washed so many times you can see through it in the middle.
Hallway: nothing on the walls. Not a nail hole. Not a lighter square where something used to hang.
He's lived here long enough that the porch boards have rotted through and he has never put one thing on a wall.
By the time I get to the back door I'm not reading a house anymore. I'm reading a man, and what it says is that he could be gone from here in eleven minutes and there wouldn't be anything left to tell you his name.
He's out on the porch with his back to me and a cup in his hand.
No shirt. That's the other thing about a house with nobody in it — nobody bothers.
The ink runs across both shoulders and down, black and heavy, some kind of thorn work with no picture in it that I can find, and there's a scar low on his left side about four inches long that's gone white and doesn't match anything.
I look at all of it for about two seconds longer than I mean to.
Then I hate myself for a bit, and then I get over it, because I'm thirty-three years old and I've been furious for nine days and neither of those things has ever stopped anybody's eyes from working.
"There's coffee," he says, without turning around.
"How'd you know I was up?"
"Floor."
"The floor."
"Fourth board from the hall door." He drinks. "Ain't a thing in the world I could do about it and I quit tryin' in about twelve."
I get the coffee. It's terrible and it's hot and I take it out onto the porch and sit down in the other chair, which is a dock chair with the webbing gone in one corner, and neither of us says anything for a while.
The water's forty feet out through the trees and it's the color of coffee too. A heron stands in it and doesn't move the entire time we sit there.
"So how does this work," I say.
"You eat, you sleep, you stay in the house."
"That's the whole program."
"That's it."
"For how long?"
"Ain't—"
"—worked it out yet. Yes. You've said." I put my feet up on the rail. "You know that's not a plan, right? A plan has more than one day in it. Right now you've got a woman, a house, and a lie, and you've told me two of the three."
He doesn't answer.
"Here's mine," I say. "You want to know what I took. That's your entire interest in me and we both know it. And I'm not going to tell you, not this morning and not Thursday, because the day you find out is the day I'm worth nothing to anybody."
"That how you see it?"
"That's how it is. You'd see it the same way sitting where I'm sitting."
He turns his head then and looks at me for the first time all morning, and there's a thing that happens with his hands when he does — the cup goes down onto the arm of the chair and his fingers spread a little, and I have decided to start paying attention to his hands, because his face doesn't do anything and something has to.
"You ain't wrong," he says.
"I know I'm not."
"Doesn't mean it holds."
"Nothing holds. I'm not asking for forever. I'm asking for Tuesday."
Around eleven he brings in eggs from somewhere and cooks them badly.
I don't offer to help, and he doesn't ask, and we eat standing up on opposite sides of a counter like two people who have both decided sitting down would mean something.
And then I do the thing I came in here to do, which is work him.
I've had all morning to figure out how. He's not stupid, so it can't be a question, it has to be a complaint — men will correct a woman who's wrong about their business faster than they'll answer a woman who's curious about it.
"Y'all haven't even been going twenty years," I say.
He looks up.
"The sign at the gate. Est. two thousand four. My mother had a car older than your club."
"Twenty-two years."
"Sure. Twenty-two." I push the eggs around. "Barely a club. Half the men out front of that place last night are older than the patch on their own back."
His jaw goes and comes back.
"There were seven of 'em," he says. "Seven men, one room, one night, and every one of 'em walked away from somethin' worse to do it.
Charter's on the wall in the chapel and I've stood in front of it every New Year's for fifteen years while Storm reads the names off, and I've said 'em back every time, so you can go ahead and think what you want about it. "
"He reads them."
"Every year."
"Out loud."
"That's generally how readin' out loud works."
Don't ask. Don't ask, don't ask.
"Well," I say. "What are they?"
And he says them.
He says them standing at a kitchen counter in his own house on a Thursday morning with a fork in his hand, the way you'd list the counties you drive through to get somewhere. Storm's given name, which I don't know and file. Scourge. Two I've never heard in my life. A Boudreaux.
Sixth.
"Tithe."
He says it the way you say a word.
He says it and he keeps going, straight through into the seventh one without a pause, without a breath, without one single thing happening on his face — and then he's done, and he sets the fork down and picks up his plate and says something about the propane running low.
There's a heron out there that hasn't moved in three hours.
My hands are on the counter. My coffee is at my right elbow. My pulse has gone up into the hundreds again and it is doing it entirely on its own and none of it, not one part of it, is reaching my face.
For twenty-two years the only place my father existed was inside my head.
And this man has been saying his name out loud, once a year, in a room with a fire going, to nine other men who all say it back.
He doesn't know who he's talking about.
Nobody in that building knows who they're talking about.
"Propane's in the tank on the side," Havoc says. "If the burner starts poppin', that's what it is."
"Okay," I say.
And my voice comes out completely level, because of course it does.