Chapter FIFTEEN
Sabine — September 25
It has been raining since three and it is the kind that does not move, that sits over the parish and just goes on, and the road out front has been running like a ditch since about six.
At twenty past nine there is a knock.
I know it. Two, then one. He has knocked on that door like that for four years and I have told him twice it is stupid because who else would it be, and he has kept doing it.
I stand in my kitchen with a dish towel in my hand.
Here is what I should have done. I should have stood there and let him knock and then let him not knock, and gone to bed, and let the rain do the rest of it.
That is what a woman in a book does and I have thought about it enough since to know that it was available to me, standing right there, for about nine seconds.
I open the door.
He is soaked all the way through and he has not got a jacket, and he is standing back off the step in the rain rather than under the eave, which is on purpose, because a man under an eave has already come in a little.
“Can I come in.”
“No.”
“Alright.”
He does not move. He stands out there in it with his hair flat to his head and the water coming off his jaw.
“Say what you came to say,” I tell him.
“Not from out here.”
“Then go home.”
And he says, “Sabine,” and it is nothing, it is just my name, and I stand back off the door.
That is the mistake. Not the talking. The door.
He comes in and stands on the mat and the water starts going off him onto the floor immediately, and he sees it happening and does not do anything about it, and neither do I.
“Do not sit down,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“And do not.”
I stop.
“Do not what?”
“Nothing.”
He had already lifted his arm about two inches toward the hook by the switch. Four years of a shoulder coming up and an arm going back and a cut going onto that hook, and his body started to do it in my kitchen with the rain coming off him, and he caught it.
“Go on,” I say.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Yes you do.”
“Sabine.”
“You have been sitting in a truck or on a bike or in your own kitchen for eleven days working out how to start, and you have got about nine of them worked out, so pick the first one and say it.”
He wipes his face with his hand and it does nothing.
“The route was going to die,” he says.
“No.”
“Let me.”
“No.” I put the towel down on the counter. “That is the club and I said no club. Try again.”
“You can’t take the club out of it, that’s what it.”
“I can take the club out of it because I have heard it. I heard all of it on the twenty-third of August standing right there while you dried my dishes. Nineteen percent. Twenty-two. Veracruz. Micah in the bars. Your daddy’s valve. Eleven flat on paper.”
I say it evenly, and it comes out in order, because I have had it in order for a while.
“Nine true things, Dax. Every one of them checks. I have checked them.”
He does not say anything.
“So do not bring me those nine again, because I have already had them, and I gave them back to you and said pay the man and go to bed, and you did not want that answer. Now say the thing that is not on that list.”
“Auguste wanted a tie.”
“Better.”
“He wanted it known. Blood or bed.”
“Better. Keep going.”
“And it had to be.” He stops. “It had to be whoever’s holding the gavel after.”
“And who is that?”
“Nobody knows.”
“Who did you decide it was?”
He looks at me.
“Me,” he says.
“There it is.”
The rain is on the roof and on the window unit and there is a gutter at the back of this house that has needed clearing since August and it is going over in a sheet past the window, and neither of us looks at it.
“Now do the next one,” I say. “Who told you to do it.”
“Nobody.”
“Say it in a whole sentence.”
“Nobody told me to do it.”
“Not your father.”
“My father stood up at that table on the fifth in front of fourteen men and killed the motion,” he says. “Micah moved it and Fry seconded it and Deuce said there’d be no vote, and he said no man gets voted into a bed, and he put the gavel down and walked out of that room.”
“So there was a room where it was discussed and you sat in it.”
“Yes.”
“And your president refused to make it a club matter.”
“Yes.”
“So it was not the club.”
“No.”
“Say that plainly.”
He takes a breath.
“It was not the club,” he says. “There was no vote and no order and nobody sent me. I sat at that table by myself for a while after they all went out and then two nights later I got on my bike and rode out there.”
“Two nights.”
“Yes.”
“So you thought about it for two nights.”
“Yes.”
I put my hand on the edge of the counter, because there is a thing happening in my legs that I would rather not have happening.
“Why,” I say.
“The route.”
“No.”
“Sabine, the route is.”
“You had a father with a bad valve and a treasurer who lies about numbers and eleven flat on the table for five years, and you had another way, and I gave you the other way in this kitchen and you did not take it.”
I am not shouting. I have not gone above the level of a woman asking the price of a fitting. “So say the real one.”
“There isn’t a.”
“Say the real one.”
“I wanted the gavel,” he says.
And there it is, and the kitchen is very quiet under the rain.
“Say the whole thing.”
“Sabine.”
“You have got it half out and half out is worse. Say the whole thing.”
He stands on my mat in a spreading puddle and he says it.
“I’ve been Road Captain eleven years,” he says.
“Eleven. And every man in that yard thinks I’ve got it because I’m his son, and every year I don’t get it is another year they’re right. Micah’s been VP six years and he says in bars there’s better money in the yard than the water,
and if he takes that gavel he brings a motion to come off the water inside a year and he doesn’t even have to win it, he only has to make it a question.”
His voice has not gone up either. That is the worst part of the whole night.
Neither of us shouts. “And Auguste sat me down at his own table and told me he wanted the man who’d be holding it, and I heard it, and I did the arithmetic, and the arithmetic came out that I could buy the whole thing in one night.”
“With what?”
“You know with what.”
“Say it.”
“With you,” he says.
I do not move.
“You costed me,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You put me in a column.”
“Yes.”
“And what did you put next to my name?”
He does not answer that.
“What did you put next to my name, Dax?”
“That you’d forgive me,” he says.
And that is the end of it. Right there. Not the woman, not the leather, not the eight days. That.
“Because I had before,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Because I washed your hands.”
“Sabine.”
“Because I have taken that thing off your shoulders four hundred times and put it on that hook and never once asked you what you had done that day.”
My voice does something on the word never and I take it back.
“You sat in a room and you thought about it for two nights and the reason it was possible was that I had been good to you.”
“That’s not.”
“Do not tell me what it is not. You just told me what it is.”
He puts his hands up about waist height and puts them down again.
“There’s one more,” I say.
“Sabine, I.”
“The leather.”
He shuts his eyes.
“Who ordered it?”
“I did.”
“Who paid for it?”
“I did.”
“Did anybody ask you to?”
“No.”
“Did Auguste?”
“He wanted it known. He never said the word.”
“So whose idea was the cut?”
“Odette said it out loud,” he says. “In the room. And I’d been thinking it since the sixteenth of August and I hadn’t said it, and she said it so it’d be hers and not mine.”
“And then you picked up a phone.”
“Yes.”
“And you said a colour and a size.”
“Yes.”
“And you said your own name into a telephone.”
“Yes.”
“And how long did they tell you it would take?”
He does not answer.
“How long, Dax?”
“Two weeks.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said make it one.”
“And what did that cost you?”
“Eighty dollars.”
I look at him for a long time.
I want to describe what I am doing in that stretch because I was doing something, I was not blank. I am standing in my mother’s kitchen looking at a man I have slept next to for four years and I am checking, honestly, the way I would check a hull, whether there is any part of this I could carry.
Because people do. That is the thing nobody says out loud. Half the women I have known since I was a child are married to something they decided to carry, and they are not weak and they are not fools, and some of them have got forty good years out of it.
So I stand there and I look for the place I could put it.
And I find one. That is what I have never told anybody.
I find one, for about two seconds, somewhere around the idea that he is standing in my kitchen soaked to the skin telling me the true thing when he did not have to, that he did not once say the club made me, that he stood there and said I wanted the gavel out loud in his own voice.
Two seconds. I could feel where it would go.
And then I think about the telephone.
Not the bed. The telephone. A man on a shell road at ten past seven in the morning with the sun coming up, and a seventy-one year old man in Bayou Blue asking him black or brown, and my name is not in that conversation anywhere.
There was nobody in that phone call at all.
Not Auguste, not Deuce, not Micah, not the route.
Just him, choosing words, and paying extra to have it quicker.
That is not a man who was cornered. That is a man doing an errand.
“Alright,” I say.
“Sabine.”
“You have said it. That is what I asked for and you did it and you did not lie once, and I want you to know that I know that.” I pick the dish towel back up because my hands need something. “It is the only thing left that I think well of you for.”
“Let me.”
“No.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“You are about to and I am telling you no before you spend it.”
I fold the towel. “Because you have got one thing left to say and it is going to be some version of what do I do, and I do not want to hear it, because if you say it then I will have to answer it, and there is no answer that does not turn into another meeting.”
“A what?”
“Another meeting. You come back and we talk again, and then you come back after that. I have watched women do that for six years at a time.” I look up. “I am not doing it. I would rather have tonight and nothing than eleven months of meetings.”
He stands there.
“Get out of my house,” I say.
“Sabine.”
“Get out of my house, Dax.”
He does not move for about four seconds. Then he goes to the door and puts his hand on it and stops.
“I’ll fix it,” he says.
And I do not know what is in my face when he says that, but whatever it is, he sees it, and he does not say anything else.
He goes out into the rain and he pulls the door to behind him gently, which he has done four hundred times because the frame is swollen and it will bang if you are not careful, and I stand in my kitchen and listen to a man be careful with my door on his way out of my life.
The bike does not start for a while. He sits out there in the rain on it for two minutes, maybe three, and then it goes and the sound of it goes up the road and turns at the end.
I lock the door.
Then I get the mop.
That is what I do at twenty to eleven on the twenty-fifth of September, I mop my own kitchen floor, all of it, not just the puddle, corner to corner, on my knees at the end for the bit under the stove, and I wring it out twice.
Then I sit down on the floor with my back against the cabinet and the mop across my legs.
And I do not cry then either.
What I do is think about my father, and it is not even a memory, it is his voice saying a thing he said about a boat.
He said, you can fix anything on a hull except the shape of it.
He said, you can put a new engine in her and a new deck and new frames and she is still the boat she was built as, and if the shape is wrong she will run wrong until the day she is broke up, and there is not a man alive who can make her a different boat.
I sat on that floor a long time.
Then I got up and put the mop away and went to bed at half past midnight, in a house that smelled like pine cleaner, and I slept the whole night through for the first time since the fourteenth,
and I woke up at six and lay there for a minute understanding that the thing I had been holding for eleven days had been the not knowing, and that the knowing was quieter and much, much worse.