Chapter SEVENTEEN
Sabine — October 3
The car comes down my road at ten past four and I hear it stop and I do not get up, because I am at the table with Prejean’s invoice book and a calculator and it is the third of October and I have not eaten since seven.
Then somebody knocks, and it is one knock, and it is not a knock I know.
She is standing at the bottom of the steps in the sun.
No cut. That is the first thing I check and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Jeans and a plain shirt and her hair down, and she is holding her keys in both hands in front of her like a girl at a bus stop.
“I know,” she says.
“You know what?”
“That you’re going to shut the door. I’d shut it.” She does not come up the steps. “I’ve been sat at the end of your road for twenty minutes. I want to say that so you know I didn’t just turn up. I sat there and I nearly went home twice.”
“Then you should have gone home.”
“Probably.”
We stand there.
She is younger up close than she was across sixty feet of shell. Twenty-five, twenty-six. There is nothing arranged about her at all, no lipstick, no attitude in the shoulders, and she is sunburnt across the nose in a way that means she has been outside a lot lately.
“Ten minutes,” I say.
“Alright.”
“On my porch.”
“Alright.”
And then I stand back off the door anyway, because it is ninety-four degrees in the sun and I was raised by a woman who would come out of her grave about a person standing in that heat.
I do not offer her anything and she does not look at the kitchen. She sits where I point, which is the chair facing the door, which is his chair, and she does not know that and I am not going to move her.
“Say it,” I say.
“My daddy put me in the car.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Nita told me on the sixteenth. Everybody in that yard had worked it out within days.
“Good.” She puts her keys on the table and then picks them back up. “Then I’ll not spend my ten minutes on it.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Everybody wants something.”
“That is a true thing to say,” Odette says, “and it’s the reason I sat at the end of your road for twenty minutes, because I couldn’t answer it and I thought if I can’t answer it I’ve got no business knocking.”
“And now?”
“I’ve got an answer but you’re not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
“There’s not one person on this earth I can say any of this to,” she says. “Not one. And the only other woman it happened to is you.”
I sit down opposite her.
“Go on then,” I say.
She turns the keys over once.
“He trades me,” she says.
“I know that.”
“You know it the way you know a thing about somebody else. I want to say it the way it actually is, once, out loud, and then I’ll never say it again.”
She puts the keys down flat. “I’ve been in that house twelve years since my mother died. Men come up that alley and they sit in the kitchen and they talk to him in the dining room with the door shut, and I have been the thing at the end of the hall the whole time.”
“Has he done this before?”
“Not like this.”
“Then like what?”
“Like a hundred small ones,” she says. “Wear the blue one, they’re coming in a few days. Sit in and take the coffee through and don’t rush. Go out to the yard for the afternoon.”
She looks at me steadily. “He’s never once put a hand on me and he’s never once said an ugly word to me in my life, and I want that said, because people hear this and they build a man out of it who isn’t him. He’s kind. He’s the kindest man in a room. He just trades what he’s got,
and I’m what he’s got, same as the water rights he bought off the Naquins in ninety-eight, and he’d tell you both of those in the same voice.”
“And you got in the car.”
“I got in the car.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been getting in the car since I was fourteen,” she says. “That’s the whole answer. There’s not a better one and I’ve looked for one.”
I do not say anything to that. There is nothing to say to that.
“On the fourteenth,” she says, “he told me to wear it. And I said no. Twice. Which I’ve never done.”
“And?”
“And he said, wear it or Sylvain will tell me why you didn’t.” She shrugs one shoulder, small. “So I wore it in the car and I meant to carry it in from the gate, and Sylvain stood at that gate and watched, and he didn’t go until about four minutes after you drove off.”
“So somebody called him.”
“Somebody called him.”
“Who?”
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” she says. “It wasn’t Dax. He was in Larose with his daddy.”
“I know where he was.”
“Then you’re ahead of me, because I found that out afterwards.”
“Ovide Thibodeaux saw the bike go out on the Larose road at eight in the morning and told three people before nine,” I say. “There is nothing in this parish that does not get seen.”
She almost smiles at that, and it goes off her face straight away.
“I’m sorry it was you that walked in,” she says.
“Do not.”
“I’m not asking you to take it. I said it in that yard and I’m saying it here and then I’ll leave it alone.”
“Why are you sorry?” I say. “You said it. You got in the car. You have been getting in the car since you were fourteen. So which is it?”
“Both.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the only true one I’ve got.” She looks straight at me.
“I got in that car and I could have not got in it. I’d have paid for it and I decided I wasn’t going to pay for it. That’s mine and I’m not going to sit at your table and tell you I was made to, because that would be the same thing he does.”
And I have to sit with that for a second, because it is the first sentence out of her mouth that I actually respect.
“Alright,” I say.
We sit there. The window unit knocks.
“Can I say the other thing?” she says.
“Is it worse?”
“Yes.”
“Then say it and go.”
She puts her hands flat on my table.
“He’s never said your name.”
I do not move.
“Five weeks,” she says. “It’ll be five weeks since the sixth of September. And in five weeks that man has not once said the word Sabine out loud in front of me.”
“Good.”
“No.”
“I do not want my name in that house.”
“I know you don’t. That’s not what this is.”
She keeps her hands flat. “You think that’s him being decent. It isn’t. I’ve been in a house twelve years watching men not say things, and there’s two kinds. There’s a man who doesn’t say a name because he’s finished with it, and he’s easy, you can hear it,
he’ll say she or her or that whole business and it comes out flat and he moves on to the next thing.”
“And the other kind?”
“The other kind can’t get the word out of his mouth.”
The invoice book is still open on the table between us with the calculator on it and the pen across the page.
“He’ll go all the way round it,” she says.
“Every time. Not once, not twice, every single time in five weeks. He’ll say the yard. He’ll say the fourteenth. He’ll say what happened that day. Sylvain said your name in the kitchen three weeks ago, just flat, just a fact about a mechanic, and he went out to the porch.”
“Stop.”
“And on the twenty-fifth he came in at half eleven at night soaked through and he sat at that kitchen table with his boots on and he did not say one word for about forty minutes, and then he said, I’ve got to fix a thing and I don’t know how, and I said, fix what, and he.”
She stops. “He couldn’t. He sat there and couldn’t.”
“I said stop.”
“Alright.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you asked me why I came.”
“That is not why you came.”
“No,” Odette says. “It’s not.”
She takes her hands off my table.
“I came because I’ve been in that house five weeks with a man who doesn’t want me,” she says, “and I have worked out that I can live in a house with a man who doesn’t want me. My mother did it eleven years. That’s a thing a woman can do.”
Her voice does not change at all. “What I hadn’t worked out until about three weeks ago is that I’m going to be doing it while he does that. And I wanted to look at you, because I wanted to know what I’m going to be sat across from for the next however long, and now I’ve seen it,
and it’s worse than I thought.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d have been good to him,” she says.
I stand up.
I do not do it fast and I do not do anything with my hands, I just stand up out of the chair and go to the sink and put my back to her and put both hands on the edge of it, and I stay like that for about six seconds.
“Get out of my house,” I say.
“Alright.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.” I hear the chair go back. “I’ll say one thing at the door and it’s the last one.”
“Do not.”
“He’s not going to fix it.”
“Odette.”
“He’s going to try, because he’s got it in his head that a thing can be fixed if he can just find what to pay.”
She is at the door now, behind me. “And there’s nothing to pay. There’s no arrangement and no number and no man to go and see. He’s thirty-two years old and he has never in his life come up against a thing that couldn’t be handled,
and he’s going to spend a very long time being handed nothing at all, and that’s the only thing in the whole of this that I’m glad about, and I’m not proud of that either.”
The screen goes.
I stand at that sink until I hear the car turn at the end of the road.
Then I sit back down at my own table with the invoice book and the calculator and Prejean’s figures, and I do the column three times and get three different answers, and the third one is the same as the first, so I write that one in.
And here is what she took away from me, and it took me until about nine that night to work out what it was.
Before she came I had a clean thing. It was a bad thing but it was clean.
There was a man who costed me and traded me and made a phone call on a shell road, and there was a woman in a yard with his name on her back, and both of them were on one side of a line and I was on the other side of it, and I knew what everything was.
And she came and sat in his chair for twenty minutes and told me the truth, all of it, without asking me for one single thing, and now I have got a woman who has been getting in the car since she was fourteen, and a man who cannot say my name out loud,
and neither of those facts changes anything at all.
That is the part.
It does not change one thing. He still did it. She still wore it. The cut is still on a hook in a house at the end of an alley and eleven people still arranged their faces for eight days and the boats are still coming apart in the order I said they would.
I have just got to carry all of it now instead of half of it.
At about ten I put the invoice book away and go out to the shed under the carport and stand there with the light off, looking at a welder and six tool boxes and eleven fairing battens hanging from two nails with the numbers turned out.
Then I go in and go to bed.
I did not sleep well. Not because of her, and not because of him.
Because there was one sentence she said that got in under everything else and would not come back out, and it was not about Dax at all. It was: there’s not one person on this earth I can say any of this to.
She said it about herself.
And I lay there in the dark on the third of October and went through everybody I have got, one at a time, all the way down, and I got to the bottom of the list and there was nobody on it either.