EPILOGUE
Sabine — November 6
The bathroom is round the back and you have to ask for the key at the counter, and the key is on a piece of plastic pipe about a foot long so you cannot put it in your pocket and walk off with it.
The woman behind the register looks at me when she hands it over.
Not unkindly. She is about fifty and she has been on that register since six in the morning and she looks at me the way you look at somebody who has come in off a highway with their hair pushed back and a shirt they have slept in.
“It’s round the side,” she says. “The light don’t work but the window’s clear.”
“Thank you.”
“You want the coffee first?”
“After.”
I take the key and go round the side.
Eleven days.
I have been counting them and I do not know why, except that I count everything, and eleven days is the twenty-sixth of October to the sixth of November and I have spent four of them in the truck and seven of them in a room at a place outside Slidell that charges by the week.
Three hundred and eleven dollars.
That is what is left. It was four thousand one hundred on the fourteenth of October and there was a week at forty a night and there was two hundred and nine in fuel and there was a set of tyres in Bay St.
Louis because the near side rear was down to the wire and I have never in my life driven on a tyre I could see the belt on.
And a toolbox. Six of them, and a welder, and eleven battens on the seat.
The bathroom is concrete and the light does not work, exactly as advertised, and there is a window up high with wire in the glass and enough grey November coming through it to see by.
I lock the door and put my back against it.
I have known since the second.
That is the truth of it and I am not going to make it more interesting than it was.
I have got a body I have lived in for thirty-one years and I have never once been a woman who had to wonder about anything, ever, in her life, and on the second of November I sat on the end of a bed in a room outside Slidell doing nothing at all and understood that I was four days out and that I
have never been four days out.
I did nothing about it for four more days. I want that said too.
I drove. I looked at two yards, one in Gulfport and one in Long Beach, and neither of them had anything and both of them said come back after Christmas.
I ate at a place on the beach road twice.
I did not buy a test in Slidell and I did not buy one in Bay St. Louis, and yesterday afternoon I stood in a Walgreens in Gulfport for about six minutes with one in my hand and put it back on the shelf and walked out.
I bought it this morning at eleven at a different Walgreens two miles from the first one.
I am not going to pretend that was an accident.
It is two minutes.
That is what the box says and the box is right, and I stand with my back against a concrete wall in a bathroom behind a gas station on Highway 90 with my arms folded and I count it.
I do not look at my watch. I count.
One thousand and one, one thousand and two, and I get to about forty and lose it and start again, which has never happened to me in my life, and I start again and get to a hundred and twelve and lose it again.
So I stop counting and I look at the window.
There is a gull on the other side of it that has got itself up on the sill and is walking back and forth, and I stand there and watch the shape of it go one way and the other way through wire glass, and that is how I spend the two minutes.
I know before I look.
I have known since the second and I have known properly since about four o’clock yesterday afternoon in a Walgreens car park, and I look anyway, because you do, because a person has to see the thing.
It is October the nineteenth.
That is what is in my head. Not a hospital and not a date on a calendar and not any of the things a person is supposed to think. It is a date, because I know exactly which night it was, and there is not one hour of ambiguity in it anywhere in this world.
I went to that house with a question. I gave a man eight hours in the dark to say one true thing without being made to, and he took the breath twice and did not use it, and I got up at twenty to six and dressed with my back to the bed and stood in the doorway with my boots in my hand.
And I came away with a clean answer.
And this.
I sit down.
Not on anything. There is nothing in that room to sit on, so I go down the wall with my back on the concrete until I am on the floor of a gas station bathroom outside Gulfport, Mississippi, with my knees up and the thing in my hand and the plastic pipe with the key on it on the floor beside me.
And I do the arithmetic.
That is what I do. Sitting on that floor. Because it is the only thing I have ever been able to do with anything and it is what my father gave me instead of religion.
Three hundred and eleven dollars.
No job. Two yards that said after Christmas. A truck with new tyres on the back and a hundred and forty thousand miles on it.
A house in Port Ardeen with the power on and my key in my pocket, and a dock with somebody else’s key on the gate from the first of the month, and a facility fee of fifteen hundred dollars a month that will be paid into an account with my name on it whether I am in that parish or on the moon.
Fifteen hundred a month.
I could go back.
That is a real thing and I sat on that floor and looked straight at it, and I am not going to pretend I did not.
There is a house that is mine and there is no rent on it and there is money coming into it every month, and there is a man in that parish who would put his hand on this and hold it up over his head,
and there is not one woman in that yard who would say a word to my face ever again as long as I lived.
I would be taken care of. That is the phrase and it is exactly the right one and I have heard it used about eleven women in my life.
And I sat on the floor of that bathroom and thought about Nita Aucoin at a folding table in the shade on the ninth of August.
Four months old. Eleven months. A name on a paper on a wall in a church hall in Port Arthur, Texas, in December, and a woman in Lake Charles who is alive today as far as anybody knows.
Came back for him with what, cher.
That is the whole of it. That is the arithmetic and it does not take two minutes, it takes about four seconds, and it comes out the same way it came out on that folding chair with a plate on my knees when there was no reason on earth for me to be thinking about it at all.
There is no paper.
There is no venue and no filing and no judge in a courthouse in Terrebonne Parish who has not got somebody in that yard, and there is no line anywhere in this world where I stand up and say the word mine and it means anything at all.
And there is one document in the whole of the Cottonmouth Motorcycle Club.
If I tell him, then everything I have got is a thing I am given.
Every single thing. The house is a thing I am allowed to keep and the child is a thing they have agreed to let me raise, and there is a gate somewhere with a key on it and the key is not mine, and the day I want out is the day I find out what I actually own.
And I have watched exactly what a man in that family does when he wants a thing that cannot be voted on.
He does not take it from you. That is what nobody understands. He does not come to your house and take it. He goes and has it made, and he pays extra to have it quick, and then it exists, and after that there is nothing you can do about it for the rest of your life.
If I say nothing, I have got three hundred and eleven dollars and a truck.
That is worse. That is so much worse that a person could laugh, and I did, sitting on that floor, one breath of it out loud in an empty concrete room.
But it is mine.
I get up.
I wash my hands. Hot, too hot, because that is how I have always had it, and there is a dispenser on the wall with the pink soap that does not lather, and I do my hands properly, the backs and between the fingers and under the nails, the way you do when you have had them in something.
There is a mirror over the sink with a corner gone off it.
I look at myself in it for a second. Thirty-one years old, hair pushed back with the wrong side of a hand, four days in the same shirt.
“Alright,” I say.
That is all. That is the entire ceremony and it is more than most things get.
I put the thing in the trash under the paper towels and then I take it back out and put it in my jacket pocket, because I have got a horror of a thing about me being found by somebody else, and I do not throw it away until Mobile.
I hand the key back at the counter.
“Alright?” the woman says.
“Yes.”
“You want that coffee?”
“Yes.”
I do not want it. I have not wanted a cup of coffee since about the twenty-eighth of October and I did not know why until yesterday afternoon in a car park.
I buy it anyway, and a bottle of water and a packet of crackers, and I put four dollars and eleven cents on the counter and she counts it and gives me nine cents back.
“Where you headed?” she says.
And I stand there at a counter on Highway 90 on the sixth of November with a coffee I am not going to drink and nine cents in my hand.
Because I do not know.
I got in that truck eleven days ago and went right at the Ardeen road because right is east, and I have been going east ever since without one reason for it, and the woman is not being nosy, she is making conversation the way people do at a register at eleven in the morning.
“East,” I say.
“Well, that’s most of it.”
“It is.”
She laughs. “You have a good one.”
“You too.”
I go out and put the coffee in the holder and get in.
The battens are on the seat where they have been for eleven days, tied in the bundle with the tarred line, numbers turned out. I put my hand flat on them the way I do about four times a day and have done since Port Ardeen.
Then I start the truck.
Highway 90 runs east out of Gulfport along the water and then it goes inland and then there is Alabama, and there is Bayou La Batre in Alabama, which I know because there is a boatyard there that my father talked about twice in his life, and I have got a name in my head and nothing else.
And I know exactly one thing for certain, sitting at the edge of that lot with my hand on the gearstick.
He is not going to know.
Not this year and not next year and not when it is four and asking questions, and not if he stands on a step somewhere in ten years’ time with his hands open.
There is no version of it and no arrangement and no afternoon at a table where it gets discussed, because there is nothing to discuss, because in that parish there is no such thing as half of a child.
He costed me once and he got everything he costed.
He is not going to cost this one.
I pull out onto Highway 90 heading east with the water on my right and the sun already up over it, and I get about four miles before I notice that I have got both hands on the wheel at ten and two like a girl taking a test, and I make myself let go with the right one and put it back on the battens.
THE END