Chapter 2 #2
"She go back yet? They were gonna check the — " He stopped. He was reaching for the word and it wasn't there, and he knew it wasn't there, and he had to sit in the room while it wasn't there. "Whatever they put in. They were gonna look at it again."
"The stent."
"The stent."
"Six weeks ago," Georgia said. "She's fine. She's got another one in June."
"June when?"
"I don't know that you get to have June."
"That's fair."
"It's the tenth," she said, and hated herself immediately, because she had never once in her life been able to hold a piece of information back from him. Fifteen years of handing him things.
He took out his phone. She thought — and the thought had teeth — he's going to have Curtis put it on the routing.
But he didn't open anything. He wrote it on the back of his hand with a pen out of the junk drawer, the way a man writes down a load number, and then he put the pen back in the drawer and shut it.
"You know Peyton Kinney's sister's name," Georgia said.
He went still.
"On the memo. You asked about her sister. By name." She kept her voice completely even, and she felt the evenness cost her something in her jaw. "You know how that girl takes her coffee. You didn't know the word stent."
"No."
"That's the whole thing. That's it, right there. It isn't the calls. It's that you have been paying attention this entire time. You've got all of it — you just spent it somewhere else."
He sat with his hand over the writing on his skin like he was keeping it from rubbing off.
"I used to know everything about you," he said.
"You did."
"I could've told you what was in your purse."
"You could have."
"When did I —" He stopped again. He'd been stopping all night, which was new; he had spent twenty years being a man who finished his sentences beautifully. "I keep trying to find the week it happened. Like there's a week."
"There's no week," Georgia said. "That's what's so ugly about it. Nobody does this in a week."
There was a long stretch of nothing.
Outside, the mockingbird that owned the fence post had gone to bed and something else had taken over, one of those small night birds that only ever asks the one question.
"I'm gonna say a thing and I want you to know I know it doesn't buy me anything," Jesse said.
"Then say it."
"I never once thought about leaving you." He was looking at the table. "Not one time. Not for a second. If it had ever gotten anywhere near that I'd have — I don't know what I'd have done, but I'd have known what I was doing."
"I believe you," she said.
His head came up.
"Don't look like that," she said. "It's not a good thing. Jesse, it's the worst thing you've said tonight."
"How is that the worst thing?"
"Because it means you didn't even want her." She heard her own voice go thin and let it. "You weren't in love. You weren't losing your mind over some girl. That I could almost — people lose their minds. That's a thing that happens to people."
"Then what —"
"You just wanted somewhere to put yourself at two in the morning," she said, "and I wasn't convenient, and she was there. Fifteen years, and I got traded for convenient."
He didn't say anything.
There was nothing to say. She'd finally found the sentence that had no back door on it, and she watched him look for one anyway, out of pure habit, and not find it.
She packed in front of him, because the house was not so big that she could do it privately, and because she was not going to sneak out of her own bedroom.
He stood in the doorway the whole time with his hands at his sides.
"Where are you going?"
"Trina's."
"You don't have to leave. I'll go. I'll get a room in town, I'll — "
"It's my house too, and I can't sleep in it tonight, and both of those things are true at once."
"Okay."
"Don't call me."
"Okay."
"Don't send Curtis. Don't send Janelle. If anybody puts a statement in front of me with my own name at the bottom of it I will burn this to the ground in public and I will enjoy it."
"Okay," he said. Then: "Georgia."
She stopped in the hall with the bag on her shoulder.
"I'm not gonna fight you on anything," he said. "Whatever you want, the answer's yes. I need you to know that before you go, so you're not laying awake tonight figuring out how you're gonna have to fight me."
She stood there.
That was the trouble. That was exactly the trouble with him, and it always had been.
He was a man who could find, in the worst hour of his life, the one sentence that would let her sleep — and she could not tell, standing in her own hallway, whether that was love or whether it was just the thing he was born able to do, the same way some people can throw a ball.
"Move," she said, and he moved.
Trina put her in the back room without asking a single question, which was its own kind of mercy, and then ruined it slightly by saying, "There's a gun in the closet, don't shoot my dog," and leaving.
The room had a quilt on the bed that Trina's grandmother had made and a window unit that came on like a diesel. Georgia lay on top of the covers in her clothes with her boots by the door.
She was fine. She had been level all night. She had not raised her voice once, and she had said the true things in order, and she had walked out of that house on her own two feet with a bag she packed herself.
She lay there in the dark and waited to feel proud of that.
What she felt instead was the sound he made when the memo started.
Over and over, on a loop, that pulled-out sound.
And her own body doing the thing she could not forgive it for — going toward it.
Wanting to cross the kitchen. Wanting to put her hand on the back of her husband's neck the way she had ten thousand times in this life, because he was crying and she was the person who fixed that.
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw color.
Fifteen years. Nine weeks. A stack of yellow pages on the table, and a fistful of ditch flowers on the counter that nobody had put in water, and a man in her kitchen who had said the answer's yes before she'd even asked a question.
She had meant to close the door tonight. She had meant to close it so hard the frame cracked.
Somewhere around two in the morning, Georgia understood that she had left it standing open about an inch, and that she had done it on purpose, and that she was going to have to live with knowing that about herself.