Chapter 4
He canceled four dates in the third week of April.
She found out the way she found out everything now, which was secondhand — her mother, who had it from a woman at church, who had it from the computer.
Two thousand refunded tickets in Little Rock.
Two more nights gone somewhere in Missouri.
Curtis Meeks eating it with a smile in front of a camera and saying the word family twice.
Then a truck in her drive at nine in the morning, and Jesse getting out of it with a toolbox.
Georgia came out on the porch and stood with her arms crossed.
"No," she said.
"I'm not staying."
"Jesse."
"I'm not asking to stay, I'm not asking to come in, and I'm not gonna talk unless you talk first." He set the toolbox down on the bottom step.
"Your porch roof's been weeping four years and I'm gonna fix it.
If you want me to leave, say leave and I'll load up and go.
I won't argue with you about it and I won't make a face. "
She stood there.
"Leave," she said.
"Okay." He picked the toolbox back up.
And he did. He put it in the bed and got in and backed down the drive without one word, no wounded look through the windshield, nothing.
Georgia stood on her porch and watched him go and felt exactly like a woman who had just lost an argument she won.
He came back the next morning at nine.
"You get one word out of me," he said. "Same as yesterday."
"You're going to do this every day?"
"Yes ma'am."
She looked at him for a long moment. The tin over the porch had been ticking at her all summer for four summers. There was a stain in the ceiling of the front room shaped like Louisiana.
"Fix the roof," she said, and went inside, and shut the door.
He was up there by nine fifteen.
She did not watch him. She made a point of not watching him, which took a considerable amount of doing, because the house was not large and the sound of a man walking around over your head is not a sound you can put down.
He was bad at it. That was the first thing. He got the old tin off fine, and then he stood up there for forty minutes with his hands on his hips looking at what was underneath, and then he got in his truck and drove to town and came back with different screws.
At noon she took him a glass of ice water because she was raised by Vonda Tidwell and there are limits to what a person can override.
"Thank you," he said, and drank it, and handed the glass back, and did not try to say anything else.
That, she thought, going back in — that is new.
The second day he was there at nine and she found herself listening for the truck at ten till.
She hated that. She noted it and set it aside and did not examine it.
Around ten thirty she came out with the water and he was sitting on the edge of the porch roof with his boots hanging off, and she stood in the yard so she could see him without craning.
"How's your mama," he said.
"You've got one word."
"That's four."
"You know what I mean."
"She all right?"
Georgia squinted up at him. The sun was behind him and she had to make a visor of her hand.
"She's all right. She's got the appointment in June."
"You drive her?"
"Yes."
"How often?"
She almost didn't answer, because she could feel the shape of where it went. Then she thought: let it go there. Let him stand in it.
"Every other Wednesday," she said. "Kerrville. Since two years ago last fall."
He did not say anything for a second.
"Every other Wednesday for two years," he said.
"Yes."
"Georgia, that's — " He stopped. He put the heel of his hand against his eye. "How many is that."
"I don't know. I never counted them."
"That's about fifty trips."
"Then it's about fifty trips."
"You never told me."
"When?" she said, and it came out flatter and harder than she meant, and she let it stand. "Tell me the week. Give me a Tuesday and I'll tell you where you were."
He sat up there in the sun and took it. He had gotten strangely good at taking it. She'd expected the opposite — she'd expected a man who'd been agreed with for a decade to fold up like a card table the first real time somebody didn't — and instead he sat with it and did not reach for anything.
"Can I drive her in June?" he said.
"No."
"Okay."
"You don't get to walk in on the good part."
"No," he agreed. "That's fair."
He went back to the screws. She went back inside and stood in her kitchen for a minute with a glass in her hand and no idea why she'd brought it in.
The third day he found out about the truck.
Not because she told him. Her old one — the '94, the one she'd bought at twenty-one with money from the record, the one she'd driven to every dance hall between here and Amarillo — had been sitting under a tarp behind the barn for three years with a dead motor in it, and he went back there looking for a ladder.
He came around the side of the house holding the corner of the tarp.
"What happened to your truck."
"It died."
"When?"
"Three years ago. Two and a half."
"What have you been driving?"
"The ranch truck."
"The — " He looked at the white flatbed in the drive, the one he had bought for hauling round bales, the one with the ripped seat and the radio that only got AM. "You've been driving that for three years."
"It runs."
"Georgia."
"It runs, Jesse."
"You loved that truck."
"I did."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
And here — here was where she could have been generous, and she found that she was fresh out.
"Because you'd have bought me one," she said.
He stood there holding the tarp.
"I'd have called Curtis," he said slowly, "and Curtis would've called a guy."
"Yes."
"And you'd have had a truck in the drive in about a week."
"Yes."
"And that's not — " He was working at it. She could see him working at it, and she made herself stand there and let him, because she had spent fifteen years finishing his sentences for him and she was done doing his work. "That's not the same as me knowing about it."
"No," she said. "It isn't."
He put the tarp back down. He did it carefully, tucking the corner under the bumper the way you'd square a sheet.
He did not buy her a truck. Not that week and not the week after, and she noticed that too, and the noticing sat in her chest like a swallowed stone, because there was no clean way to feel about a man finally not doing the thing you spent a decade wishing he wouldn't.
Curtis called him on the roof Thursday afternoon.
Georgia was under the kitchen window snapping beans, which put her about nine feet from where Jesse was sitting on the edge of the tin with his boots hanging, and neither of them thought about it until it was already happening.
She heard one side of it. That was enough.
"No."
A pause.
"Because I'm not there, Curtis. That's the whole answer. I'm not there."
Another pause, longer. Georgia kept snapping beans and did not breathe much.
"Then move it." — "Then move it." — "I don't care what it costs. I've never once asked you what it costs, so let's not start."
She heard him shift on the tin.
"Say that again," Jesse said.
The voice on the other end went on for a while.
"Curtis." Very quiet. That was the register she knew to be afraid of, back when she'd had reason to be. "Say her name one more time in a sentence with the word optics in it and I'll come up there."
Silence.
"No. No, that's not — I'm not gonna do the interview.
I'm not doing a radio spot, I'm not doing a sit-down, I'm not doing a heartfelt anything.
" A breath. "Because every one of those is me talking about my wife to a stranger, and that is the exact thing I did.
That's the thing. That's what I actually did, Curtis, and you want to fix it by doing it on a bigger microphone. "
The beans went on snapping.
"Yeah, I know what the July hold is." — "Then let it go."
Georgia's hands stopped.
She did not know what the July hold was. She knew what a hold on a calendar looked like, though. She'd been reading that calendar by the back door for four years, and she knew that a red circle with nothing written in it was worth more than everything else on the page.
"Let it go," Jesse said again. "I'll call the label myself. Don't you do it, I'll do it, I don't want you softening it."
Then, after a while, in a completely different voice — tired, almost kind:
"Curtis. You've done nothing wrong except the same thing I did. You made me easy to agree with."
He hung up.
She heard him not move for a good three minutes. Then the drill started up again.
Georgia sat under the window with a bowl of beans in her lap and her heart going like she'd run somewhere.
She could have walked out into the yard and asked him what the July hold was. It was her name on that house and it had been her life on that calendar, and any woman in the county would have said she had the right.
She didn't ask.
That was the thing about a man handing you a piece of evidence in his own favor. You did not want to pick it up and look at it too closely, in case it turned out to be a photograph of something else.
The roof took him five days, because he did it twice.
He tore out two days of his own work on Thursday when he figured out he'd run the panels the wrong direction, and he did not tell her he'd done it, and she only knew because she counted the trips to town for screws.
He came off that roof every evening the color of a brick with his shirt stuck to him and his hands cut up, and every evening he put the toolbox in the truck and left without asking for anything.
By Friday she was setting the water out on the step before he came down for it.
By Friday she was also, and she could not pretend otherwise, waiting for nine o'clock.
"You're gonna take him back," Trina said.
They were at the feed store on Saturday. Georgia had come in for nothing at all this time, which was itself a piece of evidence, and she'd been telling the roof story like it was funny — the wrong direction, the two days, the screws.
"I didn't say that."
"You told me a five-minute story about a man and some tin."
"He's fixing the porch."
"Uh huh."
"That's all I said."