Chapter 4 #2
"You said it with your whole face." Trina set the pencil down. "Sit down a minute."
"I don't want to sit down."
"Then stand there and let me say it and then you can go on home and be mad at me. I'd rather be the one you're mad at than the one you can't call."
Georgia stayed standing.
"He's real good at this," Trina said.
"At roofing? He's terrible at it."
"At the other thing." Trina looked at her, and there was nothing funny in her face at all now, and that was rare enough that it landed. "Georgia. That man makes a living being sincere in front of eighteen thousand people at a time. Four nights a week. For twenty years."
"You think he's faking."
"I think he couldn't tell you if he was," Trina said. "That's the part that scares me. I'm not saying he's a liar. I'm saying the man's got a machine in him that turns on when somebody's watching, and right now you're the only one watching, and it's been nine days."
"Twelve."
"Twelve days!" Trina threw her hands up. "You just corrected me. You know the number."
Georgia put both hands flat on the counter.
"He asked about my mother," she said.
"I know."
"Do you understand that nobody has asked me about my mother in — " Her voice went sideways.
She got it back, but the getting-back took a second too long, and Trina saw it.
"Twelve days ago he found out I've been driving her to Kerrville for two years, and it about took the legs out from under him, and I have been so hungry for somebody to notice something about my life that I have been out on that porch every morning at nine o'clock like a dog at a gate. "
Trina came around the counter and stood next to her, not touching, just there.
"That's the whole thing," she said quietly. "That's all I'm saying. A woman that hungry can't taste anything."
"I'm not stupid."
"Never said you were. I've seen you starve people out. I watched you not speak to your daddy for a year and a half." Trina blew out a breath. "But I've never seen you starving before."
"So what am I supposed to do?"
"Wait him out. That's it. That's the whole plan. Six months. If it's real in six months it'll still be real, and if it ain't, you'll have found out for free."
"Six months," Georgia said.
"Six months."
"That's a long time to sit in a house."
"Yeah," Trina said. "It is."
She drove home the long way, out past the low water crossing, with the windows down.
She turned it over the whole way and she gave it a fair hearing, she really did. Trina was right. Trina was right in every particular, and Georgia could have written the argument herself and probably written it better.
Here is what Trina did not have, and could not have, and Georgia would not have handed her for anything:
The sound he made in the kitchen when the memo started.
You cannot fake that. Georgia had been married to the man for fifteen years and had heard him perform grief on stage in front of a crowd and had heard him do it real at two funerals, and she knew the difference the way you know your own child's cry in a room full of children.
Whatever else was true, that sound was not a machine turning on.
Something had broken in him that night. She had been standing right there. She had watched it break.
And the argument she could not get around — the one that had been running under everything for twelve days, in her sleep, in the truck, at the sink — was this.
If he had broken, and if he was out there on her roof at nine in the morning doing a job wrong and doing it again, and if he never once asked her for anything —
Then how long, exactly, was a person supposed to make him pay?
She knew the answer she was supposed to give. She'd been given it by her mother and by her best friend and by a woman in Ohio she had never met.
Georgia turned in at the cattle guard and the tires made their two sounds, and the house came up on the left with its new tin catching the last of the light, and it looked, for the first time in a very long while, like a house somebody was taking care of.
He came at nine on Monday with the toolbox, out of pure habit, because there was nothing left to fix.
He stood at the bottom of the steps holding it like a man who had come to a party on the wrong night.
"There's the gutter," he said. "On the east side. It's — it's not really a job."
"Jesse."
"I can do the gutter."
"Put it down."
He put it down.
Georgia stood on her own porch under her own new roof and heard herself say it, and even as it was coming out of her she could hear Trina's voice underneath it saying twelve days, and she said it anyway.
"You can sleep in the house," she said.
He did not move. His face did something complicated and he got hold of it fast.
"In the back room," she said. "Not with me. I want to be extremely clear about that."
"In the back room," he said.
"And this is not us being fixed. This is me being tired of watching you get in a truck at six o'clock every night."
"Okay."
"And if you make one single phone call about it — if Curtis knows before Wednesday, if Janelle so much as breathes —"
"Nobody's gonna know," Jesse said. "Georgia. I swear to God. Nobody in this world is gonna know but you and me."
She nodded. Her throat had gone tight and she was furious about it.
"Go get your bag," she said.
He went to the truck. And Georgia stood there with her hand on the porch post, listening to the sound of the tailgate, and thought — with the perfect clarity that she would remember all summer, and that would not save her one bit —
This is too soon.
She went inside and held the door open anyway.