Chapter 5
The first thing that came back was the sound.
She had not known a house could be quiet in two different ways.
There was the quiet of a house with one person in it, which she had lived in for four years, and which was flat, like a held note.
And then there was this — a man moving around in a back room, a boot dropping, a faucet running somewhere that wasn't where she was.
That second quiet had a floor under it.
Georgia lay in her own bed the first night with her eyes open and hated how much her body liked it.
He was up before her. That was new too.
For fifteen years Jesse Rawls had been a man who got up at noon because he'd worked until two, and now he was in the kitchen at six thirty making coffee wrong.
"You're using too much."
"I like it strong."
"You like it bitter, which is a different thing, and you've never once made it and drunk it in the same hour."
He handed her the cup anyway. She drank it. It was terrible.
"Good," she said.
"You're a liar."
"Yes."
He laughed — a real one, surprised out of him — and turned back to the stove, and Georgia stood there holding a cup of bad coffee at six thirty in the morning and had to put her hand on the counter.
Because that was the trap, and she knew it was the trap.
Nobody warns you that the danger isn't the big moment.
She had braced for a big moment. She'd braced for him on his knees in the yard, for tears, for a song, for a speech — she had armor for all of that, forged and fitted over fifteen years of galas.
She had no armor at all for a man making coffee badly in her kitchen at six thirty in the morning.
May came in hot and stayed.
The days took a shape she recognized from a long time ago, from before, from the years when they had nothing and it did not matter.
He fixed the gutter. He fixed the gate at the county road that had been tied with baling wire since the Obama administration.
He drove into town for feed and came back with the wrong kind, twice.
He did not touch her. Not once, not on the arm going past, not on the back at the sink. He kept a foot of air around her everywhere in that house like it was a rule he'd written down.
She noticed that. She noticed it in the way you notice a splinter.
And they talked. Not about it. About everything else — about her mother, about Trina's goat man, about whether the tank in the west pasture was going down faster than it should, about a woman they'd known at twenty-three who had married a dentist and become insufferable.
He told her about the drummer's divorce. She told him about the fan in Ohio.
"Three videos," he said.
"Twice as many as she's made about you."
"Well, I'm boring."
"You're not boring, you're hard to explain. She had to give the whole background."
He laughed so hard he had to set down the pliers.
Fifteen years of shorthand doesn't leave. That's what nobody tells you either. You can hate a man to the bottom of your soul and still land the joke he set up, and both of you will hear the timing of it, and it will feel exactly like it used to.
There was a night in the second week when it nearly went early.
The power went out around nine — it did that out here for no reason anybody had ever explained — and they ended up in the front room with two candles and a flashlight standing on its end, and no television and nothing to do.
He got the guitar out of the case in the corner. Not to play at her. He sat on the floor with his back against the couch and picked at it the way he'd done ten thousand nights of his life, not really playing anything, and Georgia sat in the chair with her feet up and let him.
Then he hit a shape and stopped.
"What's that," she said.
"Nothing."
"That's not nothing, that's the — " She sat up. "That's the thing from the Amarillo trip."
"It is not."
"Jesse. That is the thing from the Amarillo trip, in the van, when the heater was broken."
"I don't remember that."
"You are the biggest liar in this county," Georgia said, "and I want it on the record that I remember every single one of them and you remember about four."
He laughed and played it again, properly, and it was fifteen years old and nobody had ever finished it and it was still good.
And then he sang the little bit of words there was.
Two lines. That was all there had ever been. And he did not look at her while he did it, which she understood was deliberate and correct, and she sat in that chair in the candlelight with her heart absolutely wrecked.
When it was over the room was very quiet.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're sitting on my floor with a guitar in the dark."
"I'll put it up."
"Put it up."
He put it up. He set it in the case and closed the case and went and stood on the other side of the room with his hands in his pockets like a man behind a line he had drawn on the floor himself.
Georgia got up and went to bed, and lay there in the dark with her hands over her face.
The lights came back on at midnight, all at once, every one in the house, and she got up and went around turning them all off.
The ledger started around the second week.
She did not mean to start it. It just began, the way a thing in the back of your head begins, and once it was going she could not stop it.
Wednesday: didn't ask about the calls.
Friday: didn't ask what they talked about.
Saturday: his phone rang at nine and he looked at it and let it ring and I didn't ask who.
She kept it nowhere. It was not written down. It ran along under the days like a second set of tire tracks, and every night she lay in bed and read it over, and every morning she got up and did not say any of it out loud.
There's a word for a woman who keeps accounts she never presents.
She didn't want to use it about herself, so she didn't.
It happened on a Thursday, and there was no reason for it to be Thursday.
They'd been to town. Vonda had come out to the house that afternoon and stayed two hours and been so aggressively pleasant to Jesse that it was practically a felony, and after she left the two of them had stood in the kitchen and not looked at each other for about four seconds and then broken down laughing at the same instant, the way you can only laugh at somebody's mother.
Georgia laughed until she had to hold the counter. Actual laughing, the kind that hurts.
And when she came up out of it, wiping her eyes, he was looking at her.
That was all he did. He was standing there with a dish towel in his hand and he was looking at her the way he used to look at her out the window of a van at a truck stop in 2010, and every bit of the air went out of that kitchen.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing something."
"Georgia."
"Say it."
"I've been in love with you since I was twenty-five years old," Jesse said, "and I have not looked directly at you in three weeks because I was scared of exactly this, and I'm going to go outside now."
He put the towel down and went outside.
She stood in the kitchen with her hands flat on the counter and her heart going like a bird in a box.
Body knows first. It had known for days. It had known since the coffee.
She gave herself about ninety seconds to be a reasonable woman.
Then she went out on the porch.
He was on the top step with his forearms on his knees.
She sat down next to him. Not touching. Close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him, which in May in the hill country meant nothing at all and meant everything.
"If we do this," she said, "it doesn't mean anything's fixed."
"I know."
"I mean it. I'm not — this isn't me forgiving you. I want to be clear, because I know how you hear things."
"Georgia." He turned his head. "I'd take one hour and go be quiet about it for the rest of my life."
"Don't be pathetic."
"I'm being accurate."
She laughed, which she had not planned on, and then her throat closed up, and then she said the true thing, which she had not planned on either.
"I've missed you so much I've been sick with it," she said. "That's the part I can't stand. That's what I can't forgive. Not what you did. That you did it and I still —"
He was already turning toward her.
"Say it," he said.
"I still want you. I've wanted you the whole time. Even the night I was printing those pages I wanted you, and I have never told another human being that and I'm not going to."
And then his hands were on her face.
It was not gentle and it was not tender, not the first part of it.
She got a fist in his shirt and pulled and he came, and the two of them went back through the screen door hard enough to bang it off the wall, and she did not care, and neither did he, and they got about as far as the front room before she gave up on the bedroom entirely.
Fifteen years. She knew where his hands were going before they went.
That was the terrible mercy of it. There was no learning in this, no first-time carefulness, no polite question — he knew the exact place on her ribs that made her breath catch and he went there without looking, the way you find a light switch in your own house in the dark.
He got her shirt over her head and stopped.
"What," she said.
"Nothing. Let me look at you."
"Jesse —"
"Two months," he said. "Let me look at you."
And that was the thing that broke her open, not the hands.
He stood there in her front room and looked at her like a man reading a letter he'd been carrying around unopened, and Georgia felt every one of her thirty-eight years stand up and be seen, and she did not put her arms over herself, because she had never once in her life needed to with him.
"Come here," she said.
He came.
They went down onto the rug because it was there. He had her jeans off with a competence that would have been funny in any other hour. His mouth went down her throat and stopped at the hollow of it and stayed, and she made a sound she hadn't made in four years and heard it and did not care.
"Say my name."
"Georgia."
"Again."
"Georgia." Against her skin. "Georgia. Georgia."