Chapter 5 #3
"Give me a minute and I'll be dirty." He wiped his hands on the dish towel. "I thought about that summer we lived on Pecan Street and the AC went out and you made us sleep on the floor 'cause you said the floor was cooler."
"It was cooler."
"It was not cooler. There is no science."
"Jesse, I have never been more comfortable in my life."
"We had one fan and you pointed it at the dog."
"The dog was suffering."
"I was suffering!"
"The dog had a coat on," Georgia said. "You had shorts."
He put his head back and laughed at the ceiling, and she stood there in his shirt with cold chicken in her hand and watched him do it.
That was the moment. If she'd had to pick one, out of the whole spring, and put it in a box — not the rug and not the bed. This. A kitchen at half past ten at night and a man laughing about a dog that had been dead for nine years.
"I'm gonna say something serious," he said, when he came down.
"Don't."
"It's short."
"Jesse."
"I've been out there fifteen years telling everybody I'm from here.
" He was looking at the window over the sink, which at that hour was a mirror.
"Nashville, Amarillo, wherever. 'Boy from the hill country.
' And I got in the truck three weeks ago in Shreveport and drove nine hours and I got to the cattle guard and I thought — I'm not from there. I'm from her."
Georgia put the chicken down.
"That's not short," she said.
"No."
"That's about the longest thing anybody's ever said to me."
He reached over and put two fingers on her wrist, just that, just the two fingers, and neither of them moved for a second.
"Curtis wants an answer on the fall by the first," he said. "It's handled. I'm not — I just didn't want you hearing it from somebody."
"Okay."
"That's all it was."
"Okay," she said.
And she let it go by. It went right on past her, that word, handled, and she watched it go and put it in the ledger and did not say one thing about it, because there was cornbread and the light was the color of weak tea and she had gotten her whole life back at four o'clock that afternoon.
Afterward the ceiling fan turned and the window was open and the frogs down at the tank were going like a machine shop.
She lay with her head on his arm. The sweat cooled. Somewhere out in the dark a truck went by on the county road, and slowed at the gate the way they all did now, and went on.
She was happy.
That was the thing. There was no getting around it and no dressing it up.
Lying there in the dark in her own bed with her husband's arm under her neck, Georgia Rawls was so happy she could have cried about it, and she was aware — clearly, the whole time, like a person watching herself on a screen — that this was the single most dangerous thing that had happened to her all spring.
"You awake?" he said.
"Mm."
"I'm gonna say one thing and then I'll shut up."
"You always say that. You've never once shut up."
"I'm gonna get it right this time," Jesse said. "The whole thing. However long it takes. I'm not asking you to believe that tonight."
"Okay."
"That's all."
"Okay."
She lay there and waited for him to say the other thing. The real one. The one that had nine weeks in it, and a bus lounge, and a name.
He didn't.
And here is what she found out about herself, at twenty till twelve on a Thursday night in May, with her head on his arm:
She didn't want him to.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand at ten after midnight.
She was mostly under. She felt him reach over, and felt the light of the screen go across the ceiling, and felt him turn it face-down against the wood.
Very quietly. Carefully quietly. The way you set something down when you don't want to wake somebody.
Georgia lay with her eyes shut and her breathing even and did not move.
Who is it.
Two words. That was all it would have taken. She had a right to those two words — she'd had the pages printed in a stack on her kitchen table three weeks ago, she'd earned the right to ask a question in her own bed at midnight for the rest of her natural life.
She lay there and did not ask it.
And she understood exactly why, which was the worst part. It was not fear. She was not afraid of the answer.
It was that the house was quiet in the good way.
It was that his arm was under her neck and the fan was going and she had laughed twice today and had not thought about the video once since Tuesday.
It was that she had gotten her life back four hours ago, warm and whole, and asking would have put a crack in it, and she was not — tonight, this one night — she was not strong enough to be a woman who cracked her own life on purpose.
Tomorrow, she thought. I'll ask tomorrow.
She felt him settle. He pulled her in against his chest and his breathing went slow and even and his hand went loose on her hip, and Jesse Rawls fell asleep in about ninety seconds the way he had done every night of his life, untroubled as a dog.
Georgia lay awake in the dark beside him for a long time.
There is a kind of peace you can only have by agreeing not to look at something.
She held on to it with both hands.