Chapter 7 #2
The ninth of May.
"Say the date again."
"May ninth."
"I let you back in my bed on the fifteenth," Georgia said.
He made a sound.
"Don't." Her voice did not move. "Don't you make a sound. You do not get to be the one making sounds today."
"Okay."
"You had six days," she said. "Six days, and then a whole month on top of it, and every day of that month you got up and made me coffee. You drove my mother to Kerrville. You sat in a waiting room and read a pamphlet about a stent."
"I did."
"Was that real?"
"Yes."
"Was it real, Jesse?"
"It was real." His face was coming apart. "Georgia, it was the realest thing I ever —"
"Then why didn't you tell me?"
And there it was. She had gotten to the door of it in four minutes, which was three months faster than she'd gotten anywhere in March.
He opened his mouth. Whatever was going to come out of it, she saw him look at it and put it down, and she watched him reach past it for something worse and truer, and some far-off part of her thought: he's gotten better at this.
He's gotten better at this and it's the most terrible thing about him.
"Because you'd have left," he said.
"Yes."
"And I thought if I could get it bought back, then it wouldn't —" He stopped. "No. That's not it either. Let me say the true one."
"Please."
"I thought if I could hold it off long enough," Jesse said, "you'd get far enough back into loving me that when it came out you'd stay."
The wind moved in the live oaks.
"There it is," Georgia said.
"Georgia —"
"That's a plan." She was so calm. It frightened her, how calm. "That's not a mistake and it's not weakness and it's not a man in a bad spot. That's a plan, Jesse. You made a plan about the inside of my head."
"Yes."
"You worked out what it would take to get me soft enough to survive it."
"Yes."
"Six weeks of the best behavior of your life," she said, "so that when the worst thing about you came out of a radio in a parking lot, I'd already be too far in to get out.
And you were right. That's the — " Her voice went, for the first time, and she had to stop and take it back by the throat.
"That's the part I can't — you were right, weren't you.
If that had come out in April I'd have been gone.
And you knew that, because you know me, because you have always known me, and you used it. "
He had gone down onto the top step. Not dramatically. His legs had just quit, the way hers had in March, and he sat down on his own porch step and put his hands over the back of his head.
"Yes," he said.
She did not scream. She had thought she might. She stood there for a while and found that the wanting-to-scream had gone somewhere else entirely, and what was in its place was flat and cold and very wide.
"You know what's funny," she said.
"Don't."
"I'd have forgiven the calls."
He lifted his head.
"I want you to hear this correctly, because I'm only going to say it once, and after today I don't imagine we'll be doing much talking.
" She held on to the porch post. "I had already forgiven the calls.
I did it sometime in the second week of May, in this house, without telling you, because I'm my mother's daughter and I don't announce things.
You were forgiven, Jesse. You'd been forgiven for a month. "
"Georgia."
"And I'd have gotten to the kitchen, too.
Sixteen years is a long time to carry a thing and I know what carrying does to a man.
If you had sat down in front of me in April — March, even — and said, Georgia, I asked you to give it up and I've let you think it was your own idea ever since — " She was shaking now.
She let herself shake. "It would have taken years.
It would have taken years, and I'd have done them. I would have done that with you."
He was looking at her the way a man looks at weather he can't get in front of.
"But you didn't tell me," she said. "A girl on a bus told me. And before that, a girl on a bus got told first, at two in the morning, because it was easier. And then when it was coming out anyway, you spent six weeks making sure I'd be too gone to leave."
"I love you," Jesse said. "That's the — that is the actual reason. I know how it sounds. I'd give anything for it to sound like anything else."
"I know you do," Georgia said, and that was the worst sentence either of them said that day. "That's not the question anymore."
She went inside.
She did not slam the screen. She let it go on its spring, the way it had done ten thousand times, and it clapped behind her the way it always did, and the ordinary sound of it in the ordinary afternoon was somehow the thing that finally took her legs.
She sat down on the kitchen floor with her back against the dishwasher, in exactly the same square yard of linoleum where she had sat in March with a phone bill in her lap.
And the thought that came was not about him at all.
It was this: In May I made this. Nobody did this to me in May. I looked at a man on the fifteenth of that month and I chose it, and I was happy, and I was so proud of myself for being a woman who could choose it.
He handed me the shovel and I dug the whole thing.
She sat on the floor of her kitchen and understood that she was not going to be able to trust her own judgment for a very long time, and that this — not the nine weeks, not the girl, not the tape — was what he had actually taken.