Chapter 8
The first time she left, in March, she had shaken for two days.
This time she made a list.
That was the whole difference, and it told her everything about what had happened to her since. In March she had been a woman with a wound. In July she was a woman doing a job.
Monday: call the lawyer in Kerrville her mother's insurance man had recommended, and make the appointment for Thursday.
Tuesday: the bank.
Wednesday: the locks.
She wrote it on the back of a seed catalog in the same small neat hand she had used to total up the calls in March, and she stuck it under the sugar canister where she would see it, and she worked her way down it without hurrying.
He did not leave the property.
She'd assumed he would. She had assumed a man in that position would get a hotel in town or go to Nashville or do the thing men in his world did, which was to disappear into a series of rooms other people paid for.
Instead he slept in the back room with the door open, and got up at six, and stayed out of the kitchen when she was in it.
Episode two came out Sunday. Episode three on Monday. She did not listen to any of them. Trina listened to all of them and reported nothing, and the not-reporting was its own kind of weather report.
Wednesday, Curtis's truck came down the drive and Georgia watched from the window as Jesse met it before it got to the house, and stood in the road talking through the driver's window for four minutes, and then stepped back, and the truck reversed the whole length of the drive rather than turn around in her yard.
She did not ask what that was about. She was done asking things about that man.
He tried, over those four days, everything he had.
That was the part that got to her — not that he tried, but the inventory of it, the way you could watch a man go down a list of his own instruments and find that every single one had been ruined by the same fire.
Monday, the apology. He waited until she was on the porch and said it plain, no hedging, no excuses, exactly the way she'd have told him to. And she stood there and heard how good it was — how well built, how well placed, how much better than the one in March — and thought: he's had practice now.
That was the trouble. He had gotten better at apologizing to her, and there is no way for a man to get better at that except by doing it, and every improvement was a receipt.
"That was a good one," she said.
"Georgia."
"No, I mean it. That was better than March. You've come a long way."
He went white and did not finish.
Tuesday, the truth. He told her the whole timeline of the tape unprompted — when Peyton had called, what she'd asked for, what Curtis had offered, the number, the second number, the day the girl had stopped answering.
Everything. Chapter and verse. He put it all on the table like a man emptying his pockets at a checkpoint.
And Georgia listened to it and felt absolutely nothing, and when he was done she said, "Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because you asked me to. In March. You said say the rest."
"I did."
"So I'm saying it."
"Four months late," she said, "on the one day it can't cost you anything, because it's already on the radio."
He put his hands over his face.
Confession is only worth what it costs, and his had gone on sale.
Wednesday, the money. This was the one she had been waiting for, and he did it anyway, and she almost respected him for how badly he did it.
He came in with a folder. Actual paper.
"Don't," she said.
"You don't know what it is."
"It's the catalogue."
He stopped.
"It's the catalogue, and the publishing, and probably the touring company," Georgia said, "and it's got my name on it, and your lawyer's had it sitting in a drawer since Saturday."
"Since Saturday afternoon," Jesse said. "Yes."
"Take it away."
"Georgia, it's not — this isn't a trade. I'm not — " He set it on the table anyway, gently, at the far end from her. "It's done. It's already filed. I'm telling you because you'd have found out from a bank in October and I didn't want you finding out from a bank."
"You've given me your catalogue."
"Yes."
"Everything."
"Yes."
She looked at the folder.
Here is the thing about a man like that giving away everything he owns: it costs him nothing that he actually wants, and both of you know it.
He'd have handed her the last dollar he had at twenty-five, in the van, laughing.
Money had never once been the currency of that marriage, which was exactly why it was the only thing he could still hand over freely.
"Do you know what I'd have taken?" she said.
"Tell me."
"One phone call. May ninth. You in a parking lot somewhere saying, Georgia, that girl's got tapes and one of them's about the kitchen and I'm coming home to tell you before anybody else does."
He did not say anything.
"That's it. That's the whole price." She put her hand flat on the folder and slid it back down the table toward him, not hard, just steadily, until it stopped in front of him. "You had it in your pocket the whole spring and you spent it on six weeks of coffee."
And then the last one. He caught her at the truck that same evening, before Trina came, while she was still unloading feed.
"I'll quit," he said.
"Quit what."
"All of it. The fall, the record, the whole apparatus. I'll call this afternoon and I will cancel every date on that routing and I will not book another one."
And there it was, the last card in the deck, and he laid it down with his whole chest the way he'd have laid it down on a stage.
Georgia leaned against the truck.
"No," she said.
"Georgia —"
"If you cancel that tour this week because I left you on Saturday, then you didn't cancel it.
I did." She shut the truck door. "And then it's mine.
Then for the rest of my life there's four hundred people out of work and a number with a lot of zeros on it, and every one of them knows whose fault it was, and you get to be the man who gave it all up for her. "
"That's not why I'd —"
"I know it's not." She was very tired. "That's what makes it worse. You'd mean it, and it'd still land on me, and you have not once in twenty years been able to tell the difference between a thing you're doing and a thing you're doing at somebody."
He stood there in the drive.
"So what do I do," he said.
"Whatever you'd do if I was never going to hear about it," Georgia said, and went inside.
Trina came Wednesday evening with a bucket of chicken and did not say one word about any of it for the first hour, which was a kindness Georgia would have paid money for.
They ate on the porch. The heat had broken a little. Down at the tank the frogs were getting started.
"You want me to say I told you so?" Trina said finally.
"Do you want to?"
"No."
"That's a lie."
"It's about forty percent a lie," Trina admitted. "I'd like the record to show I said the man was good at this. I don't take one bit of pleasure in it."
"You said six months."
"I did."
"I gave it twelve days."
"Georgia —"
"Twelve days." She was holding a paper plate she hadn't touched.
"You want to know the part I can't get around?
It's not him. I've got him figured. He's a man who cannot stand to be the one holding a bad thing, so he hands it to whoever's closest, and for nine weeks that was a girl on a bus and for six weeks it was nobody at all.
That's who he's been the whole time. I married that. There's not a mystery in him."
"Then what?"
"It's that I did it to myself," Georgia said, and heard her own voice crack open on it, and could not stop it this time.
Trina reached over and took the plate out of her hand and set it down.
"I sat in this house in May and I decided.
Nobody held a gun on me. I looked at that man across a kitchen and I thought, I know exactly what I'm doing, and I was so — " She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth.
"I was proud of myself, Trina. I thought I was being brave.
I've had one piece of ground my whole life and it's that I know what I'm looking at, and that's gone now, and he's the one that took it, and he took it by being nice to me. "
Trina put her arm around her and Georgia let her, and cried for about four minutes, hard, on a porch, at an age when a woman expects to be past it.
Then she stopped, and blew her nose, and said, "Is there a biscuit left."
"There's two."
"Give me both."
The week the tapes ran, the world came out to the gate.
It started with things in the mailbox. Not mail — things, put in by hand, because the box was at the county road and anybody could reach it. A card. Then four cards. Then a devotional book with a ribbon in it and a note that said Isaiah 43:18, which Georgia looked up and did not find helpful.
Somebody left a casserole in a foam cooler with a Ziploc of ice. It had gone off by the time she found it, and she stood at the end of her own drive holding a warm dish of somebody's kindness and had to put it in the barrel.
On Tuesday a man in a clean straw hat drove up and got out with a marker and asked if she'd sign something for his daughter.
"Sign what?"
"Well — anything, I reckon."
She went back inside.
And by Wednesday, it had turned. That was the speed of it. Four days for a hundred thousand strangers to be certain she was a saint, and then, about the time episode three ran, a certain number of them worked out a better story.
Trina brought her the shape of it, unwillingly, on the porch with the chicken.
"There's a whole thing now that you knew."
"Knew what?"
"About the deal. Sixteen years ago." Trina would not look at her. "That you knew he asked you, and you took the trade on purpose, and you've been sitting out here on all that money letting him carry it, and now that it's out you're leaving him over it."
Georgia sat with that.
"That's clever," she said.
"That's what I said. It's too clever. Somebody built that."
"There's four thousand people who believe I've spent sixteen years running a con on a man who couldn't work a phone."
"Five, by supper."