Chapter 8 #2
Georgia laughed. It was not a good laugh, but it was real, and Trina let it be.
"You know what gets me," Georgia said. "Not one of those people has ever heard my record. There's a whole argument going on out there about who I am and it's happening between two groups of people who've only ever heard me on somebody else's chorus."
Then, because there was nowhere else for it to go, she said the thing she had not said out loud all week.
"I liked being the saint better."
"'Course you did."
"That's ugly."
"It's not ugly, it's Tuesday." Trina wiped her hands. "You lost a marriage and about a hundred thousand strangers gave you a prize for it, and then they took the prize back. That's a real thing that happened to you. You're allowed to hate it."
"I don't want the prize."
"You want the prize."
"I want the prize," Georgia said, and put her face in her hands, and Trina laughed so hard she had to set her plate on the boards.
She did the locks herself on Thursday morning.
She could have called a man from town. Half the county would have driven out for free and considered it a privilege.
She got the box down off the shelf in the barn — three deadbolts, bought two years ago for a chicken house she never built — and a screwdriver, and she did the front door and the back door and the door off the laundry room, and it took her most of the morning because the strike plate on the back door had been painted over twice.
Jesse came around the side of the house while she was on the back one.
He stood there.
"You want a hand with that plate?"
"No."
"There's a chisel in the —"
"Jesse."
He stopped. He put his hands in his pockets. He watched her work at it with a screwdriver she was using wrong, and he did not offer again, and she understood that this was the single hardest thing she had ever asked him to do and that he was doing it.
She got the plate off. She got the new one seated. She hung the bolt and it went home with that solid double sound, and the sound of it in the quiet was the most satisfying thing she had heard in four months.
She stood up and wiped her hands on her jeans.
"I want you off the property by tonight," she said.
"Okay."
"Take the truck. Take your clothes. Leave the guitar, it's mine, you bought it for me in 2011 and you know it."
"It's yours."
"There's a storage place on the highway. I'll put whatever's left in it and you can tell somebody where to send it."
"Okay."
"And Jesse." She turned around and looked at him properly for the first time in five days. "Don't come back up this drive. Not with a toolbox, not with a folder, not with flowers out of the ditch. If you want to talk to me you can do it through the woman in Kerrville."
He nodded.
He did not argue. He did not say let me just or one more thing or can I say something. And she found, standing there with a screwdriver in her hand, that she had been braced for the argument for five days and that its absence went through her like a draft through a door.
He came out with a duffel bag at six.
She was on the porch, because she was not going to hide in her own house, and because some hard piece of her wanted to watch it happen so it would be real.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps.
"Can I say one thing that's not for me?"
"That's a hell of a sentence."
"It's the best I've got."
"Go on."
"The tapes are gonna run all week," Jesse said. "There's four more. I don't know exactly what's in 'em. I want you to know I'm not gonna answer any of it — not one word, not a statement, not a lawyer, nothing. Everybody's telling me to. Curtis has got a whole thing built and I told him to burn it."
"That's not for me. That's a decision about you."
"No, listen." He shifted the bag on his shoulder. "If I answer it, it's a fight, and if it's a fight then it's your marriage in the paper for six months and people asking you about it at the feed store till Christmas. If I say nothing, it dies in about ten days. That's all. That's what it's for."
Georgia looked at him a long moment.
"All right," she said.
"That's all."
"Jesse."
He waited.
"In March," she said, "when you came up that drive with those flowers, I stood in that kitchen and I thought — he's going to fight me.
He's going to talk. He's going to be so good at it that I won't be able to hear myself think.
And you didn't. You sat down and you took it, and I thought that meant something. "
"It did mean something."
"It meant you'd figured out that taking it worked," she said.
He stood there in the yellow six o'clock light with a duffel bag on his shoulder.
"You want to know the true thing?" he said. "I don't know. I sat in that back room five days trying to work out which parts of the last four months were me and which parts were me handling it, and I can't tell them apart. That's what I've got. That's the whole report."
"I know," Georgia said. "That's why I can't have you here."
He looked at the house. Then at the roof he'd built her, and she watched him look at it, and watched him decide not to say anything about it.
"Okay," he said.
He got in the truck.
He did not linger, and he did not look back in the mirror in a way she could see, and the truck went down the drive and over the cattle guard and turned left onto the county road toward town.
Georgia stood on the porch until the dust had gone all the way down.
Then she went inside and shot every one of the three bolts, one after another, front and back and laundry, and stood in her own hallway in the dark listening to the well pump kick on out back.
The first time she left him she had cried herself sick and wanted him.
She did not want him now. That was the difference, and it was not relief, and it was not freedom, and nobody was going to be able to tell her it was strength.
It was just that something had gone out of the middle of her, and the house was very quiet, and for the first time in fifteen years there was nobody at all in the world who had the key.