Chapter 14
He came on the fifteenth at one fifty-eight and sat in the truck until two, the same as before, and Georgia stood at the kitchen window and watched him do it and thought, he's going to do that every single time for the rest of his life.
It was March and the wind had gone soft. There were bluebonnets starting in the bar ditch again, which was the kind of thing she had decided months ago she was not going to make into anything.
He got out. He had nothing in his hands. She had told him not to bring anything and he had not brought anything, not so much as a jacket, and there was something almost funny about a man arriving that empty.
"Hey."
"Hey. Come up."
It went the way the first one had gone, for about nine minutes.
The dog. The tank. A cold snap that had killed half the county's tomatoes.
He asked whether the fence was holding and she said it was, and then said it wasn't, and then said she'd done the corner post wrong and knew it and had been ignoring it since November, and he said, "Corners'll get you," and she said, "Corners will absolutely get you," and neither of them said anything for a second because they had somehow arrived at an actual conversation.
Then he said, "I burned my hand up last week."
"Doing what?"
"Cooking."
Georgia looked at him.
"Cooking what?"
"Well," Jesse said, "that's the part of the story where it gets bad."
"Jesse."
"I was making a roux."
She started laughing before she could stop it.
That was it. That was the whole thing. A year of a marriage coming apart, a radio show, a folder of yellow pages, three deadbolts — and what got through was a grown man in her yard saying the word roux like it was a species of snake.
She laughed until she had to put her hand on the porch rail, and it went on longer than it should have, and by the end of it she was not entirely laughing anymore.
Then she stopped, and the yard was very quiet.
Jesse had not laughed with her. He was sitting there absolutely still with his hands on his knees and an expression on his face like a man watching something come down a road at him.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You've got a look."
"I know it." He looked away, out at the pasture, and gave her the second she needed. "Corners'll get you," he said again, to the fence line, and that was the single kindest thing anybody did for her that month.
At twenty minutes he stood up.
"That's about it."
"Sit down."
He stopped.
"Georgia — "
"Sit down, Jesse. I'm not — " She pressed two fingers against her eyebrow. "I don't want to talk on a porch in the cold. Come inside and I'll make coffee and we'll do this at a table like people."
He stood there for a second.
"Okay," he said, and his voice was not entirely level, and she pretended not to hear that.
He had not been in that kitchen since July.
She watched him come through the door and she watched him not look around, which took effort, and she knew exactly what it cost because she had done the same thing at her mother's house after her father died.
He sat down at the table. She made coffee. He did not offer to help and did not comment on the fact that she had moved the canisters.
She sat down across from him with two cups and neither of them touched them.
"All right," she said.
"All right."
"I'm going to say some things and I don't want you to fix any of them."
"I won't."
"You will. You're going to want to."
"I know I am," Jesse said. "I won't."
So she told him.
Not the anger. She had done the anger in March and July and there was nothing left in that seam. What she told him, in a plain flat voice at her own kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon in March, was the damage.
She told him what it had been like to find out from a stranger in a feed store, twice, in one year.
She told him about the ledger — the running list of every question she hadn't asked in May, and how she had kept it in her head every night like a woman counting a rosary, and how she had known while she was keeping it that keeping it was the sickest thing she had ever done.
She told him she'd printed those pages with steady hands and that the steadiness had frightened her more than anything else that year.
She told him about standing in a room full of his crew and their wives and being introduced four times as the wife, and about not correcting one of them, and about the laundry room with the door shut for one minute by the clock.
She told him about the woman in a truck in a parking lot with a phone in her hand, and about the man who had asked her to sign something for his daughter.
And she told him the last one, which she had never said out loud to anybody, including Trina.
"There was about six weeks in there," she said, "after July, before Cypress Hall, where I didn't want to be here anymore.
Not — " She stopped him with a hand before he could move.
"Not that. Don't. Not that. I fed the dog every day and I went to town and I was never in one bit of danger.
I just quit wanting to be anywhere, and I sat in this house, and I'd think, well, that's fine.
That's a way to do it. There's a lot of women out here doing it that way. "
Jesse Rawls sat across the table from her with tears going down his face and did not make one sound.
"You said you wouldn't fix it," she said.
"I'm not."
"You're not saying anything."
"I know it." His voice was in pieces. "I'm sitting here."
"Good," Georgia said. "That's the whole job."
They sat there a while.
Outside, the light moved off the west wall the way it did around four, and neither of them got up to turn a lamp on, and the kitchen went the color of weak tea, which she noticed and refused to make into anything.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You can ask."
"That six weeks." He was turning the cup, not drinking it. "Would you have told me? If we were — if things had been the other way. Would you have told me you felt like that?"
Georgia thought about it honestly, which she owed him and which she owed herself more.
"No," she said.
"No?"
"No. I'd have handled it." She looked at her hands.
"That's the thing about me that nobody puts on a list of my good qualities.
You've got a machine in you that turns on when somebody's watching.
I've got one that turns off. I've been running the second one since I was about nine years old and I don't know how to shut it down and I never once in fifteen years let you see it working. "
"Georgia — "
"I'm not making it even," she said sharply. "Don't you take that and make it even. You did what you did and it's yours and it stays yours."
"That's not where I was going."
"Where were you going?"
Jesse put the cup down.
"I was gonna say I'd like to know that woman," he said. "The one that turns it off. I've been married to her fifteen years and I've met her about four times."
She got up.
She did not plan it. She would think about that later and be sure of it — there was no decision anywhere in the room.
She got up out of the chair and went down the hall to the spare room and opened the bottom drawer and moved the shoebox and took out the green notebook, and came back down the hall with it, and put it on the kitchen table in front of him.
He looked at it.
"That's the feed store list," he said.
"That's the feed store list."
He did not touch it. That was the correct move and she wondered afterward whether he'd known it was, or whether he'd just been too scared.
"Can I?" he said.
"That's why it's there."
He opened it.
She sat down and watched her husband read four years of her handwriting.
It took a long time. He read like a man being careful with something, one page fully, then the next, and he did not skip, and about eight pages in he stopped and put two fingers on the paper and looked at it and then went on.
He did not say this is good and he did not say God, Georgia and he did not say any of the dozen things she had braced for.
When he got to the end he closed it and put his hand flat on the cover and left it there.
"How long," he said.
"Four years."
"Anybody seen it?"
"Marlee's heard nine of them," Georgia said. "Nobody's seen it. You're the only person who's had it in his hands."
He nodded. He was not looking at her. His jaw was doing something.
"Say it," she said.
"I'm not — "
"Whatever it is. Say it."
"There's a song in there about a woman listening for a truck," Jesse said, "and it's the best thing anybody's written in this county in twenty years, and I was four hundred miles away when you wrote it, and I want to go outside now."
"Go on then."
He went outside.
She sat at the table with her hand on the notebook and listened to him not making any noise at all out there for about six minutes.
"What have you been doing?" she said, when he came back in.
He stopped with his hand on the back of the chair.
"You want to know that?"
"I asked."
"You've never asked me a question you didn't want the answer to in your life," Jesse said, and sat down.
So he told her, and the thing that surprised her — the thing she chewed on for three days afterward — was how boring it was.
He had a rent house in Bandera. Not a ranch, not Nashville, not a suite. A rent house with a carport, on a street with four other rent houses on it, and he had been in it since September.
He got up at six because he could not sleep past it.
He did the crossword badly. There was a man two doors down named Ramiro who had a bad hip and a driveway that needed sweeping and Jesse had been sweeping it since October, and Ramiro thought he was a contractor, because Jesse had let him think that in week one and then had gotten in too deep to correct it.
"You let a man think you're a contractor."
"He asked what I did and I said I used to travel for work."
"Jesse."
"It's not a lie! I traveled for work."
"That man's going to find out."
"He's going to find out," Jesse agreed, "and I'm going to be so embarrassed I'll have to move counties."