Chapter 14 #2
She laughed again, and this time it did not frighten her, and she noticed that it did not, and set the noticing aside.
"What else," she said.
"I go to a thing on Thursdays in Kerrville."
"What thing?"
"It's a group. There's eight of us and a woman named Reece who runs it and I don't like it and I don't miss it.
" He said that flatly, the way you'd report a fence line.
"That's about it, Georgia. That's my whole year.
I sweep a driveway and I don't sleep and I go to a room on Thursdays and get told things about myself I'd rather not know. "
"You didn't tell me any of that in February."
"You didn't ask in February."
"You could have offered."
"No," he said, "I couldn't."
"Why not?"
Jesse turned his coffee cup around.
"Because there's a version of me that walks up on this porch and tells you about the rent house and the crossword and the Thursday thing," he said, "and every bit of it's true, and every bit of it is also a man laying out how sad he is where his wife can see it.
I've thought about that a lot. I've had a lot of time.
" He looked up. "I'm not gonna get sad at you.
If it's ever gonna be worth anything it can't be because you felt bad. "
Georgia sat with that.
It was a good answer. It was, in fact, exactly the right answer, and there was a piece of her that immediately went looking for the trick in it the way she had gone looking on the porch in November.
She could not find one. She had not been able to find one since October.
At some point, she thought, a woman has to decide whether she is going to spend the rest of her life inspecting a man for a trick that is not there — and whether that is any way to live either.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
"I'm gonna get through the rest of this without doing that again."
"You don't have to."
"I'd like to," Jesse said. "It's not much, but it'd be nice to have one thing left."
And Georgia laughed — she did not want to, and it was small, but it came out of her — and looked up and found him looking at her, and there it was.
Not warmth. Warmth she could have handled.
Fifteen years of knowing exactly what that man's face did four seconds before he kissed her.
She stood up too fast and the chair went back on the linoleum with a noise like a shot.
"I need you to hear a thing," she said.
"All right."
"Sit there."
"I'm sitting."
She put her back against the counter. She needed the whole width of the kitchen and she was not proud of that either.
"I am not afraid of you," she said.
He waited.
"That's the part I think you've got wrong, and I've watched you being careful all winter like a man handling something that'll bite.
I'm not scared of you. You're not going to hurt me again, or — you might, but it won't be that, you've only got that one in you once.
" Her voice was steady and her hands were not. "I'm afraid of me, Jesse."
"Georgia."
"I forgave you in May. I sat right there and I decided, and I was so sure, and I was wrong.
" She pressed the heel of her hand flat against the counter's edge.
"Do you know what that does to a woman like me?
I don't have looks and I don't have a career and for sixteen years I did not have one single thing that was mine except that I know what I'm looking at.
That's it. That's the whole inventory. And I looked straight at you across this table and I got it wrong. "
"You didn't get it wrong," he said. "I lied to you."
"That's the same thing from in here."
He put his hands over his mouth for a second.
"So this is what I'm scared of," Georgia said. "I'm scared that in about four minutes I'm going to want to walk over there. And I don't trust the woman who wants that. She's been wrong before. She's got a record."
The refrigerator cycled on.
"And I don't know how you fix that," she said. "There's not one thing you can do about it. That's not your job, it's not even your business, it's mine, and it might be mine for years."
Jesse Rawls sat at her kitchen table and looked at his own hands for a long moment.
"Then I'll wait years," he said.
"Don't say that."
"Why not?"
"Because it's a beautiful sentence," she said, "and you're very good at beautiful sentences, and I cannot take one more beautiful sentence from you as long as I live."
He thought about that.
"Fair," he said. "How about this one. I'm gonna go home."
Georgia stood with her back against the counter and the whole kitchen between them and did not say anything at all.
"I've been here two hours and forty minutes," Jesse said, standing up, "and I'd like the record to show I didn't ask for a minute of it. And if I stay another ten I'm gonna do something that costs us both a year." He picked up his hat. "So I'm gonna go home."
"All right."
"Thank you for the notebook."
"Take it," she said.
He stopped.
"What?"
"Take it with you," Georgia said. "Bring it back when you're done."
She stood in the doorway and watched the truck go over the cattle guard and turn left, and stayed there until the dust settled, and then went back inside and stood in her own kitchen with two cold cups of coffee on the table.
She had wanted him to stay.
That was not the frightening part. She had wanted him to stay every single day since March, one way or another, and she had gotten used to that the way you get used to a bad knee.
The frightening part was the four seconds before she stood up — when she had looked across a kitchen at that man's face and felt something come up in her that was not wanting and was not anger and was not even forgiveness.
It was ease.
For about four seconds Georgia Rawls had felt easy in a room with her husband, and there is no armor in this world that will stop that, and she had been fifteen years learning that there is nothing on God's earth she is worse at surviving.
She washed both cups and put them in the rack.
Then she sat down at the empty table where the green notebook was not, and put her face in her hands, and said, out loud, to a kitchen with nobody in it:
"Oh, honey. You're going to take him back."