Prologue #2
The back door of that church opens onto gravel and a dumpster and a hedge that Miss Ida's husband trimmed for thirty years and nobody's touched since he died.
I remember three things about walking out of it.
The organ, still going, that slow warm-up.
My mother's hem dragging in the gravel and picking up dust, which she would have found funny.
And the church bell, not ringing, just sitting up there in the tower being enormous and patient the way bells are.
I got in the truck. I drove to my grandmother's shed.
I loaded ninety pounds of salt in nine bags and I got the wooden measure and the iron nail and the notebook with the order of it, because it is an order, it isn't sprinkling, it goes east to north to the water and back and you can't skip and you can't rush and if you do it wrong you have to start over from the last mile marker.
I took the dress off in the shed and put on my grandmother's work shirt over the slip because there wasn't time to find anything else, and that is why the story that went around town is that Wrenlee Thibodeaux was seen driving out of Marrow Bend on her wedding day in her underclothes, which — fine. Fair. That one's accurate.
There's a photograph of me from that morning. Delphine took it in the back room, before, and I didn't know about it for four years.
I'm laughing in it. Head back, mouth open, holding my mother's veil in both hands.
I've looked at that photograph more times than is good for anybody.
Not for the dress. For the time stamp in the corner, which says 10:39, and which means that woman had eight minutes left and did not know it, and I have never once been able to look at her without wanting to shout down the years and give her the eight minutes back.
The gap was at mile four, near the Vachon culvert. It was clean. Something had come through and taken a good bite of the line with it, and the ground where the salt had been was black and dead in a strip you could have laid a body in.
I started at 12:15.
I finished at 11:04 that night.
I'll tell you about the middle of it another time. I'll tell you about hour seven, and what stood at the treeline and watched me work, and what it said in my mother's voice, and what I said back, which was nothing, because you don't answer.
I'll tell you about my hands, which bled from the fourth mile on, because you lay it by hand or it doesn't take.
What matters for this part is the end of it.
At 11:04 the last handful went down and I felt it close, the way you feel a jar seal — that small backward pop that means the pressure went the right direction.
I sat down in the road in my slip and my grandmother's shirt with my hands in the dirt and I laughed for about a minute and a half, alone, eleven miles out, and then I stopped laughing and I got in the truck and I drove back into town.
The church lot was empty.
Two hundred cars, gone. The lilies were in the dumpster; somebody had thrown them in without taking them out of the buckets, which is a thing you only do when you're angry.
And the sanctuary lights were on.
I sat in the truck in the dark at the far edge of the gravel with the engine off, and through the window I could see the front of that church, and Jonah Pike was standing at the altar in his suit with his hands at his sides.
Alone. In an empty building. At five past eleven at night.
Somebody had told him. Somebody had told him at eleven that morning and at noon and at two and at four and at seven, and he had stood there anyway, because he had said he would be standing there, and he is a man who does not know how to be anywhere except where he said he'd be.
Twelve hours.
I laid a line for eleven and he held one for twelve.
I want to tell you I got out of the truck.
I sat there with my hands on the wheel and my hands were split open and I had my mother's dress in a ball on the passenger seat and I could not think of one single sentence.
Not one. I turned over every word I had.
Something broke. I had to. There's a thing outside town and I'm the only one who can hold the door.
Every one of them was the first sentence of a conversation that would end with him knowing, and him knowing would end with him going out there, and the east line eats Pikes.
So I started the truck.
He turned his head at the sound. I know he did, because I watched him do it in the mirror.
By the time he got to the door of that church I was on the parish road with my lights off, driving toward a bar three parishes over where nobody would ask me anything for seven years.
The story the town settled on was that I ran.
It's a good story. It's clean. It has a beginning and an end, and it makes one person the villain, which is efficient, and it explains why a good man got quiet.
Miss Ida stopped speaking to me first, at the funeral of a woman we both loved, which is a very Marrow Bend way to do it.
Delphine kept my secret. She hated me for it for two years, and then she stopped hating me and just carried it, which was worse.
And Jonah never once said a word against me. Not one. Seven years. I know because in a town this size you hear everything, even three parishes out, and what I heard was silence, and I've never been able to decide if that was mercy or if it was the way he holds a thing before he sets it down.
I was twenty-six years old on my wedding day.
I have been the woman who left Jonah Pike for longer than I was ever anything else.