Chapter 2
Wrenlee
He didn't laugh.
I didn't expect him to laugh. I want that understood. I said it the way you'd put your hand in a fire on purpose, to find out how bad it is, and I found out.
"The east line's open," he said.
"Hello to you too, Jonah."
"Mile four. Same spot."
"I heard."
That stopped him. Just slightly. A man who's been braced for a fight and gets handed a chair instead.
"You heard."
"There's a phone in this bar and I'm not dead."
I want to be clear that I was doing an impression of a woman at that point. Inside I was a house on fire. My hands were flat on the bar because if I'd lifted them off I'd have found out what they were doing.
Seven years I'd worked out what I'd say. I had eleven versions. I had a version for if he was angry and a version for if he'd remarried and a version — the one I'd polished the most, the shameful one — for if he'd come to say something forgiving, in which I was very cold and he left quickly.
Not one of them was for him standing in a doorway saying the east line's open like we'd been in the middle of a conversation. I picked the rag back up because my hands needed a job. "Miss Ida's granddaughter works Thursdays. She talks like a burst pipe."
"She's in the group chat."
"I know she's in the group chat. I'm in the group chat."
Jonah Pike stood in the middle of Vergie's with his arms at his sides.
"You're in the group chat."
"Roach added me on Monday."
"Roach added you."
"He said, and I'm quoting, 'no pressure but there's a situation and also I think you should know Bear says you should know.'"
"That's not a sentence."
"It was four sentences. He sent them separately. It took nine minutes." I threw the rag under the bar. "You want a drink or are you going to keep standing there being a doorway?"
"I'm not drinking."
"No, you're not, you never did, I'm asking so the room stops looking at us."
He came and sat down. Not at the near stool. Two down, so there was an empty one between, which is the single most Jonah thing that has ever happened.
"How long's it been open," I said.
"Nine days that we know."
"Ground dead?"
"Strip of it. About the size of a truck."
"Anything come through?"
He looked at the bar top.
"Jonah."
"Sunday there were twelve people in church and thirteen in the pews."
I sat down on the beer cooler behind the bar, which I've never done in four years of working there.
"It sang," he said. "All four verses."
"Including—"
"Including the fourth."
I put my hand over my mouth for a second and then took it away, because he'd seen, and there's no point.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?"
"Okay, I heard you, I'm thinking. Give me a minute. You rode two hours, you can give me a minute."
"Two forty," he said. "I took the parish roads."
And we sat there in a bar in Ste. Amélie parish, and I looked at him properly for the first time in seven years.
He'd gotten bigger through the shoulders in the way men do when the work is real. Gray at the temple on the left side only, which is not fair to anybody. Same hands. Same absolutely unbearable stillness — Jonah doesn't fidget, he never has, he just sits there like furniture God made on a good day.
Somebody had told him to shave and he had not shaved.
I want it recorded that I noticed this in the first four seconds and thought about it for the following two hours and forty minutes, and that I am forty years old and should be past that, and am not.
"I need to ask you something," he said.
"You said you weren't going to ask me anything."
"Who told you that?"
"The group chat, Jonah. Roach transcribes church."
He closed his eyes briefly.
"He posts minutes," I said. "There are headings."
I went in the back and told Vergie I was leaving and she said "for good?" and I said "probably" and she said "well, hell," and hugged me, and then took my apron before I was out of it, because she runs a business.
Four years I worked there. That was the whole goodbye. There's a lesson in it about the kind of life I built and I've decided not to learn it.
I packed a duffel out of a rented room above a laundromat in eleven minutes.
He carried it out to the truck he'd borrowed from somebody, because you can't put ninety pounds of salt on a motorcycle, and he didn't offer to carry it, he just took it, which is different and I noticed.
Then we got in the cab.
Two hours and forty minutes is a long time.
The first thirty of it, neither of us said anything. Radio off. Windows cracked. The parish roads out that way go through six miles of cane and then nothing and then cane again, and the headlights make a tunnel, and the whole thing is very good for not talking.
At mile thirty-one I said, "Ask it."
"Ask what."
"The question you've been chewing on since Vergie's."
"I don't have a question."
"Jonah."
"I have about nine hundred questions," he said. "I got rid of the good ones on the ride out. What's left is the ones that make me look bad."
"Ask a bad one, then. It's a long drive."
He drove for another mile.
"Did you plan it?"
"No."
"That morning, or before?"
"That morning. Ten forty-seven in the morning." I watched the cane go by. "I was pinned into my mother's dress. Miss Ida had three pins in her mouth."
"So something happened at ten forty-seven."
"Yes."
"And you can't tell me what."
"Yes."
"Still."
"Still."
He nodded, once, like a man checking a measurement he already knew.
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"What do you want me to do with it, Wrenlee?"
"I want you to fight about it."
"Why."
"Because you're allowed to!"
"I know I'm allowed to." He didn't raise his voice. He has never once raised his voice, which is a thing I used to find soothing and now recognize as a war crime. "I stood in that church twelve hours. I got all the way through allowed to. There's nothing on the other side of it."
I sat there with my hands in my lap.
"Say the second-worst question," I said.
"Wren."
"Say it."
"Did you ever come back?"
The cab was very quiet.
"Once," I said.
"When."
"That night."
The truck slowed down about four miles an hour and then picked back up, which is the closest thing to a scream I have ever gotten out of that man.
"You were there."
"Eleven-oh-five. I sat in the lot with the engine off."
"I heard a truck."
"You did."
"I came out."
"I know," I said. "I watched you in the mirror."
He didn't say anything for eleven miles. I counted them off the fence posts because I couldn't do anything else with myself.
Then: "That's worse."
"Yes."
"You know that's worse."
"Jonah, I have known it was worse every single day for seven years. I have had a career in knowing it was worse."
"Then why tell me?"
And here's the thing I didn't say, so I'll say it here.
Because I'm going to be in that town for eight days laying eleven miles of salt with this man, and there is a version of that where he softens toward me, where the old thing comes back and warms up in the cab of a truck, and I would rather cut my own hands than let that happen on a lie.
I've built seven years on not deserving it. If he forgives me it all comes down.
What I said was: "Because you asked."
At mile seventy he said, "You want music?"
"Do you have music?"
"I have the radio."
"That's not the same as having music, Jonah, that's having a hope."
He turned it on. Out that way you get two stations and one of them is a man in Opelousas selling tractor parts at eleven at night with real conviction.
We listened to nine minutes of tractor parts.
"He's good," I said.
"He's very good."
"He believes in that hay rake."
"He believes in it more than I've believed in anything," Jonah said, and I laughed so hard I had to put my head against the window, and then I stopped laughing very abruptly because I remembered what we were doing and where we were going, and he saw me stop and turned the radio back up so I could get myself together in private.
That's the thing about him. He's got manners the way other men have muscle.
"Tell me about the club," I said, when I could.
"What about it."
"Everything. Seven years. Go."
"Cane got married."
"Cane got married."
"Delphine."
"Delphine Arceneaux? To Cane Boudreaux? Cane who once put a chair through the—"
"That's the man."
"And she said yes."
"She said yes twice. The first one didn't take, there was an incident with a cemetery."
"There's always an incident with a cemetery."
"And Preacher's married."
I turned all the way around in the seat.
"Preacher is sixty-one years old."
"Sixty-two now. Married a Guidry. Odalys. Water witch, runs the perimeter, terrifies everyone including her husband." He kept his eyes on the road. "And before you ask, yes, it was a paper marriage, and no, it isn't anymore, and if you say either of those things in front of Bear he'll cry."
"Why would Bear cry?"
"Bear's been crying more."
"Since when?"
"That's a longer story and it involves a hymn."
Marrow Bend welcomed me the way a body welcomes a splinter.
We came in past the Vachon culvert at half past midnight and I still knew every mailbox. That's the part nobody warns you about. Not the feelings — the inventory. I knew which house had the dog. I knew the pothole. My hands knew when to brace on the dash a half second before he took the bend.
"Somebody repainted the Guidry place," I said.
"Odalys did."
"That's not a Guidry color."
"She's aware. She says the old one was 'the color of an apology.'"
"I like her already."
"You'll like her for about a week."
The clubhouse lot was full at half past midnight, which is not normal, and every window was lit, which is aggressively not normal, and when we pulled in I counted nine bikes and a station wagon.
"Jonah."
"I see it."
"Why is the clubhouse lit up like a boat show."
"Because they're terrible people," he said, "and I have told them so."
They'd waited up. All of them. Every man in that club had stayed up until half past midnight, and when I came through that door they all did the exact same thing at the exact same moment, which was look somewhere else very hard.
Bear was reading a magazine upside down.
"Bear."
"Wrenlee."
"It's upside down."
"I know how I like it."