Chapter 2 #2
Roach came in at a full clip with his arms already out and hugged me before I could set the duffel down, which is how you find out who your friends are.
"You look terrible," he said into my hair.
"Thank you."
"I mean it in the warmest way."
"I know."
"Like a woman who's been carrying something."
I stepped back and looked at him and Roach has a face like a wet dog and eyes that miss absolutely nothing, and he smiled at me, and I thought: oh no.
"Where's Preacher?"
"In back with the coven."
"The what?"
"That's not what they call it," Roach said. "That's what Duckie calls it. Duckie's been asked to stop. The asking is ongoing."
They were in the back room around a table with three charts on it and a candle that wasn't for atmosphere.
Delphine got up so fast the chair went over — the same chair, seven years later, I'd bet money — and she came around the table and grabbed me by both arms and looked at me hard.
"You're skinny."
"You're bossy."
"You're skinny, Wrenlee, and your hands look like a fence."
"They've had a job."
"I know they've had a job." Her voice cracked right down the middle of it and she squeezed my arms once and let go and picked up her chair like nothing had happened, which is the Arceneaux way of crying.
"Seven years," she said, sitting down. "You could have called."
"You could have called."
"I did call. Twice a year. For four years." She jabbed a finger at me. "You let it ring."
"I let it ring."
"Why?"
"Because if I'd picked it up I'd have come home."
Delphine sat back with her arms crossed and her jaw going and didn't say anything for a second, and I watched her decide, right there, to put the whole thing down and pick it up again later, which is a skill I would give a hand to have.
"Fine," she said.
"Fine?"
"Fine for tonight. You get tonight. Tomorrow I'm going to be so ugly to you."
"I know."
"I've had material prepared, Wrenlee. There's a list."
"Written down?"
"There is a page," Delphine said, and her voice cracked on it, and she laughed and wiped her face with the back of her hand and said, "Sit down before I do something."
Odalys Guidry looked at me over the top of a chart the way a surveyor looks at a lot.
"You're the salt."
"I'm the salt."
"Good. Sit. You're four days behind."
And the third woman put down her coffee and stood up and stuck out her hand, and she was tall and about fifty with iron-colored hair cut like she'd done it herself in a mirror with intent, and she said, "Teodora."
"Sister Teodora?"
"Not for eleven years, but the town enjoys it, so I let them have it."
"You're Roach's."
"He would say it the other way around." She sat back down. "Tell me about the grudges."
"The what?"
"This town. You left a man at an altar seven years ago and I have heard about it, personally, from nine separate people, one of whom was a child.
" She stirred her coffee. "I've worked in institutions that hold a grudge for six hundred years and they were sloppier than this.
Small towns are the most efficient perpetual motion machine God ever failed to prevent.
You put one wedding in and it runs forever. "
"It runs on the wedding?"
"It runs on being retold," she said. "That's the fuel. Nothing's cheaper."
Delphine snorted into her cup.
"So," Odalys said, flattening the chart. "Eight days. Eleven miles. Can you do it?"
"I've done it before."
"In how long?"
"Eleven hours."
Three women looked up at once.
"That was four miles of touch-up," I said. "This is the whole line, from the start, in order, and I can't lay past sundown on the water stretch, and I can't lay at all on Sunday."
"So eight days."
"Six days of working light, if the weather holds and nothing's wrong."
Odalys said, "Something's wrong."
"You don't know that yet."
"I do, actually," she said. "I've been doing this for two years and I've learned exactly one thing from this parish and it's that something's always wrong. But that's tomorrow's problem. Go to bed."
I didn't go to bed.
I lay in a bunk in the back of that clubhouse listening to a building I hadn't slept in since I was twenty-five, and it made every noise I remembered in the same order, and at some point I stopped pretending.
Mags came in around two with a glass of water I hadn't asked for.
"Drink that."
"Mags—"
"I'm not going to talk to you about it."
"Okay."
"I've got one thing and then I'm going to bed." She set the glass down. "I raised four boys in this town and buried two, and I've watched what it does when a person keeps something for the good of somebody else."
"Mags."
"I'm not asking what it is," she said. "I've known you since you were in a car seat, Wrenlee, and I've never once thought you ran."
She went to the door.
"Everybody else did," I said.
"Everybody else is entertainment," said Mags, and shut it behind her.
I took the truck at four in the morning and drove out to the east boundary with the lights off for the last half mile because I wanted to see it in the dark before I saw it in the day.
The dead strip at mile four was where he'd said. Wide as a truck. Black ground, no bugs in it, which is the part that would frighten anyone who knows anything.
I crouched down at the edge with my hand out flat, not touching, the way my grandmother taught me — you don't put your hand in the wound, Wrenlee, you hold it over and see what the wound says.
And I sat back on my heels in the wet grass at four-forty in the morning and said, out loud, to nobody, in a voice that came out much smaller than I wanted it:
"Oh, you're kidding me."
Because a broken line is torn. A broken line has ends, ragged, like cloth, and you can see where the force came from and which way it went.
This wasn't torn.
The edges of it were smooth. Rounded. Tapered down to nothing on both sides, neat as a bite out of an apple.
It hadn't been broken.
It had been eaten.