Chapter 8 #2
"Where?"
"It's mine," I said. "That's all. Nobody in my family has ever gotten one.
My grandmother buried her mother out of a closed box and never got a word.
I got ninety seconds and permission and a piece of information, and that's more than four generations of Thibodeaux women got put together, and I am not going to stand out here and call it a tragedy in front of them. "
Jonah was quiet.
"Say something."
"I've been trying to work out how to say a thing for about six days."
"Say it badly."
"All right," he said. "You've spent seven years believing you were the woman who took something from me.
And tonight I watched you take eleven miles off your own mother and stay standing, and I've decided I don't want an apology anymore.
I want a life. Those are different and I've been asking for the wrong one. "
I put my head on his shoulder.
"That wasn't badly," I said.
"I've had six days."
Two in the morning.
The church was unlocked, because it's always unlocked, because Miss Ida believes a locked church is a contradiction in terms and has out-argued four ministers about it.
The candles from Sunday were still going in the rack by the side door, most of them guttered down. Whole building lit orange and low. Smelled like wax and old hymnals and floor polish.
I stopped in the middle of the aisle.
"Wren."
"Give me a second."
Two hundred empty pews. The rail. The two steps up. The exact spot.
"Twelve hours," I said.
"Yeah."
"Show me where."
He walked up and stood on the left side of the rail, about a foot back from it, and put his feet where his feet had been.
"Here."
I don't know what I expected to feel. What I felt was fury — clean, hot, and entirely at the room.
At the pews for having been full. At the flowers for having been thrown in a dumpster in their buckets.
At every board of that floor for holding a man up for twelve hours and never once telling anybody why he was there.
I walked up the aisle and I did not walk slow.
"Wrenlee—"
"I'm taking it back," I said.
"Taking what back?"
"This room."
He said, "This is a church."
I said, "It's a building, Jonah, and it took twelve hours off you, and I'm collecting."
He said, "Somebody could—"
I said, "It's two in the morning in Marrow Bend. The only person awake in this parish is Miss Ida and she's doing a puzzle."
He laughed and I got my hands in his shirt and after that he stopped arguing.
I'm going to be careful here, because it wasn't a joke and it wasn't a defilement and if anybody reads it that way I've written it wrong.
It was slow. It was almost unbearably slow, because he made it that way, and because I let him.
He put his back against the rail — the rail, that rail — and pulled me in, and neither of us said anything for a long time. All that candlelight going sideways. The building doing what old wood does at two in the morning, ticking and settling, listening the way it has since 1889.
At some point he stopped and pressed his mouth to my temple and said, "Seven years I've been standing in this room."
"I know."
"I've dreamed about this room."
"I know."
"Not like this."
"No," I said. "Nobody dreams the good version. You've got to be handed it."
He got my jacket off and folded it, because he is incapable, and put it on the step, and I laughed and cried at the same time, which is a thing that turns out to be possible.
And when it happened it happened right there, in the candle-glow, twelve inches from where he stood for twelve hours, with my hands on either side of his face and my forehead on his, and it was so quiet and so slow and so absolutely his that I felt something in my chest that had been locked since I was twenty-six simply, quietly, give.
Afterward we sat on the steps with my head under his chin for a long time and didn't say anything at all.
Somewhere around four he said, "Wrenlee."
"Mm."
"Sit up a second."
"No."
"Wren."
I sat up.
He'd gotten something out of his jacket. A small flat thing, wrapped in a receipt, and I recognized the receipt before I recognized the shape, because it had an address on it in Cane Boudreaux's handwriting.
"That's the drawer," I said.
"That's the drawer."
He unwrapped it. My grandmother's ring — the plain one, the shed ring, the one she wore working. I hadn't seen it in eleven years.
"How do you have that?"
"Your mother gave it to me," he said. "In 2018. Before — well. We know now, don't we. Before whenever it actually was." He turned it once. "She drove out to my place and put it in my hand and said, 'she'll be back, and she'll be worse.'"
"That sounds like her."
"It does." He didn't kneel. He stayed sitting on the step with his shoulder against mine, which is exactly right and I'd have thrown the ring in the marsh if he'd knelt. "I'm not going to ask you to marry me tonight."
"You've got a ring out, Jonah."
"I'm going to ask you what I asked you seven years ago on the drive-in concrete," he said, "which was a smaller question, and it's the one I actually want the answer to."
"Which was?"
He looked at the empty room. Then at me.
"Are you staying?"
Seven years ago I'd said yes to that, in a parking lot, and meant it, and then broke it in a way that took a decade off two people.
I looked at the aisle. At two hundred empty pews. At the rail.
At the man sitting on the step of a church he'd stood in for twelve hours, asking the smallest question he could find.
"Yes," I said.
And this time I was still there in the morning.