Chapter 2 #3
He followed her out as far as the driveway. The night had gone cold, the first real cold of the year, and the gate light was on down at the end the way it was every night, and her breath showed.
"Laura." He was standing on the flagstones in his socks. He had come out in his socks. "I'm going to fix this."
She put the bags in the trunk and shut it.
"There's nothing to fix," she said. "There's just what you did."
"Then I'm going to—" He stopped. He was crying, and she had seen him cry twice in ten years, and both of those times she had been the one holding him. "I don't know what I'm going to do. But I'm going to do it for as long as it takes."
She stood with her hand on the car door.
There was a version of her that wanted, very badly, to walk across the flagstones.
It was not a small thing and she did not lie to herself about it.
She loved him. That was the part that was going to be unbearable in about forty minutes, somewhere around Lebanon, when the road went dark and there was nothing to do but drive.
She was not leaving because she had stopped. She was leaving because she hadn't.
"Don't call me," she said. "Anything you need, send it to Susan Reeves's office. She'll have something for you by Monday."
"You already called a lawyer."
"At midnight," Laura said. "Yes."
She got in the car.
He was still standing in the driveway in his socks when she reached the gate. She could see him in the mirror, lit up white by the security light, one hand raised — not waving, just up, like a man in a photograph.
She turned onto Belle Meade Boulevard and the gate closed behind her, and she drove east.
The interstate was empty. She did not put the radio on. Somewhere past Mount Juliet her phone started going again in the cupholder and she reached over and turned it face down without looking, and after that it was just the dash lights and the road.
She did not cry until Cookeville. Then she did, hard, for miles, both hands on the wheel and her face soaked and her breath coming in pieces, and she did not slow down once.
It was not about the woman. She noticed that while it was happening, which was the curse of being the kind of person she was — even coming apart, some cold clean part of her stood off to the side and took notes.
It was not her face, or the hand at the small of her back, or the ring going off like a coin in the flash.
It was that he had been happy.
Two years she had worked on him. Two years of getting him up, of driving him to the appointments he canceled, of sitting on the edge of the tub at four in the morning while he said the word nobody over and over.
She had held that man together with both hands.
And what finally worked, what finally got his head back and his laugh out of him, was a twenty-six-year-old who had never once seen him play and had decided anyway that he was still somebody.
She had not been able to do it. Some stranger had done it in six weeks.
That was the thing that got her past Cookeville. Not the betrayal. The arithmetic.
Past Monterey the trees closed in on both sides and the road started to climb, and she knew every foot of it, and her breathing came back down on its own the way it always did up here.
By the time she came off the exit at Sawyer's Bend the sky behind her was gray at the bottom.
The Bennett place sat where it had always sat, at the top of Quarry Road, dark and shut and smaller than she remembered it. Her mother had been dead three years. The key was still under the flowerpot on the porch, which told you everything about the town.
Laura let herself in and stood in the cold front room with her bags at her feet and the smell of the house — dust and old wood smoke and, faintly, still, her mother — coming up around her.
The power was on. She had kept it on for three years, forty-one dollars a month, and had never once asked herself why.
She went through the rooms with her coat still buttoned.
Everything was where it had been. The recliner with the towel over the arm.
The wall of school photographs going up the stairs, her own face at six and nine and fourteen, getting less certain every year.
The kitchen with the yellow curtains her mother had made and the phone still screwed to the wall beside the fridge, cord hanging down in a loop.
She had not slept in this house since the funeral. She had meant to come up more. She had said so, out loud, to people, for three years.
There was a sound from the road and she went still in the middle of the kitchen floor, listening, until it turned into a truck going by and then going away, and she stood there another few seconds after it was gone.
Then she made herself move.
She went through and unlocked the back door, because she had left the car out front and would need to bring the rest in.
She would think about that later. Months later, in fact, sitting in a room with a deputy and a legal pad, she would remember standing in her mother's kitchen at ten to six in the morning with her coat still on, reaching over and turning the deadbolt on the back door, so that it was open.