Chapter 3 #2
It lasted about a second and a half, and Laura felt every part of it.
Then Peggy Nolan, who was eighty and under the dryer and had taught Laura's Sunday school, took the dryer hood off her own head with both hands and said, at full volume, "Well, I hope you took him for everything he has got."
And that broke it, and the room came back on, and Laura sat down in the second chair and let Tammy put a cape on her and did not have her hair cut, just sat there for an hour while the town happened around her.
She learned a lot in that hour.
She learned that the man eating lunch in the car on the shoulder was from Atlanta and had offered Ed Mullins's grandson two hundred dollars for a photograph of the house.
She learned that Ed Mullins's grandson had taken it.
She learned that everybody knew he had taken it and that his grandmother was not speaking to him.
And she learned, from the way one woman by the window would not quite look at her, exactly what the other half of the town was saying.
Laura got up at the end of the hour and paid Tammy for a cut she had not had, and Tammy took the money, because Tammy was not stupid.
At the door Laura stopped.
"Tammy. If somebody wanted to know where I was staying — " She kept her voice easy. "How hard would that be?"
Tammy snorted. "About as hard as asking."
"Right," Laura said.
She stopped looking at any of it on Thursday. She gave Tammy her passcode and told her to change it and not tell her what it was.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Because I'll do it," Tammy said, "but you have to know that means I'm the one reading it now, and I'm going to get in fights."
"I know."
"With children," Tammy said. "Children on the internet. I have no restraint."
On Friday, Laura walked into town.
She went the back way, along the creek and up behind the feed store, because of the cars on the shoulder, and she came out on Depot Street at the far end by the closed-up pharmacy.
She had not walked the length of it in years, and it was worse than she remembered.
Half of it was dark. The five-and-dime was a church now.
The hardware had a sign in the window that had been in the window for two years.
She walked the whole block. She was not doing anything. That was what she told herself.
She was doing arithmetic, is what she was doing.
Sawyer's Bend had one clinic, out on the highway, and it was a family practice with a nurse practitioner and a four-week wait.
The nearest physical therapy was in Cookeville, thirty-one miles, and she knew because she had driven her mother there twice a week for five months in the last year of her life.
Two hours round trip, plus the hour on the table, for an eighty-one-year-old woman with a rebuilt hip.
Half the county worked with their hands or had.
Every one of those men had a shoulder or a back.
And every fall this town put forty-five boys in pads on a field with two volunteer coaches and no trainer at all, and shipped the broken ones to Cookeville, where a stranger with a full caseload looked at them for twenty minutes.
She had known all of this for years. She had known it the way you know the weather.
She had never once stood on this street and thought of it as a list of patients.
At the middle of the block, on the north side, there was a storefront with brown paper in the windows and a FOR LEASE sign so old the phone number had faded to pink.
Laura stopped in front of it.
She got up close and put her hands around her eyes and looked in through the gap in the paper.
Long room, deep, going way back. Wood floor under about a decade of dust. And light — real light, north light, coming down through a run of high windows along the side wall that whoever put the brown paper up had not bothered to cover.
Twenty-two hundred square feet, she thought. Maybe more. You could put two tables in the front and still have room to walk somebody up and down the length of it.
Her heart was going.
She stood there long enough that a woman came out of the insurance office two doors up and said, "Laura Bennett?" — Bennett, not Hayes, and Laura felt that land — and then, gently, "You need something, hon?"
"No, ma'am," Laura said. "Just looking."
She wrote the faded phone number on the back of her hand with a pen from her coat pocket. Then she walked home the back way with her fist closed, feeling like a woman doing something illegal.
She came up over the rise on Quarry Road at five thirty, with the light going and the field on the back side of the house gone gold, and she saw the porch from two hundred feet off.
There was a package on it.
She stopped walking.
It was a padded envelope, brown, about the size of a book. It was square to the door, laid down straight, the way somebody lays a thing down when they want you to see it has been placed and not thrown.
Laura stood in the road.
There were four press cars on the shoulder at the bottom of the hill. There were people all over this town who knew where her mother's house was, and by now there were strangers who knew it from the internet. Any one of them could walk up a road.
That was what she told herself, standing there in the cold with her hand still closed around a phone number.
Then she thought about the fact that she had been in Sawyer's Bend for eight days, and that not one person in Nashville had her mother's address, and that the last time an envelope had been laid square against a door for her it had been at a gate in Belle Meade with a code on it, in April.
She went up onto the porch. She crouched down and looked at the envelope without touching it.
No stamp. No postmark. No address. Just her name on the front, in ballpoint, in small neat capital letters.
LAURA.
Not Mrs. Hayes.
She sat back on her heels in the cold with her breath going out white, and she understood, with a calm that frightened her more than any of it, that the thing she had been carrying since March had not stayed in Nashville.
It had come east with her.