Chapter 14
By June the fear had gone out of the house, and what was strange was how long it took her to notice.
It went the way swelling goes — not on a day, but sometime in the last little while, so that you look at a joint on a Thursday and realize it has been normal since Monday.
She stopped moving the truck. She took the rock out to the wall by the driveway and put it back where it had come from, and stood there a minute feeling foolish, and then went in and made supper.
The new door had gone in the week after the arrest. She had paid for it herself, four hundred and ten dollars including the frame, from a man in Monterey who did it in an afternoon and told her the whole time about his knee.
Twenty-six patients a week. That was the June number. She had put a second chair in the front, which was the closest thing the place had to a waiting room, and she was turning people away on Thursdays and had started a list.
Brady Combs ran two hundred meters on the track in the first week of June, all the way, in the evening with nobody watching but her and his mother, and at the end of it he bent over with his hands on his knees and swore without repeating himself for longer than she would have believed, and Donna Combs cried, and Laura stood on the infield grass with a stopwatch she did not need and felt the top of her head come off.
It was, and she knew it at the time, the best day of her life to date.
She got home at nine that night and sat on her mother's porch step in the dark and did the accounting.
She was not waiting for anything.
That was the finding, and she turned it over carefully, because she had learned not to trust a good result on first pass. Was she waiting? Was there a part of her listening for a truck on the gravel?
No. There genuinely was not. She had a life that started at six-forty in the morning and finished at seven at night, and it was hers, and there was room in it for exactly one more thing if she wanted one, and she did not have to want one.
She was thirty-four years old and she was going to be all right no matter what happened next.
That was the state Carol Hayes found her in, which was probably the only state in which it could have gone the way it went.
Carol came east on a Sunday in the second week of June and did not call ahead, because she was sixty-three and from a generation that considered calling ahead a way of giving people the chance to say no.
Laura came around the side of the house with a hose in her hand and there was a small gray car in the drive and Jake's mother standing beside it in the good coat, in June, with a foil-covered dish.
"It's a pound cake," Carol said. "I'm not staying."
She stayed four hours.
They sat on the porch because Carol would not come in — "I'll not put myself in that kitchen, Laura" — and Laura brought out two chairs and the tea and they sat looking at the field.
Carol talked about nothing for forty minutes. Her tomatoes. A woman at her church. A thing on the news. Laura let her do it, because she had watched enough people work themselves up to a sentence to know that hurrying them only pushes it back down.
At about the fifth cup Carol put hers on the boards and said, "There was a story."
Laura went still.
"About that night. Here." Carol was looking out at the field. "A magazine. One of the big ones, the kind that pays. They had the sheriff's report and a photograph of this house and two people in the county who'd talk, and they had it all written and they were running it the week after."
"How do you know that?"
"Because it was a man from Gary Stern's old shop that sold it to them," Carol said, "and he called Jake to say congratulations, because he thought he was doing him a favor."
Laura set her cup down very slowly.
"What did Jake do."
"He bought it," Carol said. "The whole thing. Killed it. It cost him — " She stopped and pressed her lips together. "I'm not going to say the figure, because it's obscene and you'd have opinions about the money, and I don't want the money to be the part."
"Carol."
"It was a great deal of money, and he did not have as much of it as he used to."
Laura sat on her mother's porch and looked at her hands.
"That was in April," she said.
"The twentieth of April."
Two months. Two months, and the story had never run, and nobody had told her, and she had assumed — she had actually sat in Ms. Petree's office and assumed — that the county paper had it and the big places did not care because it was Tennessee and a divorce and a nobody.
"Does he know you're telling me this?"
"He would be furious," Carol said, with some satisfaction. "He told me at the time and he made me promise, and I have kept it for two months, and today I am breaking it, and I want to be honest with you about why."
"Why?"
Carol turned in her chair.
"Because I have watched him do one thing after another now with nobody looking," she said, "and there is nobody left in that boy's life to tell you about a single one of them.
He fired every one of them. That's the thing about doing it properly — he's got nobody left to brag on his behalf, and he'd rather die than do it himself, and so it just sits there.
And it seemed to me somebody ought to say it out loud one time, and then never again. "
"That's what he's counting on. Somebody saying it."
"No." Carol's voice sharpened. "Laura, I have known that man his entire life and I will tell you exactly what he is counting on, which is nothing.
That's the trouble with him now. He's got no plan.
He's just — going along, doing the next right thing, waiting to be told what happens.
" She sat back. "It's the first time in his life he hasn't had an angle, and it's made him very poor company. "
Laura laughed before she could stop it. Carol smiled a little, and then the smile went.
"Now the other thing," she said, "and this one is worse, and I want you to understand before I start that I am not making excuses. I would rather cut my hand off. Do you understand that?"
"Yes."
"His father did it to me," Carol said.
The field was very green and very still.
"In 1996. Jake was six." Carol's hands were folded in her lap and did not move once through the whole thing.
"A woman at the plant. And every man we knew and half the women told me, plain as day, that this was what men were, and that I had a boy to raise, and that I would look a fool for making something of it.
My own mother said it. My mother, Laura. "
"What did you do?"
"I stayed eleven more years," Carol said. "And then he died and I found out I'd been relieved for about nine of them."
Laura did not say anything.
"So that is the house my son grew up in.
Six years old at the table while it was being decided, all around him, out loud, by everybody, that a man does a thing like that and the world goes on.
" Carol finally looked at her. "It is not an excuse.
He was thirty-six and he did it in a room with a camera in it.
But I have thought about it every night since October and I owe you the truth, which is that nobody in his whole life ever once told him it would end anything.
Everybody told him the opposite. Including me, by staying. "
Laura sat with it.
She could feel the shape of what she was supposed to do with it — the soft thing, the reframe, he never had a chance. And it did not fit. It sat there beside the other facts and did not dissolve any of them.
But something else had moved, and it took her most of the afternoon to name it, and it was this: she had spent eight months unable to understand how.
Not why he did it — she understood want, and drink, and a man whose identity had been taken out of him at thirty-four.
What she had never been able to make fit was how a man could do it and not know, in the very act, that he was ending his own life.
And the answer was that he had genuinely not known. Nobody had ever told him.
That was not forgiveness. It was worse and more useful than forgiveness. It was information.
"Carol."
"Mm."
"Why are you really out here?"
Jake's mother was quiet a long moment.
"Because you were the best thing that ever happened in our family," she said, "and I did not do one single thing for you for ten years except be glad you were there.
Not one. I watched you go quiet at those dinners and I never said a word, because I liked having you and I was afraid of the money.
" Her chin went, once, and she put it back.
"That's my part. I've been wanting to say it since November. "
Laura reached over and took her hand, and Carol let her, and neither of them made anything of it.
Kevin Barnes came out the third Saturday in June, and that conversation was the other half of the nine days, though she would not have said so at the time.
He brought nothing. He had stopped bringing things in April, which she had noticed.
They walked down to the bottom of the field because the evening was good and neither of them wanted to sit in a kitchen, and about halfway along he said, "I'm going to be a grown-up about something."
"Oh, Lord."
"I know." He put his hands in his pockets. "You remember in the parking lot, I said I wasn't going to ask you anything."
"I remember."
"I'm keeping that," Kevin said. "I just want to say one time, out loud, so it's said and then it's done: if you'd have wanted it, I'd have been all in. Not a fling. The whole thing. House, the works, and I'd have driven that road every day forever and thought I got the better end."
Laura stopped walking.
"Kevin."
"Let me finish, because this is the good part and I've been practicing.
" He was smiling, a little, at the grass.
"You don't want it. And you don't want it in a way that's got nothing to do with me — I've watched you since February and there's not one minute where you looked at me and had to decide anything.
Which is its own answer, and I'd rather have the true one. "
She stood in her mother's field and looked at him, and she was honest with herself about the fact that some part of her was sorry, and about how small that part was.
"You're the best man I know," she said. "I mean that flatly. You're better than he is."
"I know it," Kevin said. "It doesn't work like that though, does it."
"No."
"No." He rocked back on his heels. "Well. Then I'm going to say the other thing and then I'm going to go home and be extremely normal about all of this for the rest of my life."
"What's the other thing?"
"He's not going to ask you," Kevin said.
"You know that, right? He's decided. He's not going to ask you and he's not going to hint, and he'd stand out on that road until he rotted before he'd put you in a position where you had to say no to him.
" He shrugged. "So if anything's ever going to happen, it's going to be because you did it.
That's all. That's the whole thing I came out here to say, and I'd like the record to show it cost me something. "
She thought about it for nine days.
She thought about it while she worked, which was the only way she knew how to think about anything now.
She thought about it at the Fourth of July thing at the fairground, standing with Tammy in the smoke off the grills.
She thought about it on the tailgate of her own truck at seven in the evening with a cold drink and a boy's rehab log in her lap.
What she kept coming back to was not the money or the story or 1996.
It was that he had gone home at two in the morning when she told him to.
And that she had cut him off completely in March and he had not called once. Not one time. Three months of the most expensive silence she had ever heard.
On the ninth day she called Susan Reeves.
"I want to set some terms," Laura said. "And I want them in writing to him, from you, and I want them followed exactly."
Susan, who had spent nineteen years watching women get to this exact phone call, did not sigh, which Laura appreciated for the rest of her life.
"Go ahead."
"One conversation. One hour. Somewhere public, in this town, at a time I name.
" Laura had it written on a prescription pad in front of her and read it off.
"He does not bring anybody. He does not bring anything.
No gift, no papers, no envelope, nothing in his hands at all.
He does not pay for anything, including the coffee.
And when the hour is up, he leaves, and he does not ask for another one. "
"And if it goes well?"
"Then I'll decide whether there's another one," Laura said. "Me. Not him and not you. And Susan — write that part down exactly. Every single one of these after the first happens because I said so, and if I stop saying so, it stops, and there is no explanation owed and no conversation about why."
There was a pause on the line.
"Laura." Susan's voice had changed. "In nineteen years I have never once had a client dictate terms like this and have them accepted. I want you prepared for a negotiation. It'll come back with something reasonable-sounding attached and that's how it starts."
"Send it."
She sent it at four o'clock on a Tuesday.
The answer came back at four-nineteen.
Susan called her, and Laura could hear that she was reading off a screen, and there was something in her voice that Laura had not heard in the entire nine months she had known her.
"It's one word," Susan said.
"What?"
"His reply. It's one word, and it's yes, and then his signature block." A pause. "Nothing else. No conditions. He didn't even ask when."
Laura stood in her clinic on Depot Street with the phone against her ear and the late sun coming down through the high north windows onto two treatment tables and a column of pencil marks on the wall by the door.
"Tell him Thursday," she said. "The diner. Four o'clock, because the lunch crowd's gone and the dinner crowd hasn't come, and the place will be full of people who've known me my whole life."
"That's deliberate."
"Yes," Laura said. "It is."