Chapter 15
The first hour was terrible, and she had expected that, and it was still worse than she expected.
Four o'clock at the diner on Depot Street.
The place was full, exactly as advertised, and half of them found reasons to walk past the booth.
He came in with nothing in his hands — she checked, and hated herself for checking, and then decided she was allowed.
He sat down across from her. He said, "Hey. "
And then two people who had known each other for eleven years sat in a vinyl booth and could not think of one single thing to say.
It was the worst kind of awful, the kind with no drama in it at all.
They talked about the roof on the courthouse.
He asked about the clinic and she gave him three sentences and heard herself doing it.
At twenty past four Faye came and refilled the coffee and said, "Y'all all right?
" in a voice that meant something else, and Laura said, "We're fine, Faye," and Faye went away slowly.
At five o'clock Laura looked at the clock over the pie case and said, "That's the hour."
And Jake stood up immediately, and said, "Thank you," and left.
He did not linger at the table. He did not say when can I see you again or this was good or any of the things she had braced for.
He put his jacket on and walked out and got in his truck and drove west, and Laura sat in the booth by herself with a cold cup of coffee, absolutely furious, and could not have told anybody why.
Tammy got it out of her at the salon the next morning in about ninety seconds.
"Well?"
"It was awful."
"Awful how? Awful he was ugly about it, or awful the other way?"
Laura, in the second chair, with a cape on, said, "Awful like two people at a bus station."
"Mm," said Tammy, and did not say anything else, which from Tammy Fowler was a paragraph.
She let nine days go by before the second one.
That was partly principle and partly spite, and she was honest with herself about the ratio. The terms said every one after the first happened because she said so, and she had not said so, and every day she did not say so she was aware of it the way you are aware of a stone in a boot.
He did not ask. Not through Susan, not any other way.
The second hour was better. They talked about Carol. He told a story about the notary, Charlene, who it turned out had cornered him in the yard while Laura was walking her out and told him at length that he had a lot of nerve.
The third hour, in the third week of July, was at the picnic tables behind the Dairy Freeze, and it ran long because neither of them looked at the time, and Laura noticed that on the drive home and pulled the truck over and sat for a second with her hands on the wheel.
There was one more thing that happened in July, and it happened in a courthouse.
Derek Mills pleaded on the twenty-first of July.
Ms. Petree called her at the clinic to say it, and Laura sat down on the rolling stool in the middle of the day and listened to a woman in Cookeville explain that there would not be a trial, that the stalking count was going in as charged, and that the plea carried a sentence and an order of protection with a distance on it and a term of years.
"You'll get a letter," Ms. Petree said. "You're entitled to speak at sentencing if you want it. You do not have to."
"Do people?"
"About half."
Laura looked at the pencil marks on the wall by the door.
"I'll speak," she said.
Sentencing would be in September. She had eight weeks to write one page, and she started it that night at her mother's table, and by the end of the week it had a last line she did not intend to change:
He did not take my life away. He made me build the whole thing with one hand.
She told nobody she was writing it, and she had already decided she would go alone.
The crack came on the twenty-ninth of July, and it was over nothing.
It was a Tuesday evening. He had come out for the fourth hour and they had ended up at the clinic, because she had wanted to show him the new second room — a wall knocked through into the old storage in June, two more tables in it, done properly this time with a permit and a contractor and her own money.
He had asked good questions about it. Where do you put the ultrasound, what happens when two people come at once, are you going to hire.
And then they had gone out to the sidewalk, and she had leaned against the tailgate of her truck because she was too tired to stand up straight, and he had stood a proper distance away with his hands in his pockets, and she had told him about Roy.
Roy, who had a shoulder and no insurance and had once paid her in a ham.
Roy, who had spent June and July telling every person on Depot Street that his shoulder was fixed and that he had fixed it himself with a specific stretch he had invented, which Laura had taught him, and which he now demonstrated to strangers in the parking lot of the Marathon.
"He does it in the aisle," she said. "At the store. He backed a woman up against the cereal doing it."
And Jake put his head back and laughed.
Not politely. Not the careful laugh he had been using all summer. The real one, the one from the back of his throat, head back, the one she had heard a thousand times in a rental in Kansas City and almost never in the last three years.
And Laura laughed too.
That was the thing. She was already laughing — she had been laughing when she said the part about the cereal — and his laugh came in underneath hers and the two of them stood on Depot Street in the July evening and laughed like people.
It went on about eleven seconds and then she stopped, hard, like a door closing.
Jake stopped too. He looked away immediately, at the street, giving her the room, which was the single most infuriating thing he could have done.
Laura stood with her hands flat on the tailgate and her heart going like she had run somewhere.
She was frightened. That was what it was, and she made herself put the name on it right there on the sidewalk, because she had spent nine months naming things and she was not going to start flinching now.
Not frightened of him. Frightened of the eleven seconds.
Because in the eleven seconds she had not been managing anything.
And she understood, standing on that sidewalk, that she had been managing every minute of every hour of the last nine months — the folder, the case, the terms, the door, the clinic, the money into the account — and that she had gotten so good at it that she had mistaken it for being all right.
Eleven seconds of not managing, and there was the whole thing underneath, exactly as big as it had been in October.
"Sit down," she said.
"What?"
"On the tailgate. Sit down. I'm going to say some things and I don't want to look at you while I do it."
He sat. She hitched herself up beside him, a foot and a half between them, and they both looked at the street, which is how the only real conversation of that entire summer got had — side by side, on the tailgate of a truck, in front of a clinic, with the light going.
"I still love you," Laura said.
He did not move.
"That's not — don't do anything with that.
It's not a gift. It's a fact I've been living with since the tenth of October and it's the single most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to me.
" She was looking at a crack in the asphalt.
"I did not stop for one day. Not one. Not the night I drove out here, not in March, not the night I sat on that kitchen floor after I sent you home.
I have been in love with you the entire time, and I want you to know that it did not help you at all, and it isn't going to. "
"Okay," Jake said quietly.
"You don't get to be relieved."
"I'm not relieved," he said. "I'm — Laura, that's the worst thing you could have told me."
"Yes," she said. "It is."
They sat.
"Your turn," she said. "And I want the real one. Not the one you've been carrying around all summer being good about."
He was quiet for so long she thought he might not.
"I stopped being anybody," he said.
Laura kept looking at the road.
"That's it. That's the whole thing and I've never said it out loud to a person in my life.
" His hands were hanging between his knees.
"Pittsburgh, the room, the guy says not advisable — and I understood right then, sitting there, that I had about forty more years and nothing to put in them.
Because it was never the money. I'd have played for nothing. You know I'd have played for nothing."
"I know."
"And you were so good about it." He shook his head slowly. "That's the part I can't — you were unbelievable. You drove me to everything. You sat on the edge of the tub. And every single day you were being good about it, I hated you a little more, and I could not have told you why."
Laura turned her head.
"I've had nine months to work it out," Jake said.
"And the answer is that you knew. You were the one person alive who'd seen the whole thing, the twenty-six-year-old with the shoulder and the guy on the table in Pittsburgh, and you knew exactly what I'd stopped being.
Everybody else got to keep the old one. You had the real one and you were kind to him and I could not stand it. "
"So you found somebody who didn't know."
"I found somebody who thought I was still somebody.
" He said it flatly, with no self-pity in it at all, which was the only reason she could hear it.
"That's what it was. That's the whole squalid — she thought I was still it.
And I knew she was wrong, and I worked out by about the second week that she meant every word of it, and that I didn't and wasn't going to, and I did it anyway, because for two hours at a time I got to be the guy again.
" He looked at his hands. "She was the only person in the world who hadn't watched me stop.
That's what I bought with ten years, Laura. Somebody who never saw it."
The light was going orange down the length of Depot Street.