Take Her Word For It
A Fictional Story by GretaLarkin.
The decree came through over the winter. By the time the ground had thawed, there was a man in her backyard with a can of marking paint, and she stood at the kitchen window and watched him lay it out and did not ask one person whether it was a good idea.
She had wanted one for years. She had asked for one for years. There is a difference between those two sentences, and every woman at that party understood it without anybody explaining it.
The concrete went in that spring, fast, the way a thing goes in when nobody is arguing about it. The water went in a week behind the concrete. And on the first hot Saturday of the summer, Delia Ruffin called five women she had known most of her life and one who had turned up on the other side of her fence a few weeks before, and told them to bring a suit and nothing else.
* * *
Odessa Fontaine rents the little brick house on the corner. It is too small for her, and she took it anyway, because it shares a fence line with the Ruffin place and because the woman who lived in it before had left a good stove.
She has been in that town a good while now. She runs the alterations shop on the square, opens it at nine, and has made or taken in something for nearly every woman who was in that yard, which is a thing worth knowing about her. A tailor is the only person in a town who is allowed to put her hands on everybody. Nobody thinks twice about it. Nobody ever has.
She had felt good all week. That is worth putting down early, because of what happens later.
She had been sleeping. The shop was steady. She had eaten a peach standing over the sink on Thursday that was the best thing she had put in her mouth in a year.
And on the way out to her truck that morning she had caught herself in the side mirror at the wrong angle, in that hard flat light you only get before ten, and there it was.
Grey at both temples. Not a strand here and there. Enough that a woman across a counter would see it and be kind about it.
Odessa stood in her own driveway with a bowl of cut watermelon on her hip and looked at it a while.
Then she got in the truck and drove around the block to a house she could have walked to in a minute, because a woman who arrives on foot has to explain where she came from.
* * *
There were six of them in the chairs when she got there, and not one of them was young.
That is not an apology. Not one of them was pretending, either, which is rarer and better. Patrice Mabry was in a black one-piece with the straps down, working on her shoulders. Robin Poteet had on a suit she had owned longer than two of her children. Tammy Skiles had brought a caftan and never once put it on. Erin Coffey sat with her feet in the water and said almost nothing for the first hour, which is how Erin starts.
Heather Bordelon had a bag of limes and a knife and had appointed herself.
“Sit down, Dess,” Delia said. “You brought fruit. You didn’t have to bring fruit.”
“I had a melon.”
“You did not have a melon. Nobody has a melon.”
“Sugar,” said Odessa Fontaine, “I have had a melon in that refrigerator since Tuesday, looking for a reason.”
She sat. The chair was the good kind, the low kind, the kind that makes a woman put her head back whether she meant to or not.
And she put her head back and let them go, because she had been on that street a matter of weeks and she had learned a long time ago that the fastest way into a group of women is to shut up for the first hour.
* * *
They talked about men.
Of course they did. It was hot, and there was gin in it, and there were no men in that yard, and there had not been an afternoon like it in any of their lives in longer than any of them wanted to say out loud.
They started where women always start: with the small ones. The husband who cannot find a thing in a refrigerator he has been opening for twenty years. The one who narrates the driving. The one who has an opinion about how the dishwasher gets loaded and no opinion at all about who loads it.
Heather said her husband had recently discovered a podcast.
“About what?”
“He will not say. He just brings it up.”
“Heather.”
“He says, well, actually, now. He never said that before. Something in his ear is teaching him to say, well, actually, and I am going to find out what it is, and I am going to drown it.”
Robin Poteet said hers had gotten quiet, which she had at first thought was peace, but over about a year it turned out to be something else.
“He’s not mad. He’s just done. We are two people running a house.”
“That’s nothing,” Tammy said. “Running a house is nothing.”
“I did not say it was nothing. I said it was not what I signed up for.”
And that got the little silence that true things get.
Odessa sat with her drink on her stomach and watched all of it and did the thing she does, which is not thinking anything in particular, only letting it come in and settle, the way it has been coming in across her counter for years.
* * *
Then Patrice Mabry, who says it, said it.
“Delia. How long has it been since Chet?”
“Since Chet what?”
“Since you had to look at him.”
Delia Ruffin took her time with that one. She had a lime in her drink, pushed it under with her finger, and let it come back up.
“Sixteen days,” she said.
“That is very specific.”
“I know it is.”
“Delia.”
“I know.”
And there was a general sound from those chairs, the low collective one that women make for each other, and Erin Coffey took her feet out of the water and turned around.
“Say the thing,” Erin said. “You’ve been in that house by yourself all spring not saying the thing. There is nobody here.”
* * *
Here is what Chet Boyette did, as it came out of his wife in a lawn chair, in no particular order, the way it actually comes out.
He never raised his voice.
That is the part nobody believes, and it is the part that matters, so it goes first. In all those years, he did not yell once. He was patient. He was patient the way a man is patient with a dog that is not learning, and he was disappointed out loud, in a mild, reasonable tone, in front of whoever happened to be standing there.
He corrected her stories. Never the point of the story. Always a detail. It was a Tuesday, not a Wednesday. That was your cousin, not your sister. It was the fall, Delia. Small enough that she looked petty if she fought it, and constant enough that, after a while, she stopped telling stories at parties and let him tell them, which was always what it had been for.
He had opinions about what she ate, and he framed every one of them as concern for her health.
He handled the money. All of it. She had a card with a limit on it, and she had to say what the thing was for, and he never once said no. That is the part he would want said, and it is true and worth nothing. He never said no. He just made her ask, every time, for years, and asking is the whole machine.
And he said, more than once, at parties, in that light easy voice, that he had gotten lucky, because Delia would not have made it out there on her own.
“He’d say it like a compliment to himself,” Delia said. “Like, look at this charity I run.”
“I heard him say it,” Robin said. “At the Fourth of July thing. I heard him say it and I laughed.”
“Everybody laughed.”
“I want you to know I have thought about that laugh more times than I want to say.”
“Robin.”
“I have.”
* * *
And then Delia said the one that got the yard.
“The pool,” she said.
Nobody said anything.
“I asked for a pool for eleven years.” She looked at it. It was doing what water does in the afternoon, throwing that moving net of light up onto the fence. “Every spring. And every spring he had a reason, and the reason was always different, and it was never money, because there was money. It was the resale. It was the insurance. It was that I wouldn’t use it.”
“You are using it.”
“I am in it constantly,” Delia Ruffin said. “I am in it like a woman with a condition.”
She finished her drink.
“It took one spring. That’s the thing I keep chewing on, and I cannot get it down. It was never hard. It was never expensive. It was one phone call, and one truck and one spring, and I had water in it before the mosquitoes came.” She set the glass on her stomach. “Eleven years. He took eleven years off me for the pleasure of being the one who decided.”
Odessa Fontaine, who had not said a word in a while, sat up a little in her chair.
She has been alive a long time, and she has heard a great many women describe a great many men, and every so often one of them says a sentence that is not about the man at all. That was one. Delia Ruffin was not describing a marriage. She was describing a system she had worked out on her own, sitting in a house with the lights off, and nobody had helped her.
Which meant she was already most of the way out.
Which meant she only needed one afternoon.
Odessa did not yet know what the afternoon would be like. She had no plan in that chair. She had a melon and a gin and a grey temple, and she was, for once in two hundred years, simply at a party.
* * *
“All right,” said Patrice Mabry. “Enough of him. Tell them about Amos.”
And Delia Ruffin’s whole face changed, and every woman in that yard saw it happen.
“He’s fine,” said Delia.
“He’s fine.”
“He is a nice man, Patrice, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Delia Ruffin.” Patrice put her drink down. “I have known you since the ninth grade, and you have got the exact face on you right now that you had at your cousin’s wedding when nobody could find you for an hour.”
“I do not have a face.”
“Tell them.”
So she told them.
Amos Ledbetter does HVAC. He came out to the house the first winter she was in it by herself about the furnace, and he fixed it. He did not talk down to her about the furnace, which she said out loud like it was the remarkable part, and which every woman in that yard understood was in fact the remarkable part.
He is a large, easy man who takes his time about everything, answering included. He hasn’t provided a quick answer and doesn’t seem to be looking for one. He listens to a question all the way to the end before he starts on it, which Delia said took her about a month to stop finding suspicious.
And here is what she led with, before anything else, before a single word about how he looks or what he does in a bed:
“He doesn’t ask me where I’m going.”
Nobody said anything.
“I told him about this today. I said I’ve got the girls coming over. And he said okay, have fun, text me if you want me to bring ice.” She turned her glass around. “That’s it. That was the whole conversation. And I stood in my kitchen afterward a good while trying to figure out what I’d gotten away with.”
“Oh, honey,” said Tammy Skiles.
“And then I got mad, not at Amos. I sat down on my own kitchen floor and got mad, because it was the first time in my adult life a man had told me to enjoy myself. I started counting up all the afternoons I never went anywhere because it was easier to stay home than to explain where I was going.”
Erin Coffey said, quietly, “It’s never the big things.”
“No,” said Delia Ruffin. “It’s the Saturdays.”
* * *
They let her have it for a second and then Heather Bordelon, who had been cutting limes through the entire thing, put the knife down.
“Now do the other part.”
“What other part?”
“Delia.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You told Patrice. Patrice told me at the pharmacy. You do not get to tell one of us a thing like that at a pharmacy.”
Delia Ruffin covered her face with both hands and laughed into them, and it went on a while, and when she came out of it she was pink to the collarbone, and it was not the sun.
“It’s big,” she said.
“That is not a report.”
“What do you want, Heather?”
“I want a report.”
And Delia Ruffin, who had spent the better part of her adult life being corrected on the details of her own stories in front of other people, sat up in a lawn chair in a yard she owned outright and gave her first unedited account of anything in years.
“The first time I saw it I said a bad word out loud,” she said. “Not a sexy one. The one you say when a deer comes out at you.”
The yard came apart.
“I’m serious. I said it, and then I apologized to him. I apologized. To him. For being surprised by it.”
“What did he say?”
“He said it’s all right, it happens.” She wiped her eyes. “It happens. Like a flat tire.”
“Delia.”
“And the thing is, he’s not weird about it. That’s what I can’t get over. It’s not a personality. He does not bring it up. I have never once heard that man refer to it. He just goes about his business and then there it is, and it’s like somebody rolled a log into the room.”
“How long, though,” said Patrice.
“Patrice.”
“I am asking a serious question in a scientific spirit.”
“I’m not going to sit here and.”
“Show us with your hands, then.”
And Delia Ruffin looked around that yard at five women she had known most of her life, and then she showed them with her hands.
There was a silence with some length on it.
“That is a lie,” said Robin Poteet.
“It is not.”
“Delia, that is a farm implement.”
“I know it.”
“Does it work? Is it usable? Because I have heard things about that.”
“It works fine,” said Delia. “It works fine because he asks. That’s the whole trick. He is the only man I have ever been with who asks, and he asks every time, and he does not get his feelings hurt by the answer. And I have decided I am never going to explain that to anybody again because everybody wants to talk about the size.”
“We do want to talk about the size,” said Heather Bordelon.
“I know you do.”
* * *
They swam.
That went on a good while, and there is not much to tell about it, except one thing.
Nobody in that pool was hiding. That was the whole flavor of the afternoon, and it is why what happened later happened the way it did. Six women in their late forties in daylight, in a yard, in suits bought for bodies they actually have. Tammy with the cesarean line she has had longer than she had the marriage. Robin’s arms. Patrice, who has never in her life been the pretty one, figured out around thirty that she did not have to be, and has been the most fun person in every room since.
And Odessa Fontaine came out of that water, stood on the concrete, let it run off her, and did not once put a hand anywhere.
She is heavy through the chest and always has been. She has a soft belly and a long back, and she stood there in the sun, wringing out her hair with her weight on one hip while six women looked at her, and she did not pull one thing in, and she did not find a better angle.
That is the thing nobody expects. Not the body. It is the complete absence of apology attached to it, and it is the only thing she has ever done that has never once failed to work on anybody.
“Good Lord, Dess,” said Patrice Mabry.
“I know it, sugar.”
* * *
Amos Ledbetter showed up late in the afternoon with a bag of ice on each shoulder.
“Delia said to text her about ice,” he said to the gate, to nobody, to the yard in general. “I didn’t want to text her in the middle of her own party, so I just brought some.”
He was in swim trunks and a T-shirt gone soft at the neck, and he was, standing there, exactly as advertised. Not handsome. Big through the back and forearms in the way of a man who has spent his life carrying units up into attics, and unhurried with it, and comfortable.
The yard did not even pretend.
“Amos,” said Heather Bordelon. “Come sit.”
“I’m not going to run your party off.”
“Amos, honey, if you leave this yard right now, I will follow you home.”
He laughed at that, which was correct. He did not go red, and he did not get clever. He put the ice in the cooler and sat down on the edge of a chair with his elbows on his knees, and he was easy about it, and in no time he was in the pool with a drink balanced on the concrete, letting Robin Poteet tell him at length about her HVAC.
That is what he is. That is the whole of him, and it is more than most.
Patrice waited about as long as she could.
“Amos.”
“Ma’am.”
“Do not call me ma’am; I will get ideas. Amos, has Delia told us anything about you?”
“I hope not.”
“She has told us one thing.”
Amos Ledbetter looked over at Delia Ruffin, in the shallow end, with her hair wet and her chin up, and she looked right back at him, and she did not say one word, and something crossed his face that was not embarrassment.
“Well,” he said. “All right.”
“That’s it? That’s your statement?”
“Ma’am, I’ve had it my whole life. It’s not a talent. It’s like being tall.” He took a drink. “People want you to have a story about it. I don’t have one.”
“Delia said she apologized to it.”
“She did,” said Amos. “I felt bad.”
And they came apart again, all seven of them, in the water and out of it, and Delia Ruffin put her head back on the concrete lip of a pool she had paid for herself and laughed at the sky, and it was, up to that exact moment, the best afternoon of Delia Ruffin’s grown life.
* * *
Chet Boyette came around the side of the house while the light was still good.
He did not knock. That is the first thing. The gate was latched, and he reached over it and unlatched it, and he came into that yard with his keys in his hand and his sunglasses up on his head like a man arriving at a job site.
Everything stopped.
“Delia.”
“Chet.”
“I don’t want anything. I saw the cars.”
“You saw the cars.”
“I was going by.” He looked at the pool while he said it. He could not look at the pool. “And I wanted to check the meter box on the side there, because when they trenched for that thing they were nowhere near careful enough about it, and if that box has settled it’s going to be your problem in about two years, and you’re not going to know until it is.”
“It isn’t your problem anymore.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Then why are you in my yard?”
“I’m doing you a favor, Delia.”
There it was. The whole man in one helpful sentence, and every woman in that yard who had heard him do it at a Fourth of July cookout heard it again.
Odessa Fontaine sat perfectly still in a low chair with a drink on her stomach and started, for the first time that afternoon, to pay a different kind of attention.
* * *
They argued for a while, and it was not a good argument because Delia was better at it than she used to be, and he had not been told.
He tried the reasonable voice. She did not take it. He tried disappointed, and she laughed at him, one syllable, and Odessa watched him blink at that laugh like a man who has walked into a screen door in his own house.
“You’ve been drinking.”
“I’m at my own pool.”
“I’m only saying I can smell it and the sun’s still up.”
“Chet, there are six grown women in this yard and every one of them can hear you.”
“I’m not doing anything to you.”
“You never were,” said Delia Ruffin. “That was always the trick of it.”
And that landed, and he did not have a thing for it, and for about a second Chet Boyette stood in the grass with nothing at all in his hands.
Then he saw Amos.
* * *
He had not seen him. That is the only charitable thing in this entire account. Amos Ledbetter had been in the water with his back to the gate the whole time, and he came up out of the shallow end at the wrong moment, dripping, the whole considerable length of him, and Chet Boyette turned and found him.
You could watch it happen. You could watch a man decide to feel better.
“Oh,” Chet said. “Oh, okay.”
“Chet.”
“No, no. That’s fine. That’s great.” He was smiling now, and it was the real thing, the relief of a drowning man finding a floor. “This is the furnace guy.”
“His name is Amos.”
“I know his name, Delia; he’s been in my house.” He turned to the yard, to the audience, because there was an audience and he had spent his whole life waiting for one. “You all know he’s been in my house? He came out about the unit. Two years ago. Sat right in my kitchen and drank my coffee.”
Nobody said anything.
“How’s business, Amos? Slow season?”
“It’s all right.”
“Because I’d have thought summer would be your time. All these units going out.” He put his sunglasses down and then pushed them back up again, which is a thing men do when they are not sure they are winning. “You still got the truck with the sign on it? I see that truck everywhere. I said to a guy at work, I said, that fella is everywhere.”
“That’s the job.”
“Sure it is. Sure.” Chet Boyette looked him up and down, slow, taking his time, doing it so everybody could see him. “Well. Delia’s always liked a project.”
The yard went cold.
Heather Bordelon put her drink down on the concrete hard enough to hear.
And Amos Ledbetter, all of him, standing in a pool with water running off his forearms, looked at Chet Boyette for a long moment and then said, in a voice with absolutely nothing in it:
“You’re in her yard, buddy.”
That was all. That was the entire contribution of Amos Ledbetter to that conversation, to the argument, and to the day.
And it was enough, and Chet could not let it be enough, and that is when Odessa Fontaine got out of her chair.
* * *
Here is what she saw, and she saw all of it in about the time it takes to stand up out of a low chair.
There are two kinds of certain men, and she has been sorting them her whole life. The first kind has something underneath it. Not much, usually, and never as much as he thinks, but something, and when you get down to it there is a floor, and you stop.
The second kind has nothing under it at all. It is a shell with a man’s voice coming out of it, and the whole apparatus is held up by other people agreeing not to look, and it has been held up that way so long that he has genuinely forgotten there is nothing in there.
Chet Boyette was the second kind, and he was not even a good one.
And here is the part that made Odessa Fontaine sit forward.
He had already lost.
That is not usually available. In her experience, you have to take a man’s certainty away from him yourself, in a room, over an hour, and it is slow work and half of them fight the whole way. This one had already been taken. A judge had taken it. The house was gone, and the truck was gone, and most of the money was gone, and he had lost all of it because a woman he had spent years correcting in front of company had quietly gotten better at it than he was.
And he was standing in her yard anyway. With his keys in his hand. Doing the voice.
That is not confidence. That is a man who has put something up in a jar and set it on a back shelf and walked past it every day for years without once looking at the lid, and there is no heavier thing on this earth, and Odessa had never once had one of them handed to her at a party.
She thought, standing up out of that chair, with the ice going in the cooler and the light coming off the water: oh.
And then she thought: I am going to need somebody to measure him against.
That was the first time it occurred to her. She wants that noted, because she has spent two hundred years thinking about quantity and it took a man in golf shorts to knock it loose. She has always worked in volume. Thirteen boys in a ring at a sorority house, because boys are thin and bright and you need an armful of it. Four husbands at a table in a locked library, because that was heavier and she thought four was the floor.
Shame is not a quantity. It never was. Shame is a comparison, and a comparison needs exactly two.
She had a ruler standing in the shallow end of that pool, and she had the thing to be measured standing in the grass insulting him.
Two.
* * *
She did not hurry. She has never once had to hurry.
She got up out of the low chair, took her time getting there, and stopped a good ways off because a woman who comes close is asking for something, and a woman who stops short is not.
“Mister Boyette.”
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“I live in the brick house on the corner.”
“Okay.”
“You have been in this yard a few minutes,” Odessa said, “and you have told everybody out here three separate times what kind of man you are. About the meter box. About whose kitchen he sat in. About projects.”
“I don’t know what you think you’re.”
“I am not finished, sugar.” She had not raised her voice, and she was not going to. She never has. “Nobody in this yard believes you. Not one woman out here. Not your wife, not her friends, not me, and I have known you eleven minutes.”
“She is not my wife.”
“No,” said Odessa Fontaine. “She isn’t.”
The yard was very quiet.
“You did not come about a meter box. You came because you drove past and saw water in a hole you spent eleven years telling that woman she could not have, and you needed to see her face about it.” Odessa let that sit exactly as long as it needed. “And now you’ve found a man in it, and you have decided the way out is to stand in the grass and be bigger than him with your mouth.”
“This is unbelievable.”
“It surely is.”
“Delia. Who is this?”
“Her name is Odessa,” said Delia Ruffin, from the water, “and I would let her finish.”
Odessa did not finish. She has never once finished one of these herself, and she was not going to start in a backyard.
She turned her back entirely on the man, which is something she does, and spoke to the woman standing in the water.
“Delia, sugar. He has come all the way over here to ask you one question, and he is never going to get it out of his mouth. Do you want to hear it?”
Delia Ruffin did not say anything.
“He wants to know if you did better than him.”
The yard went so quiet that you could hear the filter running.
“Well,” said Odessa Fontaine. “Did you?”
And Delia Ruffin stood in the shallow end of a pool she had paid for herself, with her hair flat to her head and no makeup on and a man she had been married to eleven years standing up in the grass over her, and she took her time about it.
“Yes,” she said.
“Say it so he gets it.”
“I did better.” She said it slowly, pitched it to carry to the fence line, and did not look away from him once. “I did so much better than you, Chet, that I am ashamed of the years I spent not knowing there was any such thing as better.”
Odessa Fontaine nodded once, the way she nods at a hem that has come out right.
“There,” she said, to Chet Boyette. “You have gotten her word on it, in front of everybody, and that woman has never lied to you in her life. Take it and go on home.”
And then she turned around and walked back to her chair and sat down in it and picked her drink up off the concrete.
Because there was nothing else to do. Because a thing you are given is not the same as a thing you take, and because she has learned over a very long time that the fastest way to make a room do something is to make it clear you have stopped asking.
* * *
Patrice Mabry got there first, which surprised nobody.
“Well?” She was up out of her chair and across the grass before anybody else had moved, black one-piece, straps still down, and she planted herself in front of Chet Boyette and not one place else. “That’s all of it, Chet. She said it out loud in front of six women. Take her word for it and go home.”
“I’m not doing this with you.”
“You’ve been doing it since you came through that gate.”
“Patrice, I have known you a long time.”
“You have. You’ve known me since before you married her, and in all that time you have never once said a word to me that wasn’t about yourself.” She folded her arms. “Take her word for it, Chet. Get in the car.”
And Chet Boyette, who could have done exactly that, who had a gate behind him and a whole street past it, said the stupidest sentence of his entire life.
He looked over at Amos Ledbetter standing in the shallow end with the water running off his arms. And he laughed, one syllable, the way he laughs at a man’s truck.
“Come on,” he said. “She didn’t trade up.”
* * *
The yard made a sound.
Not a laugh. It was on its way to being a laugh, and it did not get there, and that half sound is the worst noise a man can hear from a group of women, and every one of them knows it.
“Trade up,” said Heather Bordelon.
“You know what I meant.”
“I know exactly what you meant. So does everybody in this yard.” Heather had not put the lime knife down. “Nobody out here was talking about that, Chet. Not one of us. You are the only person in this grass who has been thinking about it.”
“I’m not going to stand here and.”
“Then don’t,” said Robin Poteet. “Go on. Nobody’s holding the gate shut.”
He did not go.
Erin Coffey, who had not said ten words since lunch, took her feet out of the water for the second time that afternoon.
“He’s worried about it,” Erin said.
“I am not.”
“Then settle it,” said Delia.
* * *
She came up out of that pool to say it.
That is the thing Odessa will keep. Not the rest of it.
Delia Ruffin came up the steps out of the shallow end with the water sheeting off her, hair flat to her head, not one thing on her face, and that wetsuit stuck to every part of her.
She is heavy through the chest, and for years that man had been telling her to put something on over it before people came. She did not have a thing on over it now. Her nipples were up hard against the fabric from the cold, and she did not fold her arms, and she did not reach for a towel. The suit sat high enough on the hip that when she came up out of that water and put her weight on one leg, every woman in the yard got a good long look at exactly what he had been coming home to and correcting at parties.
She walked across her own grass and stopped in front of him and put a hand on her hip.
And she said it in the exact flat voice you would use to move a meeting along.
“Settle it. Both of you. Right here.”
“Delia, you have lost your mind.”
“Maybe. Take your pants off.”
“I’m not.”
“Then get out of my yard,” she said, “and never come back to it, and I will tell every person we know for the rest of my life that I asked you to prove it, and you ran.”
Chet Boyette stood in the grass.
Odessa Fontaine watched him do the thing men of that specific kind do, and she had watched it in every century she had been in. He looked for the exit that let him be the one who decided. He looked at the gate, and it was not there. He looked at Delia, and it was not there. He looked at the six other women, one at a time, and every single one of them looked back at him, and Tammy Skiles, who is the kindest woman in that town, did not look away either.
And then he did it because the shell had no floor, and the alternative was walking out of that gate with his back to seven women.
“Fine,” said Chet Boyette. “Fine. This is insane. Fine.”
* * *
He took his time with the belt, which he thought was composure.
Amos Ledbetter came up out of the water when Delia asked him to and pushed his trunks down and stepped out of them and stood there, and that was the whole of it. He did not make a face. He did not put his hands anywhere. He looked over at Delia once, and she nodded once, and he said, “Okay,” and that was all he ever said about it.
The two of them stood in the grass a few feet apart, with the pool casting light on them both.
And there was nothing to discuss.
It was not close. It was nowhere near close. Amos Ledbetter’s soft was more than Chet Boyette had ever been in his life, heavy and thick and hanging halfway down his thigh, the kind of thing that does not look like it belongs to a person. Chet was small and tight up against himself in the way of a man who has just gotten out of a cold pool, except that he had not been in the pool.
Nobody said a word for a long moment. Somebody’s ice shifted in a glass.
“Well,” said Patrice Mabry.
“Don’t,” said Robin.
“I’m not going to say it.”
“You’re going to say it.”
“I am not going to say it, Robin.”
And then Patrice Mabry put her hands up in front of her, out wide, the way Delia had done it in the lawn chair earlier. She held them there long enough that everybody in that yard got it.
Then she started bringing them in.
She took her time. She brought them in and in and in, past anything a man would tell his friends about, until her palms were damn near touching, and then she looked at Chet Boyette over the top of them with her eyebrows up and said, in the politest voice she has:
“I’m just measuring.”
The yard went.
All of it, all at once. Heather Bordelon with a lime still in her hand. Tammy Skiles, who does not laugh at people. Robin Poteet had to put her drink down on the concrete because she could not hold on to it, and Delia Ruffin got her face into both hands and her shoulders went and did not stop going for a while.
That is where it turned. Odessa has been at this a long time, and she can tell you the exact second a room quits being uncomfortable and becomes something that is happening to somebody, and it is always a laugh. It is never a word. A word he could have argued with.
Chet Boyette stood in his ex-wife’s grass with his pants around his shoes and listened to a yard full of women laugh at him.
And then the yard opened up on him.
Here is the thing Odessa wants understood about the next twenty minutes, and she has thought about it a great deal since, because she has built rooms like it on purpose and this one she did not build.
She did not have to say anything. Not one word. She sat in a low chair with a drink on her stomach and her ankles crossed and she watched six women who had been at cookouts with that man for years, who had heard him do the bit about how Delia would not have made it out there on her own, who had all laughed at it at least once, hand it back to him.
Heather Bordelon never did put the lime knife down. Patrice dragged a chair off the concrete, set it in the grass in front of him, and sat down with her drink and her legs crossed close, the way you sit down in front of a television.
What they did to him over the next while was cruel, and they were entitled to it. It is important to say why, because there is a kind of person who will read this and want to feel sorry for him. This was not a man who had been unlucky. This was a man who had spent years taking pieces off a woman with a mild voice in front of company, and who had lost a house over it, and who had walked into her yard on the first good afternoon of her life to take a piece off her about a swimming pool.
Nobody in that yard owed him one thing.
“Say the meter box part again,” said Heather Bordelon.
“That’s not.”
“No, do it again. Do the voice. You were doing a voice.”
Robin Poteet said, “I want to talk about the Fourth of July.”
“Robin.”
“You said she wouldn’t have made it out there on her own. You said it standing by my husband’s grill with a beer in your hand.” Robin Poteet was not smiling. “She has a house and a truck and a pool. What have you got, Chet? What is it you’re standing in this grass with?”
“You people are.”
“Answer her,” said Erin Coffey.
He did not answer her.
Tammy Skiles said it almost gently, which was worse than anything anybody else did to him out there.
“I always thought you were an unhappy man. I want you to know I defended you on that. When Delia would turn up to things by herself with that look on her face I’d say, well, we don’t know what Chet’s carrying.”
She had her hands folded in her lap.
“And I have been standing in this yard the whole afternoon waiting for the sad part, and there is not one. There’s no dead brother. Your daddy didn’t beat you. Nothing ever happened to you, Chet. You had a good job and a good woman and a house with a yard, and you spent every single day of it making sure the one person who loved you understood she was lucky you’d settled for her.”
She picked her drink back up.
“That’s not a man in pain. That’s just how you are.”
* * *
And Delia Ruffin stood in front of him and did the one that ended it, and it was not about his body, and she never once mentioned his body.
“I want to tell you what I used to do,” she said.
“Delia, don’t.”
“You never once asked. In all those years.” She had her arms folded, still dripping onto her own grass. “I made lists. That’s what I did. While you were on top of me. I did the grocery list, and then I did the list of what I had to do at work Monday, and if I got done with both of them and you weren’t finished, I would start on Christmas.”
Nobody in that yard breathed.
“I was not scared of you. That’s the part I want you to take home tonight, because I know you have got a whole story about yourself in that car and I want to put a hole in it.” She tipped her head. “Everybody thinks a man like you is frightening. You’re not. You were boring. You were the most boring thing that ever happened to me, and I gave you eleven years of afternoons for it, and the worst part of my entire life is not one thing you did. It’s that I was bored the whole time and I thought that was what it was.”
Chet Boyette stood in the grass and made a small sound.
“And you were never going to be told,” said Delia. “That’s why we’re out here. You made it so there was no way to tell you. So now there’s seven of us.”
* * *
He was hard.
That is the part he could not do anything about. It is the part Odessa had been waiting on since the belt came off, because she has been doing this a very long time. She had known it was coming since before he got the belt undone, the way a woman who cuts cloth for a living knows which way a bolt is going to fall before the shears are anywhere near it.
It happens. It nearly always happens, and no man to whom it has ever happened has been able to explain it afterward, and the inability to explain it is worth more than the thing itself.
It had come up on him somewhere in the middle of Robin and the Fourth of July. Small, and hard, and pointing, and there was not one thing in that yard for him to put in front of it.
Patrice Mabry saw it first.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
“It’s not.”
“Honey, we can all see it. It’s right there. It’s been right there since Robin started.”
“That’s a physical reaction. That doesn’t mean anything; that’s just a physical reaction.”
“Finish it,” said Heather Bordelon. “You started a sentence, Chet. Say the whole thing out loud and let us all hear how it comes out.”
He could not say it all the way to the end.
Erin Coffey said, “He likes it.”
“I do not like it.”
“You do.” Erin got up off the edge of the pool. Erin Coffey, who says nothing, who has said nothing at every table in that town for twenty years, walked over and stood closer to him than anybody else had. “You have been standing in this yard getting told the truth about yourself by seven women in Delia’s back yard, and that is the hardest anybody has ever seen you. I have known that woman a long while. She’d have told me.”
“She would have,” said Delia.
* * *
That was Odessa’s cue, and she took it, because there is a moment in every one of these when the room has done all it is going to do on its own, and if you let it go past, everybody gets embarrassed and goes home.
She got up, went to the drinks table, dumped the limes out of the big glass bowl into the sink through the kitchen window, rinsed it with the hose, carried it out into the grass, and set it down on the concrete lip of the pool. The pool light had come on by then. It lit that bowl up from underneath like something on an altar.
“That was his mother’s,” said Delia Ruffin.
“I know it, sugar.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you looked at it twice this afternoon and neither time was about limes.”
Delia Ruffin laughed once, and it came out of her wrong, and she put a hand over her mouth.
Odessa Fontaine straightened up and looked at the two men standing in the grass with their clothes around their shoes, and she said the only thing she said out loud to that whole yard all evening.
“Gentlemen. There is one more piece of business, and then you can both be on your way.”
She did not explain it. She rarely has to.
* * *
Chet Boyette said no.
He said no about four different ways, and each one was a different flavor of the same thing: a man asking the room to let him leave with something.
“I’m done. I’m going.”
“Go on, then,” said Delia.
He did not go.
That is the entire matter, right there, and anybody who has been around a man like that will recognize it. The gate was open. It had been open the whole time. Nobody in that yard had laid a hand on him or was going to. He stood there with his belt hanging open and his mother’s punch bowl on the concrete in front of him, and he did not go, because going meant that this had been done to him, and staying meant he was still the one deciding.
He would rather have been ruined on purpose than rescued by accident. Odessa has watched men do it for two hundred years, and she has never once seen one come out the other side.
“Chet,” said Delia Ruffin.
And then she did it. She did the voice.
She did his voice. The patient one. The mild, reasonable, disappointed one that he had used on her at kitchen counters and in cars and in front of company for years, and she had it down perfectly, because she had heard it more times than she had heard her own children’s.
“Honey. I’m not mad at you.” Delia had her arms folded. “I just think you can do better than that.”
Chet Boyette made a noise like something tearing.
“Nobody’s making you do anything,” she said, in his voice, in that same soft helpful register. “I’m just telling you how it looks.”
He put his hand on himself.
“There you go,” said Delia Ruffin. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
* * *
He cried the whole way through it.
Nobody stopped. Nobody came close to stopping, and Odessa has never once been sorry about it.
“Look at that grip,” Patrice said. She had not gotten up out of the chair she had dragged over. She had her drink on her knee. “Delia. Is that how he does it?”
“That’s how he does it.”
“Honey, that’s a fist. That’s how you’d get the lid off a jar.”
“He has always done it like that.”
“Chet, honey, you’re going to hurt yourself.” Patrice took a drink. “Please do.”
Heather Bordelon did the meter box voice again, did it better the second time, and got the word “settled” into it twice.
Robin Poteet stood with her arms crossed and said his name flat every time he shut his eyes. Every time she said it, he opened them. She made him do it a good deal more than she had to.
And then Erin Coffey, who does not go in for any of this and never has, said the one that got the first real sound out of him.
“Look at Amos.”
“Erin,” said Delia.
“No. Look at him, Chet.” Erin had not moved one step from where she was standing. “He has been out here this whole time. He hasn’t said a word. He is not enjoying this, and he is not embarrassed, and he has not looked at you one single time, and you cannot keep your mind off him.”
The yard got quiet again.
“That’s who you’re thinking about,” said Erin Coffey. “Isn’t it?”
“Shut up.”
“You’re the one who made it a contest. Nobody out here brought it up but you, and now you’ve got your hand on yourself in the grass, and you can’t finish without thinking about him.” She shrugged. “I’m not being ugly. I’m telling you what I can see from here.”
* * *
And Delia Ruffin stayed in his voice.
That is what did it. That is the thing that took him apart, and she never once broke out of it, not for a second, not at the end.
“Honey, I’m not criticizing.” She had her arms folded over her wet swimsuit, and she stood close enough that he could not find one place to put his eyes that was not her. “I just think if you slowed down you might get more out of it.”
“Delia.”
“I’m only bringing it up because I care about you.”
“Delia.”
“Do you really think you need to go at it like that?” Not one inch off pleasant. Not one. “I’m not going to say anything. But somebody has to.”
“How long does he usually take?” said Patrice, to Delia, over the top of him, the way you talk about a man who is not in the room.
“Patrice.”
“I’m asking for science.”
And Delia Ruffin looked at the man she had been married to eleven years, working himself in her grass in front of everybody she knows, and she came out of his voice into her own for exactly one sentence.
“You want a number, Patrice?” said Delia Ruffin. “I never once made it out of the produce section.”
That is the sentence. Odessa was in a low chair with a drink on her stomach, and she felt the whole yard tilt.
Chet Boyette made a noise, and his hand went faster, and everybody out there saw it go faster, and Patrice Mabry said, “Oh, he liked that one,” and Robin Poteet said, “He surely did,” and Heather Bordelon laughed with a lime in her hand.
“Slow down,” said Delia, in his voice again, gentle as a hand on your arm. “There’s no hurry. You’ve got all night.”
He did not have all night. He had about a minute.
* * *
He tried to turn his back at the end.
That is the only thing that man asked for in that yard, and he did not even ask for it out loud; he simply started to come around to face the fence.
“No,” said Delia Ruffin. “You’re going to face us.”
He faced them.
He got there fast, in front of seven women in swimsuits and a naked man a few feet off him who had not looked at him one time since he said his one sentence, and at the end he shut his eyes and said something under his breath that nobody out there could make out and that Odessa Fontaine heard perfectly well and has never repeated to a living soul.
Then his knees went soft, and he had to put a hand out on nothing at all, and he made a sound that was not a sound anybody in that yard had ever heard a grown man make.
He did not miss the bowl. Odessa has been doing this a long while, and they never do.
His mother’s punch bowl took every last bit of it.
* * *
He picked his pants up off the grass, buckled them, and did not look at anyone on his way to the gate.
At the gate he stopped.
“Delia.”
“Don’t.”
“I want to say.”
“I don’t care,” said Delia Ruffin, and she turned her back on him and walked down into her own pool.
He stood there a second with his hand on the latch. And Odessa Fontaine, who was closest, saw his face while nobody else in that yard was looking at it, and there was nothing on it at all. Not anger. Not shame yet, because shame takes about a day. Just a man who had come around the side of a house to check a meter box and had been emptied on the grass, standing in a gate looking at a hole in the ground full of water that he had said no to for eleven years for the pleasure of being the one who said it.
Then he went, and they heard the car start, and nobody in that yard ever saw him again.
* * *
Amos Ledbetter was still standing where he had been the whole time.
“You okay?” said Delia, from the water.
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“Wasn’t mine to say.”
And every woman in that yard looked at him a little differently after that, and he did not notice, which is Amos.
“Well,” said Patrice Mabry, “you are not going to stand there and let that man do it by himself, Delia. That would be rude.”
“Patrice.”
“It’s a matter of hospitality.”
“Amos,” said Delia Ruffin. “Do you want to?”
And that is the difference between the two men, and it is why the whole thing works, and Odessa would like it written down plainly.
Nobody asked Chet. Nobody in that yard asked Chet Boyette one single question all evening, because he had spent years making sure there was no way to ask him anything, and by the time they got him in the grass there was nothing left to ask.
Delia asked Amos.
“Sure,” he said.
* * *
She came up out of the water for the second time in an hour and stood next to him and put her hand on him, and there was not one thing careful about it.
The yard got loud immediately. That is worth saying, because the yard had been the quietest place on that street for a good while and this was not that at all. Heather Bordelon said good Lord out loud twice. Tammy Skiles, who had come to a pool party, sat forward in her chair with a drink she had forgotten she was holding.
He was enormous and getting worse. Delia had both hands on him inside a minute, and she needed them, and she was laughing, and she was doing it in front of five women she had known since she was a girl, and she was not embarrassed about one second of it.
“Say it,” Patrice said.
“Say what?”
“You know exactly what.”
“I am not going to.”
And then Amos Ledbetter came all the way up in Delia Ruffin’s two hands, all of him, and Delia looked down at what she was holding and said it, quiet, to nobody, in the flat startled voice you use when a deer comes up out of the ditch at you.
“Oh, shit.”
The yard lost every bit of what it had left.
“Amos, honey, look at me,” said Heather Bordelon. “Is she good at that?”
“Yes ma’am,” said Amos Ledbetter, with some difficulty.
“That’s a good man.”
He had his hand flat on the back of Delia’s neck, not pushing, just resting there, and every so often he would say her name, and every time he said it she went a shade darker across the chest and worked him harder for it.
“Delia,” he said, toward the end.
“I know.”
“I’m going to.”
“I know it. Look at me while you do.”
And Delia Ruffin walked him over to the concrete with both hands still on him, the way you walk a horse, and stood him over Chet Boyette’s mother’s punch bowl, and finished him into it herself.
It went on considerably longer than the other one had. It kept going after everybody thought it was done, and then it went again, and Heather Bordelon said good Lord for the third time that evening.
Robin Poteet said, into the silence afterward, in a voice of pure scientific wonder:
“Sweet mother of God.”
Amos got his breath and said, “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know,” said Amos Ledbetter. “Felt like I ought to say something.”
* * *
They kept him.
Nobody planned it. Patrice said it as a joke, which is how most true things get said in a backyard, and Amos Ledbetter thought about it the way he thinks about everything, all the way to the end of the question, and then shrugged and said he didn’t have anywhere to be.
So he did not put the trunks back on.
He carried drinks. He got the citronella lit. He got a jar down off the top shelf in Delia’s kitchen for Tammy, entirely nude, in a kitchen, at dusk, and Tammy Skiles laughed so hard about it she had to go sit down on the step.
He was completely comfortable. That was the wonderful part. He was not performing, and he was not sheepish about it, and he did not once make a joke, and after a while the yard stopped remarking on it, and then it was simply an evening with a large naked man refilling the ice.
“Delia,” said Erin Coffey, quietly, at one point.
“Don’t start.”
“I have been coming to your house since we were girls and I have never once seen you like this.”
“I know it.”
“That’s all I wanted to say.”
* * *
Odessa Fontaine picked up the bowl off the concrete a little after full dark, and said something about running it home to wash it, and nobody in that yard asked her one question about it.
They never do. A woman carrying dishes is the most invisible thing there is.
She left the truck sitting out front where it was, because a truck in a driveway is a woman who has every intention of coming back, and she went out through the gate in the back fence, the one that puts her own yard against Delia’s. It is nine steps. She has counted them.
She let herself into a dark house and did not turn on a single light.
* * *
She stood in her own kitchen for a while, the bowl on the counter and the party coming through the window screen.
That is the part she would like on the record, if she is going to be honest about this, and she always is—the noise. The whole thing happened with a pool party going on the other side of a fence, close enough that she could hear Heather Bordelon telling a story she had already told twice and Patrice not letting her get to the end of it.
She got out of the swimsuit and hung it on the back of a chair.
Then she stood in her own dark kitchen with nothing on and both hands down in that bowl, and she did not go near the front room, because there is a long mirror in the front room and she knows exactly what she is capable of in front of a mirror.
That is a thing she learned at a club a long way from here, on a night she does not intend to write down.
* * *
It was two men. That is all it was. Two men, in a punch bowl, in a kitchen, and she had spent two centuries believing that a working needed a crowd.
It was more than she had ever gotten out of thirteen.
She knew it before her hands were all the way in. She could tell the vintage off the surface the way other people can tell a wine, and this came up off it in the dark, and she had to put a hand flat on the counter.
Boys give you striving. It is thin and bright and clean, and it goes in like water, and it is gone by spring.
Four husbands at a table gave her fear, and it was heavier and darker and slower, and she had guessed low about it.
This was neither one.
This had been improperly sealed and left in the dark to spoil.
Here is the thing about a man like Chet Boyette. He had already lost everything before he ever came around the side of that house. It was gone. It was gone in a courthouse, and it stayed gone, and he had simply decided not to look at it, and he had gone on doing the voice and driving past the house and checking on meter boxes that were not his, and the entire time the whole of it was sitting up on that shelf with the lid still on.
And in one evening, in a yard, in front of seven women, every bit of it got looked at, at the same time, out loud, with nowhere to put his eyes.
That is not shame the way she has handled shame before. Shame is a thing that comes in over years and settles. This was a jar going off in one afternoon in a yard, all of it at once, in a man who had never once in his life gotten the lid up. Odessa Fontaine stood in her own dark kitchen with her hands full of it and understood that she had been doing this wrong since before that town had a courthouse.
She had been collecting a great deal of thin, fresh, honest material.
She had never once gotten her hands on something that had been going bad in the dark since before the divorce.
* * *
And here is the other half of it. She nearly did not see it, and it is the whole reason two was enough.
Amos Ledbetter is not ashamed of one single thing.
There is nothing in that man. He has carried what he has got his entire life and never built a story out of it, never traded on it, never once brought it up in a room. He got his trunks off in that grass in front of seven women with every bit of himself showing, and it did not cost him a nickel, because there was nothing in him for it to come out of.
She had thought he was the ruler, but he was a good deal more than that.
You cannot tell if a jar has gone off by looking at it. You can stand there and study it all afternoon. The man holding it surely cannot tell, and Chet Boyette had been holding his and walking past it for years and had honestly never once known what was in there.
You open a good one next to it. That is how you find out. That is the only way anybody has ever found out.
Amos Ledbetter stood in that grass being exactly what he is, clean the whole way through, nothing hidden and nothing performed and nothing owed to anybody, and the second he did it every woman in that yard could see what Chet Boyette was.
And so could Chet Boyette.
That is the part that goes in the bowl. Not the size. The size was the only thing that made it impossible for him to argue. What broke that man was standing next to somebody honest and finding out, at his age, in his ex-wife’s yard, undressed from the belt down, that the thing he had been certain of his whole life had gone bad a long time ago, and that everybody else had been able to smell it for years, and that he was the last person in that yard to know.
One rotten and one clean. The clean one is not the fuel.
The clean one is the light you hold the other one up to.
Two.
She has been alive for two hundred years, and she worked that out in the dark over a punch bowl from a pool party. She thought about a room at the Arbor Club with a long table in it and four men standing at the end of it, and about a house on Lorimer Street with thirteen boys in a ring on the floor, and she laughed out loud in an empty kitchen.
All that trouble. All that planning. Years of it.
She had needed two the entire time.
* * *
She did it standing up at the sink.
The material would not go in easy. It never does when it is any good, and this was the best she has ever had her hands in. It sat on her skin, thick and slow, and she had to work it, pushing it in with the heels of both hands, the way you work oil into a board that has gone too long without any, a little at a time, giving up nothing.
She started at her chest because there was no reason not to.
Both hands full, sliding, her breasts heavy and slick in her own palms and getting heavier as it went, up under her arms and back across and down. In the dark, with the sound of a party going on a fence away, in a rented kitchen in a town she had picked mostly at random off a map because a shop had come available on the square.
She named them while she worked. That is not sentiment, and it is not decoration. Half of this business is knowing whose it is and what it cost him to give it up, and in two hundred years she has never once been able to skip that part and has never once wanted to.
This is Chet Boyette, who told a woman for years that she could not have a hole in her own backyard, and who lost the yard, and drove past it anyway, and stood in it with his pants around his shoes, crying, while she did his own voice back at him.
She put him in over her heart with the flat of both hands, and she was not gentle about it at all.
And this is Amos Ledbetter, who fixed a furnace and did not talk down about it, and who said one sentence to that man all afternoon and never needed a second one, and who is going to be carrying ice out of that kitchen for the rest of his natural life without once being asked to be anything else.
Him she took up her throat with the flats of her fingers, slow, chin up, all the way to the jaw. And when she was done with her throat she did not wipe her hand.
* * *
Here is what was different about this one, and she noticed it while it was happening, which she rarely does.
She had to be quiet.
Not the old quiet. The old quiet is a habit from a hundred boarding houses, and it does not cost her anything anymore. This was a screen window standing open over a sink, and six women in lawn chairs a fence away, and one of them liable to walk up to that window and holler through it about ice.
She had to be quiet because she had neighbors, and she had not had neighbors in a very long time.
So she put her left hand back over her heart to keep the working going, and she got the right one down between her legs, and she took the whole thing slow on purpose, because slow was the only way she was going to keep her mouth shut.
She started outside. She put two fingers flat along herself and pressed, no moving at all, just weight, until she could feel her own pulse come up under them. Then she went up, got her thumb on the hood, and pushed it back off the top of everything so nothing was covered, and she left it that way, and every bit of her that was uncovered started reporting in at once.
She was slick before she ever got to it. Some of that was hers, and some of it was two men out of a punch bowl, and she did not separate them, and she did not want to.
She got her middle finger down along the inside of the left lip and worked all the way down the length of it, slow, and then the right one, and then she used the whole flat of that hand and dragged everything up together, and had to lock her jaw over it.
Then she put two fingers inside herself and left them there, not moving, just filling it, and used the heel of that same hand on the outside, small and tight and hardly moving at all, and got her hips going against it in a way that did not make one sound against a kitchen cabinet.
And the whole time the left hand kept working two men into her chest, and the window kept letting the party in, and out in the dark a fence away Delia Ruffin was laughing at something on the first good night of that woman’s life, in a pool she had paid for out of her own money.
Odessa Fontaine got up on the balls of her bare feet at a kitchen sink and came so hard she had to get her forearm down on the counter and put her forehead on it and bite her own arm to do it in silence.
It went on a long while. She let it. She did not turn a light on, and she did not make one sound anybody could have heard through a screen.
* * *
Then the rest of it did what it does: it went looking.
It went to her hands first, which it has never done before, and she stood there in the dark and felt it get into the two knuckles on her right hand that have been closing up on her since winter. They opened. She flexed that hand in the dark over a sink, and it did the whole thing, all the way, with nothing catching anywhere, and that was the moment she understood what she had gotten hold of.
Then the right shoulder. Then a place low in her back she had quit thinking of as a place.
And it went to the temples and took the grey.
She felt it go. Both sides, at once, the way a stain comes up out of good linen, and she stood there with her hand on the counter and her eyes shut and knew exactly what she had in her hands.
There was a great deal more.
That is the part she needs to be plain about. She had not taken a tenth of it. She could feel it banked up in her chest with somewhere to go, and it was already reaching, already finding the line at her throat and the softness under her arm and the twenty other places she had quietly let happen on purpose so that nobody in that town would ever look at her twice.
It would have gone. It would have gone a long way. If she had stood at that sink and let it run, she would have walked out of her own back door young enough to be Delia Ruffin’s daughter, and she would have had to be over a state line by Monday, and there would have been no shop and no Saturdays and no yard.
There is a way to stop it.
She has known it since before there was a road out front. She learned it in a language nobody alive speaks, from a woman who was dead a long time before that town had a name, who taught her the whole business in a back room in another country and never once told her it would feel like anything.
Odessa Fontaine had never used that stop. Not one time in two hundred years. She has known where it was the way you know where the brake pedal is, and she has simply never in her life had a reason to put her foot down on it.
She put her foot down on it.
* * *
She stood there afterward in the dark with her hands on the counter and her heart going, and she was, she will admit, a little shaky about it.
Because it had wanted to go and she had wanted it to go, and she had not let it, and that is a thing she has never done.
Here is why, and it is not complicated, and it took her about four seconds.
Patrice Mabry’s daughter is getting married in the fall, and Patrice has already been in the shop twice about it but hasn’t decided and won’t be for months. Erin Coffey brings in her husband’s work pants, stands at the counter, and talks longer every time. Erin Coffey does not talk to people. Delia Ruffin had said an hour ago, with a naked man carrying ice past her, same time next Saturday, Dess, I mean it, this is a thing now.
She has been in nine towns. She has never once been in a yard.
And a woman who runs an alterations shop on a square, who has been seen every day for years by a pharmacist and a mail carrier and six women who have known each other since the ninth grade, cannot come out of a dark house looking like her own granddaughter and be there Monday at nine.
So she let it have the hands and the shoulder and the place in her back, because nobody in this world can see a knuckle.
She let it go up and take the grey, both temples, because the grey was the thing she had driven over there mad about.
And when it came up off the grey still hungry and went reaching for her face, she stopped it there.
* * *
She washed the bowl. She washed it properly with soap twice, dried it, and set it on the counter to carry back over in the morning.
Then she put on a dress and went back out through the gate, because it was still going, and because Heather had not gotten to the end of the story yet.
Amos Ledbetter handed her a drink at the gate without being asked. He had a dish towel over his shoulder and nothing else on him at all.
“You washed it?” said Delia.
“I did.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Sugar, I have wanted to get my hands on that bowl since the minute I came through that gate.”
Delia Ruffin laughed so hard at that she had to sit down, and never once in her life found out what it meant.
* * *
She got a look at herself Monday morning, in the same truck mirror, in the same hard flat light.
Both temples black as they ever were.
Her hands opened all the way, and her shoulder did not say one word to her, and her back was her back again, and none of that is anybody’s business but hers.
And her face was the exact face that pharmacist has been saying good morning to across a counter for years. Not one day off it. That was the whole point of the night, and it had cost her more to do than anything she has done in a hundred years, and there is not one living person she can ever tell.
She sat in the driveway a minute with the engine running and thought about the two of them. About a large kind man who said exactly one sentence to Chet Boyette all afternoon and is presently, she has every reason to believe, still over there. And about a man in golf shorts who had come around the side of a house to be the one who decided, and had gotten his wish, and had decided.
She figured she owed both of them a thank-you note.
She was not going to send one.
Then she backed the truck out of her own driveway, drove in, and opened up in a town she is not leaving, with a face nobody in it is ever going to look at twice.
Saturday is at Delia’s.
The End.
*The opinions/views expressed in this story (and in any comments) are those of the author and do not represent this site. We support freedom of speech. This story has been previously published on other free websites and is now in the public domain, so that we can republish it here.