He leaned back on his elbows. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“I bet your daddy is happy.”
“He is.”
“I bet your momma is, too.”
“It would’ve been good for her to see me sitting here.”
“I bet she’s smiling wherever she is.”
“I’d hope.”
Sarah held her hands together between her knees, fingers intertwined. She rubbed her thumbs together. “So. What are you gonna do? Help out Mitchell?”
“Nah. Mitchell doesn’t really have anything he needs help with anymore. He sold about everything except this one little house that I guess he hung on to for no other reason than me.”
He got up from the steps and walked to the truck and took out his cigarettes. He lit one as he walked back to her and sat down. He offered her one and she hesitated. Smiled and said I don’t do that anymore. Then she said what the hell. For old times’ sake. And she took one and he lit it and they sat together smoking.
“Nice house you got down there,” he said. “Blue. Your idea, I’m guessing.”
“Ride through there in the daytime and you’ll see all those big houses are white. Couldn’t stand it.”
“Neighbors like it?”
“All but one old woman who walked over after we were about halfway done and said we didn’t know how to respect a house like that.”
“What’d you say?”
“Nothing. Can’t say nothing to people like that.”
“Chicken.”
“Not chicken. Mature.”
“Same thing.”
He flicked his cigarette into the bushes and he thought of the girl who had spray-painted stop signs and shotgunned beers and skinnydipped. He thought of her not telling the old woman what she wanted to tell her. Maybe her kids had been standing within earshot. Maybe her husband. Maybe it was simply who she had become.
“You still mad at me?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No.”
“You sure?”
“I told you then and I tell you now. Nothing to be mad about. Seems like you told me the same thing.”
When it started she had made the four-hour drive twice a month to sit and talk with him for half an hour. Driving alone into the middle of God knows where, across the flat Delta lands and toward a concrete palace where the offenders survived one another. Frisked by men with guns. Touched in places where it would have been impossible to conceal anything. He had been embarrassed when she saw the kind of people he was living with and the kind of people who came to visit them. She had forced herself into smiling and forced herself into talking of the world outside the walls though her strained expression did little to conceal what she truly felt.
“I don’t think I can come back, Russell,” she had said after two years of visits. Her voice wavering and her eyes glassy.
“I wouldn’t if I was you. No sense in it.” He had known it was coming and in some ways was relieved to hear it but he answered staring at the tabletop between them.
“What do you mean no sense?”
“No sense in it. You know what I mean.”
“You don’t have to put it that way,” she said.
“There’s no other way to put it.”
“I know.”
“Good. I know, too. Go and don’t come back.” He had practiced being harsh in the solace of his cell, talking to a cinder block as if it were the woman he loved. The woman he knew he had to persuade to get on with her life.
“I mean it,” he said. “Don’t come back.”
She looked around at the other people. Fought to keep from crying. Then he told her that there was nothing easy about it. It don’t matter if we do it now or tomorrow or a year from now. There won’t be anything easy about it ever and the only thing to do is just get up and go get in the car and go. Don’t even look at me.
So she did. She pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped her nose and eyes and didn’t look at him as she got up and didn’t look as she walked to the door and as she drove across the Delta she reached up and snapped off her rearview mirror and threw it out the window.
There had only been one more letter three years later which explained her new life. He had flushed the letter down the toilet but he kept the envelope it came in so that maybe one day he could go to the address on it and try to get her to look at him again. Like she was now.
“You want a beer?” he asked.
“I’m already smoking when I shouldn’t be.”
“Why shouldn’t you be?”
“Because, Russell.”
“So. You want one or not?”
“I want one. But I’m not drinking one. I gotta pick up the kids.”
“Kids. Plural.”
“Plural.”
“How many?”
“Twin boys and a girl.”
“How old?”
“The boys are four and the girl is about a year and a half.”
“And who is our hero?”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“I know. Sorry.”
“I thought you said you weren’t mad.”
“I’m not mad at you. But there’s a lot of shit I am mad at. Seems you’d understand that.”
She set her cigarette down on the step. “I can.”
“Seems of all the people I know you’d understand it.”