A tear crept to the edge of her right eye and trembled there. “You’re kind of missing the point. I can’t take care of myself, not yet. And I won’t be ‘taken in,’ unless it’s at home, where Mom will hire a nurse to help with the nasty bits. I’ve got a little pride left. Not much, but a little.”
“I’ll take care of you.”
She stared at me, wide-eyed. “What?”
“You heard me. And when it comes to me, Sadie, you can stick your pride where the sun doesn’t shine. I happen to love you. And if you love me, you’ll stop talking mad shit about going home to your crocodile of a mother.”
She managed a faint smile at that, then sat quiet, thinking, hands in the lap of her flimsy cover-up. “You came to Texas to do something, and it wasn’t to nurse a school librarian who was too silly to know she was in danger.”
“My business in Dallas is on hold.”
“Canit be?”
“Yes.” And as simply as that, it was decided. Lee was going to New Orleans, and I was going back to Jodie. The past kept fighting me, and it was going to win this round. “You need time, Sadie, and I have time. We might as well spend it together.”
“You can’t want me.” She said this in a voice just above a whisper. “Not the way I am now.”
“But I do.”
She looked at me with eyes that were afraid to hope and hoped anyway. “Why would you?”
“Because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
The good side of her mouth began to tremble. The tear spilled onto her cheek and was followed by others. “If I didn’t have to go back to Savannah… if I didn’t have to live with them… withher… maybe then I could be, I don’t know, just a little bit all right.”
I took her into my arms. “You’re going to be a lot better than that.”
“Jake?” Her voice was muffled with tears. “Would you do something for me before you go?”
“What, honey?”
“Take away that goddamned chop suey. The smell is making me sick.”
10
The nurse with the fullback shoulders and the watch pinned to her bosom was Rhonda McGinley, and on the eighteenth of April she insisted on pushing Sadie’s wheelchair not only to the elevator but all the way out to the curb, where Deke waited with the passenger door of his station wagon open.
“Don’t let me see you back here, sugar-pie,” Nurse McGinley said after we’d helped Sadie into the car.
Sadie smiled distractedly and said nothing. She was—not to put too fine a point on it—stoned to the high blue sky. Dr. Ellerton had been in that morning to examine her face, an excruciating process that had necessitated extra pain medication.
McGinley turned to me. “She’s going to need a lot of TLC in the next few months.”
“I’ll do my best.”
We got rolling. Ten miles south of Dallas, Deke said, “Take that away from her and throw it out the window. I’m minding this damn traffic.”
Sadie had fallen asleep with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I leaned over the seat and plucked it away. She moaned when I did it and said, “Oh don’t, Johnny, please don’t.”
I met Deke’s eyes. Only for a second, but enough for me to see we were thinking the same thing:Long road ahead. Long road.
11
I moved into Deke’s Spanish-style home on Sam Houston Road. At least for public consumption. In truth, I moved in with Sadie at 135 Bee Tree Lane. I was afraid of what we might find when we first helped her inside, and I think that Sadie was, too, stoned or not. But Miz Ellie and Jo Peet from the Home Ec Department had recruited a few trustworthy girls who had spent an entire daybefore Sadie’s return cleaning, polishing, and scrubbing every trace of Clayton’s filth off the walls. The living room rug had been taken up and replaced. The new one was industrial gray, hardly an exciting color, but probably a wise choice; gray things hold so few memories. Her mutilated clothing had been whisked away and replaced with new stuff.
Sadie never said a word about the new rug and the different clothes. I’m not sure she even noticed them.
12
