The nausea came back.
This time I didn't think it was something I ate.
He came home at seven.
I heard the car on the gravel and had approximately thirty seconds to decide what to do with my face. I was on the sofa in the sitting room, the TV on, some home renovation program I hadn't been watching. I pulled the blanket higher. Tucked my feet under me. When he appeared in the doorway, I was the picture of a woman who had spent a quiet sick day doing nothing of consequence.
It wasn’t surprising I was good at this — at pretending — when the household I’d grown up in had demanded for theatrical piety. I'd learned it young.
“You're up,” he said.
“Feeling better.” A smile. Easy. “Darlene sent me home at nine.”
He looked at me for a moment — that assessment he did, the one that felt like being read — and then he came into the room and set a paper bag on the coffee table. Then a second one. Then a pharmacy bag he'd folded over at the top.
I looked at the bags.
“Ginger candy,” he said, nodding at the pharmacy bag. “For the nausea. And these—” the first paper bag “—are from Sucré. The ones with the lemon. Darlene said you hadn't eaten.”
“You called Darlene.”
“She called me.” He was already moving to the kitchen with the second bag. “She worries.”
I looked at the pharmacy bag. At the bakery bag.
15. 12. 14. 16. 11. 15. 13. 17.
“Thank you,” I said.
He came back from the kitchen with a glass of water and set it on the table next to the bags and then sat on the coffee table across from me, close, his elbows on his knees. Still in his Baton Rouge clothes — dark jacket, the good shirt. He looked tired in a way he didn't usually let show.
His hand found my ankle through the blanket and he rested it there.
“How long were you sick this morning?” he asked.
“Just the once. I think it was something I ate.”
He nodded slowly. “The heat's been bad this week. Things turn fast.”
“That's what Darlene said.”
His thumb moved against my ankle. That small arc. The same motion as always, automatic, like breathing.
“Did you rest?” he asked.
There it was.
I looked at him. At the tired around his eyes. At the hand on my ankle. At Judah Beaumont, pastor, bookkeeper, the man who had pressed his mouth to my temple in front of his congregation and called mesweetheart.
Who had a folder with Celeste’s name on it and a circled17in his handwriting.
“I watched TV mostly,” I said. “Fell asleep for a bit upstairs. Nothing exciting.”
He looked at me.
Two seconds. Three.
“Good,” he said.
