“I'll be in the east guest room,” he said, moving toward the door. He paused with his hand on the knob, his back to me. “Mercy.”
I didn't answer.
“Whatever you're thinking right now — whatever you're feeling — remember that there are things in motion that were set long before you arrived. Things you don't understand.”
“I understand enough,” I repeated, the words hollow even to my own ears.
He turned his head slightly, profile sharp in the dim light. “No,” he said softly. “You don't.”
The door closed behind him with barely a sound.
I slid down to the floor, my back against the bathroom door, and pressed my palms flat against the hardwood to stop their trembling. The room felt cavernous without him in it. And yet I didn’t feel any better with him gone.
Billy opened the door before Judah knocked. It was around 9AM. If we wish to be precise, then it was 9:16, and Billy had just poured himself a coffee when he heard the Mustang pull into the driveway and nearly wheel over his mother’s gardenias. At that point Billy knew Judah had started his morning with a bottle instead of a mug.
He looked at Judah in the doorway.
Judah looked back at him. His collar was open. His jacket was somewhere — his tattoos on full blast. Not characteristic of Judah.
Billy stepped back and let him in.
He didn't ask right away. That wasn't how it worked between them. Billy poured two glasses and put one in front of Judah and sat across from him in the leather chair his father had died in, which he'd never gotten rid of because there wasn't a Arceneaux alive who threw out good leather on account of sentiment — and he waited.
The study was cool, the shutters drawn against the morning heat. Billy's house was smaller than the Beaumont manor — a cottage, really, inherited from his grandmother — the Black Widow of St. Francisville. Twelve husbands on the day she died — and if God had allowed it — the thirteenth somewhere between her cremation and the pearly gates of Hell.
The house had been renovated once in 2009 and not since. His mother had claimed residence in the east wing after an unsuccessful fling with her yoga instructor who’d cheated her out of a sum that wasn’t polite to say out loud.
So now Billy’s house had the whiff of the Black Widow and wilting beds of gardenias — and a particularly miserable preacher sitting in his living room before 10 AM.
“That bad, huh?” he said.
Judah reached for the bottle.
By noon the bottle was half gone and Billy had stopped pretending to pace himself an hour ago. The shutters kept the worst of the heat out. The ceiling fan turned. Somewhere outside, a dog barked — then gave up. He thought he heard a gator, but that might’ve been bourbon whispering.
Judah had talked. Not all of it. Not in any order that made sense. But enough — the bedroom, the tests, the way she'd looked at him when he'd saidbought, the way she'd saidget off mewith her voice gone flat and — Judah had to forgive him — Billy understood where she was coming from.
Billy had listened without interrupting, which was not his natural condition. That, more than anything, told Judah how bad it sounded from the outside.
“She sent you to the guest room,” Billy said finally.
“Yes.”
“And you went.”
“Yes.”
Billy turned his glass. “Huh.”
“Don't.”
“I'm not doing anything.” He drank. “I'm just noting that in the twenty-two years I've known you, I have never once seen you do what someone told you to do. Certainly not a woman.”
Judah said nothing. The bourbon was doing its work. He just wished it would do it quicker.
“She's going to leave,” he said.
“Maybe.”
