And he said it with the ease of a man who had never in his life let anything keep for anyone, which meant he was choosing to let it keep for me. I didn’t know what to do with that except to feel it land somewhere in the vicinity of my chest and stay there.
"Brock," I said.
"Mary Catherine."
I almost smiled. Four syllables again. Deliberate as the first time.
"Thank you," I said. Which was starting to feel insufficient for the thing I actually meant.
He looked at me for a long moment, ocean behind him, afternoon light coming sideways across that carved and complicated face.
8
BROCK
"Take me home," she said, climbing into the rental with the dress bundled around her like a shipwreck she'd decided to keep. "Might as well go face the firing squad."
So, I drove her home.
I had the heater going full before we hit the end of the island, because she was soaked through and she'd started to shiver in that fine, steady way a body does when the cold's gotten into the deep parts of it.
The vents kicked out that hot-dust smell rental cars get the first time you run the heat all season. She held her hands up to one and said nothing. I said nothing back. We rode the causeway in a quiet that should've been awkward and wasn't, the marsh sliding by gold and silver on both sides, the two of us steaming gently in our wet clothes.
I kept my eyes on the road and worked the problem the only way I knew how, which was to not look at her and fail at not looking at her about every fifteen seconds.
It was the touch in the water that had done it. Her hand closing around my forearm, that's all, a woman catching her balance—and something had gone up my arm and through me like I'd grabbed a fence somebody'd run a current through. A jolt. Clean and physical and instant. I'd put my hands on more people than I'd ever count, in every way a man can put hands on another person, and I had never once felt a thing like that.
It put me in mind, of all the damn things, of those movies my mother used to watch.
Sunday afternoons, when the work let up enough to let up at all, she'd have one going on the little set in the kitchen while she cooked—the old ones, black and white or close to it, where the music swelled at the right times and the man and the woman fought and fought and then quit fighting. There was always, always a happy ending waiting at the back of it like a held breath. And there was always that moment. The one where they looked at each other and the whole picture went still and you understood that this was it, this was the thing they'd known the second they touched.When you know, you just know,one of them would say, and my mother would smile at the stove like she was hearing good news.
I'd thought it was horseshit, even then. A pretty lie people paid a quarter to sit in the dark and believe. Real life didn't run on swelling music and happy endings. Real life ran on loss and the hard daily work of surviving it, and I'd had a closer look at that engine than most. There was no zing. No spark. No bolt out of the blue that told youhere's the one, here's where the hurting stops. Men who waited on that died waiting.
And yet.
Something in me—some dumb, stubborn thing I'd have sworn died at sixteen—was sitting up in the dark of my chest and itching to believe the jolt was real. That it meant something.That the old pictures had been onto a truth I'd been too bent to receive.
It wasn't. It couldn't be. I didn't have the equipment to believe in it, and a man should know the limits of his own machinery. I put it away.
"It's coming up," she said. "Off Tradd. The blue door with the?—"
She dropped.
Folded herself down sideways into the footwell so fast and so low that for half a second, my hands wanted to do something violent before my head caught up.
"Keep driving," she said, from down around my knee. "Don't slow down. Just—keep going, normal, please."
I kept going. Normal. Same speed, same easy hand on the wheel, eyes moving without my head turning, the way you learn to look when looking can get you killed.
I read the street. Parked cars down both sides, nose to tail, the genteel crush of an old neighborhood. A sedan. A wagon. Two SUVs and a work truck. Nobody in any of them. No engines running, no warm hoods I could see, no shape sitting low behind a wheel waiting on a door. No threat. Just a pretty Charleston block dressed in afternoon light.
"There's nobody out here," I said. "Who're we hiding from?"
"The gray Mercedes. Across from the house, the one under the crepe myrtle." A pause from the floor. "That's my father's car."
I clocked it on the next pass without slowing. "Then they're inside," I said. "Waiting on you."
She made a small sound that wasn't a word.
