He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: No Locks

Cal's waterfront house has no locks on any inside door, and he stands in her doorway at 3 a.m. looking at the child's yellow slicker in her bag.

I went home first and packed in forty minutes.

The white house on Shell Belt Road smelled of Vicks and lemon oil and my mother's lavender talc.

Beverly Guidry was propped on three pillows in the front bedroom with the window cracked toward the bayou.

She knew before I said a word.

"Come here," she said.

I sat on the edge of the bed.

She took my hand in both of hers, thin and cool, with her wedding ring turned loose on her finger.

"Your father called from the car," she said. "He cried, Josephine. He told me what you signed."

"It's one year, Mama," I said.

"It's a man's house."

"It's a house with a roof and a bookkeeper's desk," I said. "That's all it is."

She looked at me for a long time with my own grey eyes.

"He's not a stranger to us," she said. "Is he?"

"I don't know."

It was true, and I hated that it was true.

"Whatever your father did, he did it before you were old enough to stop him," my mother said. "Don't you pay for it with your whole life, baby. You hear me?"

I kissed her forehead and told her I heard.

I did not tell her what I had in my duffel bag, under my jeans and my work boots.

A green cloth ledger.

And a child's yellow rain slicker, folded flat, which I had not unfolded in sixteen years.

Cal Reese's driver took me across the Causeway at dusk.

The house on the Dog River came up out of the trees all at once.

It was low and long, made of cypress and glass, with a screened porch the length of the front.

A dock ran out into the black water like a pointing finger.

There was no gate.

There was no alarm panel by the door.

He was standing in the hall when I came in.

He had taken off the jacket, and the sleeves of his white shirt were turned back over forearms I did not want to notice.

"Your room is at the end," he said. "The second door on the left is the office. You'll find the books there."

"Mr. Reese," I said.

"Mr. Reese is fine," he said.

"I want the terms in writing, separate from the notes."

"I've written them," he said.

He held out a single sheet, and I read it standing up.

A year, to the day.

His books, five days a week.

A salary, and a fair one, which annoyed me.

My own room.

And at the bottom, in plain black type: No lock on any inside door of this house, mine or yours.

I looked up at him.

"There are no locks," I said.

"None. I had them taken off the day I bought it."

"Why?"

He didn't answer for a moment.

"I spent three years behind doors somebody else held the key to," he said. "I decided I would never live where I couldn't walk out of any room I chose."

He said it level, like a number read off a gauge.

Then he looked at me, and I understood he had said it on purpose.

He wanted me to know that he knew exactly what he was doing to me.

"Go to your room, Miss Guidry."

"Josephine," I said. "Or Jo, if you're going to put a year of my life on paper."

"Guidry," he said.

He said it like a charge read into a record.

I picked up my bag and went down the hall.

The room had a double bed made up in white, a window onto the water, and a desk with a lamp.

I locked nothing, because there was nothing to lock.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the duffel between my feet and unzipped it.

The ledger came out first.

Under it was the yellow slicker.

It was a child's size small, the plastic gone stiff and chalky, one snap missing and a smear of old brown on the left cuff.

I had been eleven.

The morning after, my father told me the slicker was lost.

I had taken it off a hook on the sleeping porch and hidden it at the bottom of my closet.

For sixteen years I had kept it there, and I did not know what it meant that I had brought it here.

I put it on the closet shelf and stood looking at it.

I told myself I was only packing for a stay.

I did not sleep.

At three in the morning I heard the hall light click on.

I lay still.

A board creaked outside my door, the way a board creaks under a big man trying to be quiet.

The door swung open slowly, because it could.

Cal Reese stood in the doorway in a grey T-shirt and dark trousers, fully dressed, as if he had never been to bed.

He wasn't looking at me.

The closet door stood open.

The light from the hall fell across the shelf, and across a small yellow coat.

He stood there looking at it.

I sat up with my heart going so hard I could feel it in my ears.

"What is that?" he said.

His voice was very quiet, and for the first time since the courthouse it wasn't level.

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