Chapter 12: Rice Dust

Odette's POV

I opened the back door at midnight in my grandmother's robe, with the porch light on, and found him on the step.

He didn't stand up.

He held something small and plastic in his two hands.

"I'm not coming in," he said.

"I can see that."

"I came to give you this."

It was a specimen cup, with a lid and a label.

It had been in a drawer for five years, and it showed.

I sat down on the top step beside him, a careful arm's length away, and took it.

His name was on the label, and a lab number.

"The urologist gave me this the Monday after the boil," Gabe said. "I never opened it."

"You said."

"I didn't tell you why."

"I'm not going to ask you tonight," I said.

"Okay." He rubbed his face. "I wanted you to have it. It's the only thing I've got that proves I didn't look."

I turned it over in my hands.

It weighed nothing at all.

"I'll keep it," I said.

"What for?"

"I don't know yet."

He nodded, and he sat there another minute, watching the dark field behind the house.

Then he stood and said goodnight, and went.

I took the cup inside and put it in the drawer by the stove next to my grandmother's rubber bands.

I couldn't have said why that felt right.

On Saturday morning he picked up Lou at eight, with me in the passenger seat.

It was the only way I would let it happen.

He drove us out past Crowley on a levee road, with the windows down and the cold air full of the smell of cut stubble and diesel.

The harvest was finished.

The fields lay flat and gold under a white sky, with sheets of standing water in the low rows where the crawfish ponds had been flooded.

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