Chapter 4: The Lucky Charm Quits

Ida pulled the notice off the door, nail and all, and carried it inside.

She laid it on the kitchen table between the salt and the hot sauce.

"Forty-one years," she said. "My daddy built that crane."

Jasper sat down across from her.

"I'll talk to the bank."

"Corbett is the bank, baby. He bought the note last spring. I wondered why."

I stood at the stove where she'd put me to stir a pot of red rice.

I thought about the spring board meeting.

Corbett had said, "Let's clean up the creek," and everybody laughed.

I had laughed too, after I checked his face.

The deputy came back at six with the order fixed.

Jasper met him at the gate with our license application.

The deputy read it and said that was above his pay grade.

By eight the judge had turned the pickup into a hearing in four days.

The clerk froze our license until the same hearing.

Corbett's lawyer had filed an objection that I wasn't fit to marry anybody.

"Four days," Jasper said. "He's buying time."

"So am I," I said.

They both looked at me.

I turned off the burner.

"I have one moon. Twenty-eight more nights."

I held up one finger.

"I get my pearl back off his hand."

Two fingers.

"I prove he and my sister sank the Lady Margaret. In public, where he can't call it a breakdown."

Three.

"And he doesn't get this yard."

Ida took off her glasses.

"Honey, you don't owe us a thing."

"You fed me twice. Nobody's fed me without a reason in five years."

Jasper rubbed his beard.

"That's three impossible things."

"Then we'd better start early."

"With what? You don't have a dollar."

"I have things. At the tower. Five years of things."

"He'll have changed the locks."

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