He Bought My Father's Debt, So Now He Owns Me novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Sunday

At the care home his mother looks at Jo and says 'the girl in the yellow'; in the parking lot Jo breaks the first near-miss with a mocking line.

"It's mine," I said. "It's a rain slicker. I wore it when I was a kid."

I said it fast and flat, and I held his eyes while I did.

He looked at the coat a moment longer.

Then he looked at me, at the sheet pulled to my waist and my bare arms.

Something crossed his face and was put away.

"You kept a child's raincoat for sixteen years," he said.

"I keep everything," I said. "I do the books."

"Go back to sleep, Guidry."

He closed the door behind him.

I lay awake until the window turned grey.

I told myself I wasn't thinking about the coat.

I was thinking about the width of his shoulders in the doorway.

He had stood there, and he had not come in.

On Sunday morning he knocked, a courtesy he had no need to pay, since nothing in the house could stop him.

"I'm going to see my mother," he said through the wood. "I'd like you to come."

I opened the door.

He wore a navy suit and a white shirt with no tie, and he held a paper bag from a bakery on Dauphin Street.

"For the books?" I said.

"For her. She likes a new face." His mouth moved, barely. "And I'd like to see what you do with yours."

The Magnolia Haven care home was a low brick building off Airport Boulevard.

The fountain out front had been turned off for the season.

He signed in at the desk without a word.

An aide met us in the hall, and she knew him by his stride.

"She's had a good morning, Mr. Reese," she said. "She asked for her cardigan."

"Asked for it," Cal said, "or told you what color it was?"

"Told me the color."

"Thank you."

I understood then that this was the only soft thing about him.

His mother sat by the window in a pale blue cardigan with a gold church brooch on the lapel.

Lenore Reese was fifty-eight and looked eighty.

She had close grey curls, her hands lay open in her lap, and her eyes were the same dark steady eyes as her son's.

They went straight past him and came to me.

They stopped.

"Mama," Cal said, and bent and kissed her temple. "This is Miss Guidry. She's helping me with some papers."

Lenore said nothing.

She looked at me for a long time with her head tipped, like a bird's.

"The girl in the yellow," she said.

My whole body went cold.

"She's confused today," Cal said, very evenly, without looking at me. "She says all kinds of things. Last week she told the nurse the president was coming to lunch."

"Mm," said Lenore.

She was still looking at me.

I sat with her for half an hour and held her hand, and she let me.

I told her the bakery bag held a pecan roll.

She smiled at the word pecan the way a child smiles at a dog.

When we stood to leave, her son bent to her ear and said something I couldn't hear.

She patted his cheek twice.

"The boat," she said. "Don't you go on that boat, baby."

"No, Mama," Cal said.

"I mean it."

"I know you do."

He straightened.

His face was perfectly still, and he did not look at me.

In the parking lot the October air was heavy and warm.

It smelled of cut grass and rain that hadn't come.

He walked me to the black SUV and stopped with his back to the passenger door and me between him and it.

I had meant to get in.

I did not.

"She said the girl in the yellow," I said. "What did she mean?"

"I told you. She says things."

"Does she say it to everyone?"

He put his left hand flat on the roof of the car beside my head and leaned an inch closer.

He did not touch me.

I was aware of him on every side, the heat of him and the starch of his shirt and the faint cedar smell of his skin.

I was aware that my mouth had come open.

"You're nervous," he said.

"I'm not."

"Your pulse is in your throat, Miss Guidry."

It was.

I could feel it hammering under the skin, and I could feel him looking at the place.

"I don't touch what hasn't been offered," he said softly. "Not yet. But I want you to understand something about this year."

"What?"

"It's a long time to share a house with a man who is thinking exactly what I'm thinking."

I had been thinking it since the courthouse bench.

My body had no sense.

I hated this man, and I hated my body for turning toward him like a plant toward a window.

I lifted my chin.

"Mr. Reese," I said. "You'll have to ask twice."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then the corner of his mouth moved.

For the first time in four days I saw something young under the grey suit.

"Noted," he said.

He opened the car door, and I got in.

Neither of us said another word until the Causeway.

As we pulled out I looked back at the building.

Through the big window of the day room I could see the blue cardigan.

Lenore had her hand on the aide's sleeve, and her mouth was moving.

I could read the words on her lips, plain as print:

"The wrong one will pay."

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