Chapter 9: Two Weeks of Nothing

Wiley came by Sunday evening and didn't come in.

He stood at the bottom of my porch steps, the new steps he'd fixed, with his hands in his pockets.

It was a hundred and two at seven o'clock.

The cicadas were so loud we had to talk over them.

"This was my weekend with Lula," he said.

"Was?"

"Lacy kept her. Her lawyer says until the hearing, it's 'in the child's best interest.'" He said it like a quote off a page. "Because of the photo."

"Wiley."

"My lawyer says if I want Wednesdays back, I can't be seen with you. Not on a porch. Not in a parking lot. Not until the twenty-seventh."

I held on to the porch rail.

Not for my back this time.

"So we stop," I said.

"For Lula."

"For Lula," I said. "Yes."

He looked up at me.

He looked like a man who'd been told to stand on one foot for six weeks.

"I don't want to," he said.

"I know."

"I need you to know I don't want to."

"Wiley, I know. Go home before somebody takes a picture of your shoes."

That got the corner of his mouth.

He went.

I sat down on the top step and watched his taillights go down the hill toward the river.

Then I went inside and cried in the hot kitchen where nobody could see me.

Missy came over Monday with frozen custard and her evil cat in a carrier, because the cat's air conditioner was out too.

The cat hissed at my couch.

"She's being supportive," Missy said.

"She's being a cat."

We ate the custard out of the cartons.

"So he's gone," Missy said.

"He's not gone. He's waiting."

"And what are you doing?"

I'd been thinking about that all night.

"The judge is going to look at that photo," I said. "Lacy wants the judge to see a man who forgets his kid and sleeps with the neighbor."

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