“They say I’m better, but my face feels like someone dipped it in kerosene and then set it on fire. It’s because they’re taking me off the pain medication. God forbid I get hooked on dope.”
“If you need more, I can talk to somebody.”
She shook her head. “It makes me fuzzy, and I need to think. Also, it makes it hard to keep control of my emotions. I had quite the shouting match with my mother and father.”
There was only the one chair-unless you wanted to count the commode squatting in the corner-so I sat on the bed. “The head nurse filled me in. Based on what she overheard, you had every right to blow your top.”
“Maybe, but what good does it do? Mom will never change. She can talk for hours about how having me almost killed her, but she has very little feeling for anyone else. It’s lack of tact, but it’s lack of something more. There’s a word for it, but I can’t remember it.”
“Empathy?”
“That’s it. And she has a very sharp tongue. Over the years, it’s whittled my dad away to a stub. He rarely says anything these days.”
“You don’t need to see them again.”
“I think I do.” I liked her calm, detached voice less and less. “Mama says they’ll fix up my old room, and I really don’t have anyplace else to go.”
“Your home’s in Jodie. And your work.”
“I think we talked about that. I’m going to tender my resignation.”
“No, Sadie, no. That’s a very bad idea.”
She smiled as best she could. “You sound like Miz Ellie. Who didn’t believe you when you said Johnny was a danger.” She thought about this, then added: “Of course, neither did I. I never stopped being a fool about him, did I?”
“You have a house.”
“That’s true. And mortgage payments I can’t make. I’ll have to let it go.”
“I’ll make the payments.”
That got through. She looked shocked. “You can’t afford to do that!”
“I can, actually.” Which was true… for awhile, at least. Plus there was always the Kentucky Derby and Chateaugay. “I’m moving out of Dallas and in with Deke. He’s not charging me rent, which frees up plenty for house payments.”
A tear crept to the edge of her right eye and trembled there. “You’re kind of missing the point. I can’t take care of myself, not yet. And I won’t be ‘taken in,’ unless it’s at home, where Mom will hire a nurse to help with the nasty bits. I’ve got a little pride left. Not much, but a little.”
“I’ll take care of you.”
She stared at me, wide-eyed. “What?”
“You heard me. And when it comes to me, Sadie, you can stick your pride where the sun doesn’t shine. I happen to love you. And if you love me, you’ll stop talking mad shit about going home to your crocodile of a mother.”
She managed a faint smile at that, then sat quiet, thinking, hands in the lap of her flimsy cover-up. “You came to Texas to do something, and it wasn’t to nurse a school librarian who was too silly to know she was in danger.”
“My business in Dallas is on hold.”
“ Can it be?”
“Yes.” And as simply as that, it was decided. Lee was going to New Orleans, and I was going back to Jodie. The past kept fighting me, and it was going to win this round. “You need time, Sadie, and I have time. We might as well spend it together.”
“You can’t want me.” She said this in a voice just above a whisper. “Not the way I am now.”
“But I do.”
She looked at me with eyes that were afraid to hope and hoped anyway. “Why would you?”
“Because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
The good side of her mouth began to tremble. The tear spilled onto her cheek and was followed by others. “If I didn’t have to go back to Savannah… if I didn’t have to live with them… with her… maybe then I could be, I don’t know, just a little bit all right.”
I took her into my arms. “You’re going to be a lot better than that.”
“Jake?” Her voice was muffled with tears. “Would you do something for me before you go?”
“What, honey?”
“Take away that goddamned chop suey. The smell is making me sick.”
The nurse with the fullback shoulders and the watch pinned to her bosom was Rhonda McGinley, and on the eighteenth of April she insisted on pushing Sadie’s wheelchair not only to the elevator but all the way out to the curb, where Deke waited with the passenger door of his station wagon open.
“Don’t let me see you back here, sugar-pie,” Nurse McGinley said after we’d helped Sadie into the car.
Sadie smiled distractedly and said nothing. She was-not to put too fine a point on it-stoned to the high blue sky. Dr. Ellerton had been in that morning to examine her face, an excruciating process that had necessitated extra pain medication.
McGinley turned to me. “She’s going to need a lot of TLC in the next few months.”
“I’ll do my best.”
We got rolling. Ten miles south of Dallas, Deke said, “Take that away from her and throw it out the window. I’m minding this damn traffic.”
Sadie had fallen asleep with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I leaned over the seat and plucked it away. She moaned when I did it and said, “Oh don’t, Johnny, please don’t.”
