Page 43 of Slander
Sophie kept cutting clean lines along the ceiling steady-handed, sure of the one thing nobody could take.
I watched her be part of something today.
Watched the knot she drove in with come loose by inches over the course of an afternoon. Her being part of it pulled at something low in my chest, hard enough I had to drag my eyes off her and back to the wall I was supposed to be painting.
She follows me over an hour later, the way I knew she would.
I hear her truck, her screen door, her feet on the grass, and then Hoagie's nails on my porch boards ahead of her, because that dog has decided my house is his house now.
I open the door before she knocks.
"You're filthy," she says.
"I know it." I step back to let her in. "You hungry?"
She stops just inside the door, arms folding up over her chest like a door closing.
"You don't have to cook for me, Njal."
"I didn't ask if I had to. I asked if you were hungry."
She doesn't have an answer ready for that, so I take her quiet for a yes and turn for the kitchen, and after a second I hear her bare feet follow me across the floor.
I cook.
Not my mother's food this time, brought over in foil and reheated.
My own hands, my own pan, chicken, rice, and green beans I keep in the house because a man on my kind of schedule learns to feed himself or he doesn't eat.
She sits at my table with Hoagie collapsed across her feet and watches me work, and I let her watch.
It's a small thing, cooking for a woman. Men do it every day and don't think twice.
I think twice.
I think about the fact that I’m the only person in this town who knows her, and she’s the only person in this town who knows me, and how it can either be a cage or the opposite of one depending on who's standing in it with you.
I plate it, set it in front of her, and sit down across from her with my own.
"This is good," she says, surprised, halfway through.
"Don't sound so shocked."
"I'm not—" She catches the corner of my mouth and stops. "Okay. I'm alittleshocked."
She eats like she did last night, like somebody who forgot food was a thing that happened to her today until it was in front of her.
And while she eats, while the light goes down gold and then gray through my windows, the thing Esperanza said this afternoon turns over once in the back of my head.
This is a lot of effort for a small-town spat.
Somebody went to real trouble here.
I've had the same thought since I laid those pages out on this table—multiple tools, used in the right order, aimed at the one soft place that takes a woman down quietest.
I know what that costs to build. I know it isn't gossip.
And I know, sitting here watching her clean her plate, that thereasonfor it is a problem I’m going to have to take apart soon, in the cold way I take everything apart.
