Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

first. I mean, no sense tearing down a engine if all you need’s a eighty-nine-cent plug, know what I mean? Simplest explanation here’s a animal.” He reached into his pocket and handed Ransom a card. “You have any other problems, just give a holler.”

“Well, thanks for coming out.”

“You’re welcome. Come on, Johnson.”

“Night,” said Johnson.

Ransom let them out and turned around. “Well, guys, I guess chicken wasn’t in the cards. What say we order in Chinese?”

Claire and Cell both hooted.

He gave them a sly smirk and allowed the warmth to spread. Then his face turned grave. “That pot was in the bathtub when I left.”

EIGHTEEN

Charleston is burning, Addie dreams. The smell, which fire releases from sodden foundation timbers where the sea has crept, is in the bed with her when she awakes. It’s coming from her husband, who is also there, reeking of woodsmoke, with soured claret on his breath. Lying on his back, Harlan still has on his breeches, and his tall tan boots have stained the bridal bed a color little different from the stenciled maple leaf of blood she finds beneath her. His soot-smutched face is set in a frown of concentrated worry she’s never seen him wear awake. His left shoulder is bare; his right arm, still in the sleeve of his shirt—his beautiful, ruined shirt of fine Sea Island cotton woven in an English mill—is slung across his gathered brow, warding something off. It is as though the process of undressing, in the condition in which he undertook it, proved to be too much.

She feels, for a moment, as she reorients, ill and reeling. The moment after, resigned. Now she is furious. Furious! The marriage is over. She will return to Charleston immediately. Today. This hour. Explanations? She wants none. What explanations could he give? And on her wedding night! But how could she have misjudged him so egregiously? The rumors—the ones she dismissed so blithely during the courtship—come flying back. What gave her the foolish confidence to think that she could judge with clearer eyes than social Charleston had? The sob surprises Addie, coming now from so far down, the region where those sodden timbers lie. Oh, such grief. Not tears, not weeping, an animal moan she tries, and fails, to hold back with both hands.

Yet does she bear some fault in this? Has she not lived honorably? What has God to put to her account to punish her like this?

You married without love. The voice she used to hear more frequently and hasn’t listened to in years speaks up and answers her. (Whose voice is this?) Oh, she has made a terrible mistake, a ruinous, soul-murdering mistake! And what is she to do?

What else is there, but to accept responsibility, confess her fault, and call it off? Too late, yes, but better now than in a year from now, or ten. Yes, she will tell him. She will wake him now.

Yet to return, disgraced, to Charleston, and after just one day…To face the looks and whispers, the pious mouthings of sympathy under eyes that scintillate with glee…(Louisa Elliott!) Oh, horrible, horrible. Is there not some way, any way, to stay and salvage it, some way for the cup to pass? Might not love, though absent now, still grow?

Yet the voice says, No, it never will, and Addie remembers now why she stopped listening to the voice. To wait for Gabriel forever, even should he never come, even should she die, untouched, an old maid like her aunt—this price seemed too severe, inhumanly severe, and she got angry at the voice and shut it out. And what has reawakened it? That look with Jarry on the dock, a momentary glance exchanged over open water with a man she doesn’t even know, a Negro. What is God about? But, no, she will lose everything, but not her faith. Not that.

And look at Harlan in the bed, so fretful after all, so ill. Doesn’t she—as the first racking spasm of anger dissipates—owe him the chance to account for his behavior? And what, exactly, has he done? Perhaps his feelings were simply hurt (like hers). Perhaps he simply gave in to an impulse to flee (the same one she feels now). Perhaps he simply drank himself into insensibility—is he the first bridegroom to commit this particular felony against romance? Perhaps he simply had high hopes and saw them dashed like hers—enough to end a marriage over?

You do not love this man.

Yes, yes, there’s that, but yesterday, when she admired the rowers and the parakeets, when the sky looked like a crystal bowl that, if you struck it with a mallet, just might ring, love or its absence seemed beside the point. Maybe tomorrow it will seem beside the point again. (Oh, let it pass!)

But, no, impossible—she must go!

The truth is, she does not know what to do. All Addie knows right now is she must flee this room of funerary urns and bittersweet. She must get out of this house and walk.

But the library doors are open, and though she tries to hurry past, she’s spied by Percival and cannot honorably withdraw.

“My dear!” he hails her in a tone of mirth, and then he sees her face. “Great God, Addie, what has happened?”

Her blue eyes, which can conceal nothing, are red and harrowed. She shakes her head, trying to stop tears; she fails.

“Please,” he says. “Please, my dear, sit down.” He pats the chair, and she obeys. “Can I send for something? Do you require a doctor? Are you ill? How can I assist you?”

“You’re kind. No, thank you, nothing.”

“What is it, Addie? What’s the matter?”

“Harlan left me. He was gone all night,” she sobs. “I don’t know where he went.”

“And he has not returned?”

“No, he’s upstairs in the bed right now, sound asleep, still in his clothes, still in his filthy, spattered boots.”

Behind his hazel eyes, he works the sums. “I’m sorry, Addie, so very sorry, my dear. You’ve