Page 23 of Havoc

"Here's mine," I say. "You want to know what I took. That's your entire interest in me and we both know it. And I'm not going to tell you, not this morning and not Thursday, because the day you find out is the day I'm worth nothing to anybody."

"That how you see it?"

"That's how it is. You'd see it the same way sitting where I'm sitting."

He turns his head then and looks at me for the first time all morning, and there's a thing that happens with his hands when he does — the cup goes down onto the arm of the chair and his fingers spread a little, and I have decided to start paying attention to his hands, because his face doesn't do anything and something has to.

"You ain't wrong," he says.

"I know I'm not."

"Doesn't mean it holds."

"Nothing holds. I'm not asking for forever. I'm asking for Tuesday."

Around eleven he brings in eggs from somewhere and cooks them badly.

I don't offer to help, and he doesn't ask, and we eat standing up on opposite sides of a counter like two people who have both decided sitting down would mean something.

And then I do the thing I came in here to do, which is work him.

I've had all morning to figure out how. He's not stupid, so it can't be a question, it has to be a complaint — men will correct a woman who's wrong about their business faster than they'll answer a woman who's curious about it.

"Y'all haven't even been going twenty years," I say.

He looks up.

"The sign at the gate. Est. two thousand four. My mother had a car older than your club."

"Twenty-two years."

"Sure. Twenty-two." I push the eggs around. "Barely a club. Half the men out front of that place last night are older than the patch on their own back."

His jaw goes and comes back.

"There were seven of 'em," he says. "Seven men, one room, one night, and every one of 'em walked away from somethin' worse to do it. Charter's on the wall in the chapel and I've stood in front of it every New Year's for fifteen years while Storm reads the names off, and I've said 'em back every time, so you can go ahead and think what you want about it."

"He reads them."

"Every year."

"Out loud."

"That's generally how readin' out loud works."

Don't ask. Don't ask, don't ask.

"Well," I say. "What are they?"

And he says them.

He says them standing at a kitchen counter in his own house on a Thursday morning with a fork in his hand, the way you'd list the counties you drive through to get somewhere. Storm's given name, which I don't know and file. Scourge. Two I've never heard in my life. A Boudreaux.

Sixth.

"Tithe."

He says it the way you say a word.