Page 4 of Havoc

Down the other end, Gigi says she'd pay the twenty.

"You'd pay forty," Junie says.

She takes the rag off her shoulder and works at a spot on the wood that's been in there since before I had this chair, and the ice machine's been out since Tuesday and she tells me about it, and about Ransom not signin' for a new one, and about haulin' bags up from the Gas-N-Go two at a time in August. None of it needs sayin' to me. She says it anyway, the way she's said it to men on this stool for eight years, and it fills up the part of the room where a man would otherwise have to think.

My hands are flat on the bar. I take them off it.

Junie's got somethin' else and she puts it down. I know the difference by now between her not havin' anything to say and her decidin' against it, and I don't ask which one this is.

I get about two inches down the beer.

Junie takes the bottle out from under my hand, sets it on the shelf behind her, and goes on toward the stairs without lookin' back to see whether I'm comin'.

The ceiling up in her room's got a water stain on it shaped like Texas.

Afterward she gets up and goes huntin' for her shirt, and I lie there with one arm behind my head lookin' at Texas, and I feel about the same as I did standin' on Roy Duplessis's porch. Which is to say I don't feel a whole lot of anything.

Suits me fine.

"You could stay," she says.

"Nah."

"Wasn't an offer. I'm sayin' the option's there." Her voice hasn't got a thing underneath it, and that's the reason it's her. Junie wants what she wants, says so out loud, and doesn't need me to be anything I ain't.

"I know it."

"Mm." She pulls her hair up off the back of her neck and finds me in the mirror over the dresser. "You come up here when somethin's eatin' you. You know that about yourself?"

"Nothin's eatin' me."

"Okay."

"Nothin' is."

"I said okay, Havoc." She's smilin' when she says it.

She leans back against the dresser with her arms folded.

"My sister's boy made eight on Saturday," she says. "They did it out at the spillway. Somebody's mama made a cake shaped like a crawfish and it had a face on it, and I want you to understand it was the ugliest thing I have ever seen with my own eyes."

"Yeah?"

"Went through two hundred dollars of my own money on that party." She pulls her hair back off her neck again and lets it go. "And I'd do it again next May, so don't nobody come to me about Blitz and his twenty."

I got nothin' to put in that.

"You could ask me about it one of these times," she says. "Not now. One of these times."

"Alright."

"Ain't a complaint. I'm tellin' you it happened."

That's the worst part of Junie. She's kind about it.

"Go on down." She pulls the shirt over her head. "Somebody's gonna want you."

She's right. Somebody always does.