Page 43 of Havoc

"It isn't eggs."

"It's eggs, Lennox."

"Eggs are a color." She's leanin' on the counter in my shirt with her hair up in somethin' that's held together by one clip and hope. "That's a different color. That's brown. What did you do to brown an egg?"

"Fire does it."

"Fire does it," she says.

"Cooked 'em on high."

"Why?"

"Faster."

She looks at me for a while.

"Move," she says.

So I move, and I stand in my own kitchen with a cup of coffee and watch a woman throw out my eggs and start over with the heat at about a third of where I had it, and she does it one-handed with her weight off the bad heel, and she talks the entire time.

"Butter, not oil. There's no butter in this house. There's no butter, Havoc. There's nine hundred dollars in a coffee can and no butter."

"Eight hundred."

"Eight hundred," she agrees, and doesn't look up, and I laugh so hard I have to put the cup down.

They come out yellow. Soft, almost wet, folded over on themselves, and I eat three of them standin' at the counter and I ain't had anything like it in this house one time in eleven years.

"Who taught you that?" I ask.

"Nobody. I worked a line for two summers when I was twenty-two and a man named Curtis screamed at me until I stopped scrambling everything into concrete." She takes the pan off. "That's most of what I know how to do. Somebody yelled it at me once."

* * *

There's a boat under the house.

Sixteen-foot flat-bottom that ain't been out since March, and I get it down and run the motor for a minute in the shallow to clear it out, and she comes down the bank in my shirt and her own jeans and one boot with the heel cut out of it, which is a thing she did with a knife at the kitchen table and did not ask my permission for.

"Is this safe?"

"No."

"Okay," she says, and gets in.

We go out about a mile and a half through cuts I could run blind.

Cypress standin' in black water on both sides, knees comin' up out of it like somethin' tryin' to get born. Spanish moss so heavy on some of them trees you can hear it drip. Water's flat as a table and the whole thing goes green and gold where the sun cuts through, and there ain't one sound out here but us and the birds and the motor when I've got it on, and I cut it off.

We drift.

Her hand's over the side in the water, which is how people lose fingers out here, and I tell her so, and she leaves it there another ten seconds before she takes it out.

"He wasn't lying," she says.

"Who?"

She looks at the trees for a while.