Page 50 of Havoc

Not a question. That's how she's done it for eight years. She doesn't ask a man a question he'd have to answer.

"No."

She stops wipin'.

"Okay," she says.

"Junie—"

"You don't got to do the next part." She puts the rag down. "Eight years, Havoc. I know what no is. Ain't nobody in this world ever had to say it to me twice and you ain't gonna be the first."

Behind us Cricket's losin' at cards and hollerin' about it.

She stands there a beat longer than she needs to.

"Can I say somethin' kind?" she asks.

"Ain't sure."

"Well, I'm gonna." She leans on her forearms so we're level. "You have come up those stairs with me forty, fifty times in eight years, and I want you to hear that I never minded one of 'em, 'cause I never did, and I'm not the kind of woman who says a thing like that to be cruel about it later."

"I know it."

"But you ain't never once come up 'cause you wanted to."

The room goes on around us.

"You come up 'cause you didn't want to be by yourself in your own head for forty minutes." Her voice hasn't changed. There's nothin' underneath it and there never was. "And I let you, 'cause I like you, and 'cause a woman in my job gets to decide what she's doin' it for, and I decided a long time back."

I got nothin' to say to any of that.

"So when you say no to me," Junie says, "the only thing I want to know is whether it's 'cause you finally don't need it."

"Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

She straightens up.

"Good," she says. "That's real good, Havoc."

Then she picks the rag back up and goes on down the bar and starts givin' Cricket hell about his cards, and that's all of it, and it takes about ninety seconds, and I sit there with a beer I ain't touched and I feel worse than I have in nine days.

Warden's waitin' by my bike at half past nine.

He's got his back against the fence post and his arms folded and he ain't makin' any effort to be anywhere else, which is how I know it's this and not somethin' else.

"Two days," he says.

"Two days what?"

"Two days I've known." He comes off the post. "Friday night I put Cricket on the phone about a bike he moved out of a motel lot on Wednesday and the boy lied to me. Twenty-one years old, first time in his life he ever lied to a patched man, and he was so bad at it I had to look at the ground.

"So Saturday I drove out to your place at six in the mornin' and sat at the head of that shell road for forty minutes, and at ten past seven a woman came out on your porch and stood there in a shirt that was yours."

The lot's quiet.