Reluctantly, she pulled out the opposite chair.
• • •
Mainly, he said what he’d already said in the letter. He added that he’d gone to a meeting—a program called Alcoholics Anonymous, something she’d vaguely heard of, though she couldn’t remember where.
He went on: She was the best part of his life. He respected her more than anyone else he knew. More than his own family. He liked her self-sufficiency, her enterprising nature. He thought she was smarter than any girl he knew.
He wanted her to give him another chance. He was begging for it. They’d start slow, he said; but he was serious about her. His plan was to marry her. Together, he said, they could have the sort of life that would have meaning and value. They could have children together. A nice house.
Her brother Jesse, he said, could come live with them.
She wondered for the first time if he’d ever read her journals. His articulation of her secret hopes was so precise that it startled her.
“You don’t have to answer me now,” said John Paul. “All I’m asking is that you think it over.”
Louise was silent.
“We could have a good life together,” he said, at last.
Then he stood, shoulders and head low, and lifted two paper bags from their place on the floor beside him. “Here,” he said. “I brought you groceries.”
He closed the door gently behind him on the way out.
Goddammit, thought Louise.
• • •
The problem was: the groceries were too complicated. They were beautiful and expensive, the sorts of things that John Paul’s mother had probably bought for her family when he was small. There was a T-bone steak in there, and broccoli, and shrimp, and three beautiful oranges. There was a loaf of bread, and butter packaged in a way she’d never seen before, and a tall container of milk. And there was a cake—a whole Bundt cake—in a white box.
She was hungry. She pulled off a piece of the Bundt cake and sat there chewing it.
She looked sideways at the sink and two hot plates that constituted their shared kitchen. She could make a feast for the other staffers at the lodge. But she was off that night, and she had a better idea.
• • •
Her mother’s house was a white rectangle: small upstairs, small downstairs, stacked one on top of the other around a steep central staircase. It was quiet and dark when she arrived at half past six. Through one first-floor window she saw the blue flicker of the TV. Through one second-floor window she saw a small lamp turned on. Jesse’s room.
Inside, she put the groceries on the kitchen table. Ten minutes prior, she’d had to stop short at an intersection and in doing so had sent the shrimp scattering out of their wax paper and onto the salty floorboard of her car. She’d thrown it into park and scooped them up, knowing she’d still cook them.
Jesse had never had shrimp in his life.
Now, she ran water into a large bowl and put the shrimp in there to soak.
As she worked, she realized that she smelled something.
She followed the scent around the central stairs—passing her mother on the way, asleep in her recliner—and then ascended.
Please not that, she thought.
She opened Jesse’s door without knocking.
He had heard the front door. He had opened a window and hastily put away whatever he’d been smoking, but he was looking at her, guilty, his eyes stripped of their usual curiosity, narrowed instead by the chemicals now swimming in his bloodstream.
“Where is it,” said Louise.
“What?” said Jesse.
“Don’t lie to me,” said Louise. “Don’t ever lie to me. I’m not Mom. I’m on your side.”
He said nothing. He was sitting on his bed, his arms hugging his knees.
Louise looked in the little trash bin next to his desk and found it immediately: a poorly rolled joint, hastily extinguished, still warm to the touch. Still capable of setting the contents of the bin on fire.
“Idiot,” said Louise—a word she regretted immediately—because when she looked back at her brother he was crying.
“Oh God, Jesse,” said Louise, and she rushed to him, sat down next to him, clasped him to her. “Jesse, where’d you get that?”
He shrugged. She pushed him away from her, held him by the shoulders. His face was red. He held out one hand and placed the back of two fingers to her left eye, the hurt one, still faintly bruised and swollen. It was only then that she remembered that she, too, had something to explain.
“Come on,” said Louise. “She’s sleeping.”
• • •
Downstairs, she sat him at the table and gave him a tall glass of water.
“Drink that,” she said.
Then she began to cook. She put a pot of water on to boil the broccoli. She salted and peppered the steak and put it in one pan to sear in a pat of butter. She put the cleaned shrimp in another.
