Page 34 of Rooster's Remorse
I don't say anything.
"Oranges." She's still looking at the glass. "I thought about oranges so much I think I broke something in my head. There was a woman in year two who'd been to a market in Hermosillo,and she wouldn't shut up about the oranges. Then she wasn't there anymore. And I thought about them for seven more years."
The wind gets up under the roof and the tin, a draft comes down the wall, and across the slab and finds my boots.
"You want to know what I ate the day I got out?"
"Yes."
"Everything." She looks up for the first time.
The first time since she was twenty-two years old standing in her mother's driveway with her arms crossed watching me put a bag in the bed of a truck.
I've spent a decade remembering that face, and I don't know this one.
There's nothing on it. She's looking at me the way you'd look at a wall you're thinking about painting.
"I ate everything and I threw all of it up in a Circle K bathroom," she says. "Because your stomach doesn't work anymore. Nobody tells you that part. You dream about food for nine years and your body says no."
"Mila—"
"You owe me an answer." She sits back into the couch. "That was two. Pay me what I’m owed."
My tongue's stuck to the roof of my mouth. That's what happens.
There's ten years jammed up behind my teeth, and not one word of it will come forward.
I've said it before. Out loud. That's what nobody knows.
I said it in a room in Bullhead City to nobody, at four in the morning, sitting on the end of a bed with my boots still on.
I said it on a road outside Gallup with the radio off.
I've said it in my head so many times it's worn a groove.
I've had it ready for ten years.
Had it ready for a woman who'd yell at me. For a woman who'd cry, or hit me, or ask me why.
Not for this.
She's sitting four feet away with her feet tucked up, her hands on a glass, and she's not going to help me.
She's not going to ask. She's going to sit there and let me stand in it, and there’s nothing in ten years of practicing this conversation in my mind that makes this easier.
I can see my own breath and the whiskey's sitting in my chest like a stone.
"Ask it," I say.
"No."
"Mila—"
"No." Her voice doesn't move. "I asked for ten years. I asked in the dark, and I asked when there was nobody in the room. I asked out loud like a crazy woman, and I'm done asking. You know what the question is. You've known since you left."
I put the glass down. My hand doesn't want to let go of it.
Out past the fire pit the dog barks once from under the shed and stops.
