Page 105 of Havoc

He turns it over.

It's a patch. Rectangular, black, maybe four inches by nine, and the stitching is white and heavy and it says one word.

HAVOC

And underneath it, in smaller letters:

PROPERTY OF

I sit down.

Not because I'm swept away. Because my legs go, which is a different thing and I've had about enough of my body doing whatever it wants this month.

"I ain't gonna dress it up," he says. "I know what it says. It says property of and there's women in this state would throw a bottle at a man's head for puttin' it in front of 'em, and they'd be right to.

"So I'm gonna say what it means and you're gonna say no or yes."

"I know what it means."

"Lennox—"

"No, listen to me." I get up off that chair. "Sit down. Sit down, Eli, and let me do this part, because you've been building up to a speech for four days and I've been ready for this since I was eleven years old and you have no idea."

He sits down.

"I know what a property patch is," I say. "I knew before you did. I was in a Gallow Kings clubhouse in a folding chair with a Coke when I was nine years old and there was a woman named Dot who wore my father's friend's name on her back and she used to do my hair while the men were in the back room, and I watched every single thing that happened in that place and I understood most of it by the time I was ten.

"So don't hand me that and tell me what it says. I can read.

"Here's what it means. It means I stop being a woman who's around and start being a woman who's his, in a way that thirty men have to publicly agree to and can't take back. It means if anybody in three parishes puts a hand on me the entire club is obligated, whether they like me or not, whether they voted for me or not. It means when there's a room I'm not allowed in — and there's going to be, article four is still in that book — I'm on the other side of that door with a name on my back instead of nothing."

"That ain't all it means."

"No. It means I belong to you." I'm standing over him with my hands at my sides. "In front of everybody. Out loud. In a way I can't quietly walk out of at four in the morning with a note on a table, which we both know is the part you actually want.

"And it means the day I decide I'm done, I take it off in front of the same people who watched me put it on, and that is a public thing and it will cost me and it will cost you, and that's the price and it's supposed to be."

The window unit kicks on.

"Say the rest," he says.

"The rest is that nobody has ever wanted me in a way that had a cost." My voice goes and I let it go. "My mother took twenty-two years of money from a man to keep me invisible. My father kept me in the front of his wallet where nobody would look. Every single person who ever loved me did it in private, Eli, because I was the thing they were protecting, and I have spent my entire life being carefully not mentioned.

"And you're standing in a kitchen holding four inches of leather that says my name goes on the outside."

He's got both hands on his knees and he isn't moving at all.

"Ask me," I say.

"Lennox Doucet." He stands up. "Will you wear my name?"

"Yes."

* * *

It's slow, and it's warm, and there is not one thing left in this house that either of us is running from.

That's the difference and it's everything. The doorway in the front hall was a fight and the bed was a confession, and this is a Saturday night in a house on the edge of a basin with the windows open and the frogs going and nobody in the world who needs anything from us until morning.