Page 28 of Rhodes

Iglesia de Dios sits back from the street, white paint peeling at the corners. I park under the live oak and go in through the side door, down the half-flight of stairs to the fellowship room.

Cold air hits me first, the window unit rattling in the corner. Then coffee, that scorched church-basement smell of a pot left on the warmer too long. Folding chairs sit in a loose circle with low voices moving around it, and a card table holds foam cups and a plate of grocery-store cookies nobody will eat.

Ms. Dot and Helen both catch sight of me when I walk in the room. Ms. Dot smiles, and Helen lifts a hand to let me know where she's sitting and saved me a seat.

Ms. Dot crosses over and takes my hands between both of hers, warm and dry and papery, and she doesn't ask a single thing. She just holds on a second and lets go.

"Coffee's terrible tonight," she says. "Extra terrible."

"My favorite kind."

I take the seat Helen saved for me. The metal's cool through my jeans. I set my water bottle by my foot and pull the cardigan over my shoulders.

And something in me lets go, my jaw first, though I didn't know I'd been holding it. My shoulders come down, and I let my back curve into the chair.

Nobody in this room needs me to be fine. Nobody's doing the math on my glass. Ms. Dot isn't watching my hands. There's no Coop, no Libba, no Maybank name hanging over the folding chairs. Just people in a cold room, saying true things out loud.

Somebody starts, and I listen.

I miss my mother. It sits in my chest, and I let it sit there and don't call it anything. I'm carrying other things tonight, too. I'm still mad at Rhodes. I hate that there's something else mixed up in it now.

None of it needs solving tonight. For one hour, I just let it all be true.

The meeting lets out. The lot's gone that deep blue you only get for ten minutes before real dark. I squeeze Ms. Dot's hand goodbye and cross the parking lot to my truck under the live oak.

I put my key into the ignition, turn, and it starts on the first try as smoothly as it did the day I got it.

The road unrolls under my headlights. There’s nobody in the car but me, and that's exactly the problem. Because with nobody talking, the thing I've been shoving down since this morning comes right back up.

I saw him before I understood what he was doing.

That's the part. I came around the back of it, and there he was, flat on his back on the driveway, half under the Cruiser. For one whole second, I hadn't caught up to the fact that he fixed my vehicle without asking. For one second I just saw him with grease up one forearm and his shirt shoved up where he'd been reaching. My eyes zeroed in on the strip of his stomach, that line of hip.

Competent. That's the word my brain grabbed, and it grabbed it fast, before I had permission to be mad.

My face goes warm, and I grip the wheel a little harder.

Oh, come on.

This is Rhodes. Coop's ridiculous friend, the unserious Stone, the one who's always just been there, on the edge of every crawfish boil and every Fourth of July, as part of the furniture. I knew him when he had braces. I watched him lose a shirtless swim race to my brother and never once had a thought about it.

And now I live down the hall from him. I nearly walked into him in a towel last week, dripping, and had to study the floor before he got other ideas. I saw him filthy under my truck today, and apparently that was different.

I laugh at myself, one breath through my nose. That's what I get for having eyes. Biology doesn't stop to ask whether a man is somebody I'm ever going to touch before it notices his stomach. It doesn't mean a thing. It's information. He's a good-looking man, and I'm a person who was standing there, and that's the end of it.

I turn up the radio, some old zydeco thing, accordion and washboard, and let it fill the car and push the rest of it out.

Rhodes's street is dark when I turn onto it. His truck still isn't back. The fixed Cruiser rolls up the drive under my hands, quiet and working, and I sit a second with the engine ticking down. I've got a reef write-up due and water temps to log and Josette wanting the eastern line sorted by Monday. Real things, mine, waiting for me at the kitchen table in a house with nobody in it.

I had him filed, is the thing. Coop's ridiculous friend. Furniture. Easy. He doesn't fit in there anymore, and I can't find the shape to shove him back into. He still went around me today. He's also getting harder to wave off.

His repair sits in the driveway. He isn't even home.

Somehow he's still taking up room in it.

NINE

Rhodes