The Reckless Oath We Made(111)

“Just write your number down,” I said. “I don’t have a cellphone.”

Finally, she scrawled her number in the middle of a random calendar page and handed the journal back to me. I let her go. After the recess I didn’t see her in the courtroom.

At almost three o’clock that afternoon, the defense rested, and the judge sent the jury to deliberate. Most of the spectators left then, but my brother wasn’t coming to pick me up until six, so I stayed and worked on my weaving.

The bailiff came back at four o’clock. Then two lawyers came scurrying in. The jury had a verdict. There was a half-hour crush of lawyers and reporters hurrying to get set up. Finally, the deputies wheeled Tague Barnwell back into the courtroom, and the jury filed in.

I wanted to feel free, but when the jury foreman said, “We find the defendant guilty,” I didn’t feel anything. Six times the foreman said, “We find the defendant guilty,” and none of them made me feel any differently.

When my brother picked me up, he didn’t even ask how I was, so I said, “It’s over.”

“Yeah? What’s the verdict?” He didn’t care, though. Like my father, he thought I was a fallen woman, because I’d run away from home and lived with Edrard without being married. They thought this was my punishment.

“Guilty,” I said. I might as well have been talking about myself.

“Good. Because you need to get this out of your system and do something useful. Mom and Abby need your help at home.”

“Okay.”

I was obedient and contrite, because that was the price of coming home. I bowed my head at dinner, while Dad prayed over me. When he said, “Lift up Becky and come back into her heart. Forgive her for her sins,” he meant my whole life was a sin that I needed to atone for.

If I had obeyed Dad, I would have gotten married right after high school and had kids, like my sisters did. Instead, I’d gone into strangers’ homes to babysit to pay for three semesters of college. Because I wouldn’t, my father had picked the man he thought I should marry, and invited him to dinner. Week after week, for two years, while the sand ran out in the hourglass of my father’s patience.

Then a girl in my theater class invited me to the Renaissance Festival in Bonner Springs. After I saw the ladies in their tippet sleeves, and the knights in their armor, I never wanted to go back to my old life. I didn’t want to wear modest clothes or get married or have four kids.

The night of Tague Barnwell’s verdict, while my nieces got ready for bed, I read my Bible like a good aunt. After the lights were out, I waited until they were asleep before I cried. For Edrard. Not for me. Because even though I hadn’t done what I was supposed to do, it was what I’d wanted. It was what I still wanted.

After everyone was asleep I took my prayer journal into the kitchen. Zee had the handwriting of a third grader. Big sloppy sixes and scribbled twos. I picked up the phone and dialed, liking the idea of bolting Zee out of bed in the middle of the night. A sliver of terror cutting through her sleep. Except she answered after two rings and she sounded awake.

“I just got home from work,” she said, when I asked if she’d been asleep.

“Where do you work?”

“At a bar.” That was all she said, and I remembered I hadn’t exactly treated her like a friend when I saw her at the courthouse.

“Can you go this Saturday? Out to Bryn Carreg.”

“We’d have to go early, because I work in the afternoon.” Then like she was talking to someone else in the room, she said, “Yeah, I know, Leon. We’re gonna go here in a minute.”

I gave her my folks’ address, and then we hung up. I sat holding the phone, trying to imagine where she was, who was with her, but all I knew was that she wasn’t alone. Not the way I was, awake in a house full of good Christians sleeping the sleep of the innocent and the righteous.





CHAPTER 56





Zee



When I went to pick Rosalinda up on Saturday, she walked around to the passenger side of my car, staring into the back seat the whole way.

“Is the dog coming with us?” she said.

“This is Leon. I didn’t want to leave him cooped up at home.”

“This is the Leon you were talking to the other night?”

“Yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t remember that. I’d been pretty high when she called. “I know he looks scary, but he’s safe. If it’s a problem—”

“No, it’s fine,” she said, but when she got in the car, she kept looking over her shoulder at Leon like she thought he was going to come over the center console and eat her.

After we got on the highway, he laid down and went to sleep. Rosalinda opened her bag and took out a long roll of what looked like belt webbing, with a pattern in it. It reminded me of the trim on the dress Gentry had given me. The dress that was somewhere with his camping stuff in his truck.

“I’m going to work on my weaving, if you don’t mind,” she said. “I’m trying to get a bunch of things ready for the holiday season for my Etsy shop.”

“You have a shop on Etsy?”

“I used to make decent money, but it’s been harder since . . . because I have to borrow my brother’s phone to upload pictures and stuff, and I can’t always get to the post office.”