5432852385743

I moved into Deke’s Spanish-style home on Sam Houston Road. At least for public consumption. In
truth, I moved in with Sadie at 135 Bee Tree Lane. I was afraid of what we might find when we first
helped her inside, and I think that Sadie was, too, stoned or not. But Miz Ellie and Jo Peet from the
Home Ec Department had recruited a few trustworthy girls who had spent an entire day before Sadie’s
return cleaning, polishing, and scrubbing every trace of Clayton’s filth off the walls. The living room
rug had been taken up and replaced. The new one was industrial gray, hardly an exciting color, but
probably a wise choice; gray things hold so few memories. Her mutilated clothing had been whisked
away and replaced with new stuff.
Sadie never said a word about the new rug and the different clothes. I’m not sure she even noticed
them.
12
I spent my days there, cooking her meals, working in her little garden (which would sicken but not
quite die in another hot central Texas summer), and reading Bleak House to her. We also became
involved in several of the afternoon soaps: The Secret Storm, Young Doctor Malone, From These Roots, and
our personal favorite, The Edge of Night.
She changed the parting in her hair from the center to the right, cultivating a Veronica Lake style
that would cover the worst of the scarring when the bandages eventually came off. Not that they
would for a long time; the first of her reconstructive surgeries—a team effort involving four doctors—
was scheduled for August fifth. Ellerton said there would be at least four more.
I would drive back to Deke’s after Sadie and I had our supper (which she rarely did more than pick
at), because small towns are full of big eyes attached to gabby mouths. It was best that those big eyes
should see my car in Deke’s driveway after the sun went down. Once it was dark, I walked the two
miles back to Sadie’s, where I slept on the new hide-a-bed sofa until five in the morning. It was
almost always broken rest, because nights when Sadie didn’t awaken me, screaming and thrashing her
way out of bad dreams, were rare. In the daytime, Johnny Clayton was dead. After dark he still stalked
her with his gun and knife.
I would go to her and soothe her as best I could. Sometimes she would trudge out to the living
room with me and smoke a cigarette before shuffling back to bed, always pressing her hair down
protectively over the bad side of her face. She would not let me change the bandages. That she did
herself, in the bathroom, with the door closed.
After one especially terrible nightmare, I came in to find her standing naked by her bed and
sobbing. She had become shockingly thin. Her nightgown was puddled at her feet. She heard me and
turned around, one arm across her breasts and the other hand over her crotch. Her hair swung back to
her right shoulder, where it actually belonged, and I saw the swollen scars, the heavy stitching, the
fallen, rumpled flesh over her cheekbone.
“Get out!” she screamed. “Don’t look at me like this, why can’t you get out?”
“Sadie, what is it? Why did you take off your nightgown? What’s wrong?”
“I wet my bed, okay? I have to change it, so please get out and let me put some clothes on!”
I went to the foot of the bed, grabbed the quilt that was folded there, and wrapped it around her.
When I turned one end up in a kind of collar that hid her cheek, she calmed.
“Go in the living room and be careful you don’t trip on that thing. Have a smoke. I’ll change the
bed.”
“No, Jake, it’s dirty.”
I took her by the shoulders. “That’s what Clayton would say, and he’s dead. A little piss is all it is.”