most no sense you’ve ever made. Tamara, this is why you married me. This is why you made me marry you.”
“I didn’t make you marry me.”
“You threatened to marry some old geezer.”
“And if you didn’t care about me at all, you wouldn’t have cared if I’d done it.”
“I do care about you. I did and I do. But you drive me up one wall and down the other sometimes and I swear I’m looking down at you from the ceiling right now. What the hell are you thinking saying you don’t want it anymore? Millions of dollars and the company you swore to shut down. You just want to give it back?”
Tamara turned around and raised her empty hands.
“Levi, you don’t know how good it’s been to be here with you. How good it’s been for me. I didn’t think I’d ever feel normal again, like I felt before the flood, and this past month I have. And that’s worth a fortune to me.”
“Me, too, baby. Nothing matters more than you being happy. But you seem to think going back home for two weeks and signing some papers will take away all that happiness. Only if you let it. It’s not like we have to stay there forever.”
“I don’t trust Momma. I don’t.”
“I don’t trust her, either, but what’s she got to do with us anymore?”
“She doesn’t know where we are. But if we go back, she will. And she’ll try to take it all away. She’s taken you away from me before, and I know she’ll try again.”
“So let her try. We won’t let her.”
Levi stood up and stared at the ceiling a moment. She knew he was trying to calm down for her sake. He walked over to her and took her hands in his.
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen if we go back,” Levi began, rubbing her soft hands with his rough ones. “We’ll pack up our suitcases and get in the truck. We’ll drive one whole day to get there and spend the night in a hotel in Louisville. The next morning we’ll go to the judge’s office. We’ll sign our lives away on those papers, and then we’ll go back to the hotel. I’ll call whoever I need to call to tell them that Red Thread is shutting down. We’ll give all the employees six months’ severance pay. Nobody could complain about that. People won’t be happy, but what seventeen-year-old girl wants to be saddled with a big company to run? It’ll be news for a week or two and then it won’t be news anymore. We’ll go by Arden and you can get your things out of there or you can sell everything in the house in a flea market. God knows I don’t care. And your mother will show up sometime when we’re there. And she’ll tell you I used to rape her in the stables. Or that I used to steal money from the house. Or that I tried to kill her once. And you won’t believe her. When you don’t believe her, she’ll tell me you’re crazy. She’ll tell me the doctors wanted to put you in an asylum because you’re so sick in the head. And she’ll tell me you lied about being a virgin and you lied about being trapped in the house with your grandfather’s body during the flood. She’ll tell me you tried to murder your whole family once. And I won’t believe her lies about you any more than you will believe her lies about me. She might even send the cops after me, but that’s fine. She’s trespassing on our property, so we’ll have the cops arrest her and drag her away. And then we will go to whatever farm has your Kermit, and we’ll buy him back if we can find him. And we’ll have supper with Andre and Gloria and we’ll stay the night in their house and try not to bang the bed against the wall loud enough to wake them. Then we’ll invite them to come stay with us down here, hug them goodbye and come back here—you, me and Kermit. Let’s hope Rex likes the Muppets as much as you do. The only bad thing that’s gonna happen because you and I go back home and sign those papers is that Bowen’ll kill me when I tell him we’ll have to clear land and put up a real barn for all these damn horses. Okay?”