face into his neck. I wept.
He held me tightly, his voice emanating sweet and light from his chest. But, for once, it had no effect on me. The tidal wave heaved itself up from the distance and hurtled toward my shore, its beautiful, obscene curve come at last to wash me, to drown me. I cried, trembling and clutching him to me, then beating him away.
Eventually, I sobbed myself to sleep inside his arms and the purr of his voice. I woke alone in the slant-light of late afternoon, the ends of all of my nerve cells swept clean. I heard him humming down the hall—a normal man humming a hymn. The sound of frying eggs interrupted a deep male voice singing Addie’s odd, jazzy version of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
Wobbly on my legs, I walked down the hall and stopped in the kitchen doorway to watch him. He turned from the stove with a question on his face.
“I’m okay,” I told him and eased myself into a chair.
He pulled some perfect biscuits out of the oven. God, he was beautiful.
I motioned toward the bedroom. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I should have realized what a shock it would be for you. Should have planned it with you. But I saw the opportunity.” He set a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me. A slice of ham beside it. Addie and I had done that—made breakfast for supper, when we were tired or hadn’t gotten around to making anything else.
“Tell me,” I said. “How did Roy like having a twin?”
He filled his plate and sat down across the table from me.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t ask and he didn’t say. He’ll drink as much as you give him. I kept him drunk, very drunk, and the shades drawn. Not long after you fell asleep that night, I heard him creeping around in the kitchen. Then the back door squeaked. I checked the cookie jar and figured out what he was up to. My first thought was to get the money back, then I realized what else I could do. Or at least try. I wrote you the note and ran after him. He hadn’t gotten far. We hopped the midnight freight out of the mill and got as far as a Forest City motel. I was sure I needed to be isolated with him, like I was with you.”
The two of us ate hungrily, me looking at him and him gazing back at me. Incomprehensible. Yet he sat like any man, eating eggs, chewing, lifting his coffee cup to his lips. I could hardly breathe. But I, too, sat like any woman and ate my supper.
He ate with the same concentration and gusto as Addie. When he had sopped the last smear of egg yellow with his biscuit, he wiped his hands, then took a small wad of money out of his pocket. He laid it on the table and pushed it toward me. “That’s what’s left. I wish it was more. But there was food, the motel, and the booze. I had to buy some clothes, too. I left him enough money for the train back to Kentucky. He looked up at me early one morning before I handed him the bottle and said, ‘I never knew you were such an ugly, goddamned ugly woman. How’d you get here?’ I was starting to get a beard by then.”
He tipped forward, slurring and jerking his shoulders the way Roy had when he was drunk. I laughed then and Addie laughed, too. “Ugly, goddamned ugly woman,” he repeated and we could not stop laughing. Every time we glanced at each other, we giggled and he mimicked Roy again. My face locked into a laugh, I felt hysteria rising.
Finally, I choked on some biscuit and had to stop myself.
“Do you like this?” I asked when I had calmed down. “Being a man?”
The question sobered him. He sighed and answered, “Yes, I do. But I don’t like it more than being you.” My skin prickled when he said “being you.”
“I wasn’t sure if I could even make it happen. It took longer than I thought it would. I had to concentrate everything I had on him. With you, it just happened. I went out only for food, booze, and clothes—and a haircut. When I saw I was finished, I came straight back here.”
“Did it hurt? Will you stay like this? Will you need to be around him?”
He sat very still for a moment,