of noise at me again about the tent. I didn’t care. On the drive home I put up with his country music station without saying a word. At the New Hampshire border we stopped to get lunch, and I caught sight of another shop I wanted to stop at in the strip mall.
“Not in any hurry, are we?” I asked Dodge.
“Not really, why?”
We stopped in at the pawnshop. In the glass case they had a lot of different wedding rings and engagement rings. I picked out a narrow gold band that would bottom out the last of my money until payday. Dodge said, “Your timing’s a little funny.”
“No time like the present.”
“You think she’ll go along with it?”
“Beats me. I got nothing to lose.”
He chuckled as if he wasn’t sure that was true.
“You know what,” I said slowly as the clerk wrapped up the box. “Yesterday I was one second away from splattering my brains all over a pine tree. Even if she says no, life could be worse.”
The clerk, who’d been pretending he wasn’t listening, for a split second looked up at me uneasily.
Dodge said, “That would have been a stupid-ass thing to do.”
“I didn’t do it, did I?”
“No. You think maybe you ought to take a little more time to get your head together before you ask her?”
“Now who’s on Oprah?”
“Just a thought.”
I took the bag and headed next door to the tattoo shop. Dodge looked amused while I explained to the guy what I wanted. Half an hour later I walked back out with a new motto in puffy black letters that curved around the insignia: Fiat justitia ruat caelum.
“Where the hell’d you get that from?” asked Dodge.
“John Quincy Adams. It’s Latin. ‘Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.’”
Dodge smirked and gave a quick laugh like a bull snorting. “You make a lot of noise, Cade.”
I said, “I’m not just making noise anymore.”
Chapter 22
Leela
Maybe a month or so after I lost Eve, there I was sitting at the breakfast table in my mother’s house, waiting for my tea to steep, and I had a revelation. It was very early, and the sunlight came through the window almost sideways, colored like pollen. The fields outside were cast in that haze. Easter had just passed, and where the table pushed up against the windowsill there was a basket made out of that plastic canvas stuff threaded with yarn, with the face of a bucktoothed rabbit on the front. In the bottom lay a few small chocolate eggs wrapped in foil, the dregs of that year’s candy she kept around for guests and neighbor children. It made for a poor and paltry scene, but I had my revelation even so.
I thought about the blind man in the Gospel, the one they bring to Jesus to test him. They say to him, so, was this man born blind because of his own sin, or because of what his parents did? Because everybody thought it had to be one or the other. But Jesus, he said no, this man was born blind so the glory of God could be revealed in him. And then he touched that man’s eyes and healed his sight. It made me think, maybe there’s a purpose for this sadness that I just can’t figure out, the way that man lived his whole life up until Jesus came along with everyone having the wrong ideas about why he was blind. Maybe someday I’ll come to find a purpose to this. And it wasn’t much, but it was just enough to cast a little sallow light on my heart, give me enough to feel around by. It would be a lie to say that made me feel better, but at least it made me feel like I could live.
Much later on, when Lucia came to me with that foolishness of hers, I thought about that again. I had the righteousness of knowing Jesus taught that the Lord doesn’t curse children for the sins of their parents. And even though I never received the witness for why that angel came down twice and swooped back each time, I had the comfort of knowing our hands were clean of it.
I don’t want to talk about what happened to Eli. We owe him the dignity of not speaking of that. Because it’s the truth, at wakes and memorials and such, that all the talk begins to turn a life into a set of tall tales. Somebody will tell a story,