Carolina Moon

the law said I could leave home. If I’d left before, he’d’ve made me come back, and he’d’ve made me pay.”
    “Couldn’t you have gone for help? Your grandmother.”
    “He’d have hurt her.” Tory opened her eyes, looked straight into Cade’s. “He was afraid of her, the same as he was afraid of me, and he’d have done something to her. And my mother would’ve sided with him. She always did. That’s why I didn’t go to her when I left. If he’d found out, that wouldn’t have set right with him. I can’t explain it to you, I could never explain it to anyone, the way a fear can live inside you. The way it dictates how you think and how you act, what you say, what you don’t dare say.”
    “You just did.”
    She opened her mouth, then closed it again before something leaped out she hadn’t thought through. “Do you want more tea?”
    “Sit. I’ll get it.” He rose before she could, and put the kettle back on to boil. “Tell me. Tell me the rest.”
    “I didn’t tell them I was leaving home, though I’d planned every step of what I would do, where I would go. I packed and ran off in the middle of the night, walked into town, to the bus station, and bought a ticket to New York City. When the sun came up I was miles away, and I never intended to come back again. But …”
    She lifted her laced fingers, then closed them again, like a prayer. “I went to see them that time,” she said carefully. “I’d just turned twenty. Been gone two years. I had a job, working at a store downtown. A store with lovely things. I made a good salary, and I had my own place. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, but it was mine. I had my vacation coming and I took the bus all the way to the Georgia border to see them, well, maybe part of it was to show them that I’d made something of myself. Two years I’d been away, and inside of two minutes, it was like I’d never left.”
    He nodded. He’d gone away to college, become a man, he supposed, during those four years. And when he’d come back the rhythm was the same.
    But for him it had been the right rhythm, one keenly missed.
    “Nothing I did,” she went on, “had done, could do, was right. Look how I’d tarted myself up. He knew the kind of life I was living up north. He figured I’d just come home because I was pregnant from one of the men I’d let get at me. I was still a virgin, but to him, I was a whore. I’d gotten some spine in those two years, just enough steel that I stood up to him. The first time in my life I dared to stand up to him. It took the rest of my vacation week for the bruises on my face to heal enough that I could cover them with makeup and go back to work.”
    “Christ, Tory.”
    “He only hit me once. But God, he had big hands. Big, hard hands, and they bunched so easily into fists.” Absently, she lifted her hand to her face, traced the slightly crooked line of her nose. “Knocked me right off my feet and into the counter of that grubby little kitchen. I didn’t realize my nose was broken. The pain was so familiar, you see.”
    Under the table Cade’s own hands curled into fists that felt useless and late.
    “When he came at me again, I grabbed the knife out of the sink. A big, black-handled kitchen knife. I didn’t even think about it,” she said in that calm, thoughtful voice. “It was just in my hand. He must’ve seen in my face that I’d have used it. That I’d have loved to use it. He stormed out of the trailer, with my mother running after him, begging him not to go. He flung her off like a gnat, right into the dirt, and still she called after him. God, she crawled after him on her goddamn hands and knees. I’ll never forget that. Never.”
    Cade walked back to the stove, to the spitting kettle, to give her time to settle. In silence, he measured tea, poured the hot water. He sat again, and waited.
    “You have a gift for listening.”
    “Finish it out. Get rid of it.”
    “All right.” Calm now, Tory opened her eyes. If there had been pity in his, the words might not have come. But what she saw was patience.
    “I felt sorry for her. I was disgusted with her. And I hated her. In that moment, I think I hated her more than him. I put down the knife and picked up my bag. I hadn’t even unpacked, hadn’t been there an hour. When I walked out, she was still sitting in the dirt and crying. But she looked at me, so much anger in her eyes. ‘Why’d you have to go and make him mad? You always