"Jo," he said.
"Move," I said.
He moved. I walked past him to the Buick. Before I shut the door, he said, not loud, "Where are you going to go?"
"Tasha's," I said.
"Text me when you get there," he said. "Please. Just so I know."
I didn't answer. But at 9:48 p.m., from Tasha Greer's driveway on Gold Point Circle, I texted him one word, which was Here. And thirty seconds later he wrote back, Ok. And then, a minute after that, I'm so sorry. And then nothing else, and I sat in the car and cried until Tasha's mother came out in her scrubs and knocked on the window and said, "Baby, come inside, I made up the couch."
* * *
Renée Greer was a charge nurse on the cardiac floor at Erlanger, and she ran her house the way I imagine she ran that floor, which is to say nothing in it was ever allowed to get worse while she was watching. She didn't ask me what happened the first night. She put a quilt on the couch and a glass of water on the side table and a box of tissues next to the water, and she said, "Bathroom's down the hall, towels are in the closet, Tasha's daddy snores so don't be scared," and turned out the light.
The second morning, over grits, she asked.
I told her. I told it badly, out of order, the car first and then the account and then Grandma Ida and then the bow, and at some point Tasha reached over and took my spoon away because I'd been stirring the same grits for five minutes. Mrs. Greer listened with her coffee in both hands. When I was done she was quiet a long time.
"Your mama called here at eleven last night," she said. "I told her you were safe and asleep. She asked me to tell you to come home."
"I'm not going home."
"I didn't say you had to. I said she asked." Mrs. Greer set her cup down. "You can stay here through graduation. After that we'll talk. Tasha's going to Knoxville in August and I'll have her room, and you're welcome to it if it comes to that, but I'm not going to pretend to you that it's the same as having your family behind you. It's not. I've watched a lot of people in a lot of hospital beds wish they'd made up with somebody. I'm not telling you to. I'm telling you I've seen it."
"They spent my grandmother's money on a car, Mrs. Greer."
"I know, baby," she said. "I heard you. I'm saying two true things at once. That's what grown people have to learn to do."