The Little House

In April she told Curtis she was moving out.

He was standing in the kitchen with the coffee machine going. He said, "Moving out."

"Not away. Out."

He said the reasonable things. He said the boys. He said the house. He said, at one point, what will people think, which was the only sentence in the conversation she respected, because it was the only one that was true. Then he did the thing he had been building toward since December, which was to say that he was going to have the house renovated anyway — the kitchen, the upstairs bath, six months of dust — and that she could take the little house, and that by autumn everything would be ready and she could come back and it would all have been, in his framing, a phase.

The little house was on a side street off Coliseum, four rooms behind a bigger house, with a tin roof and a cistern and a fig tree in the yard that dropped fruit on the walk and made the whole alley sticky in July. She had noticed it walking. It was what people in New Orleans call a shotgun, though it had been cut in half somewhere around 1940 and the back of it belonged to nobody.

She painted the inside herself, badly. She moved a bed, a table, two chairs, her paints, the boys' things for weekends, and a cast-iron pan. She kept no china.

Camille came and stood in the doorway and did not say what she was thinking, which Marin appreciated so much that she nearly cried. What Camille said was: "It's very you."

"It's very small."

"It's very you," Camille repeated, and then, because she was Camille and could not help herself: "And the boys?"

"Weekends. Every weekend. And two nights a week if they want."

"Will they want?"

That was the question Marin had not asked herself, and she did not answer it.

They came on the first Friday.

They came in loudly, as they came into every place, and they went through the four rooms in under a minute and declared the tin roof excellent, and Noah asked where the television was and was told there was no television and said "ever?" with the particular horror of a five-year-old confronted with the eighteenth century. They slept on a mattress on the floor in the back room and thought it was the best thing that had ever happened to them.

On Sunday evening, loading them into the car, Theo said, "When are you coming back?"

"I'm not. I live here now."

"No, but when are you coming back?"

She said, soon, and shut the door, and stood in the alley with the fig tree dropping on the roof and understood that they had been happy — that they had been happier in four rooms with a mattress on the floor than they had ever been in the house on Esplanade — and that this was, in its way, the worst thing that had happened to her all year, because she had privately been counting on their misery, and they had not supplied it.

The money was not a problem, and this was the fact that astonished her most: there was a trust from her father — modest, Kentucky, and until that spring entirely theoretical — and there were the paintings, which Birdie was now selling steadily to people from Chicago who thought they were looking at the Outer Banks, and there was the account at the other bank. She was not rich. She was, for the first time, solvent in a way that did not pass through her husband's hands, and she had been married for eleven years without once knowing whether she could afford to leave, which she now understood had been the entire architecture of the marriage.

In May she gave a dinner.

It was not a big dinner; it was eight people and it was in the little house, which meant the table had to go in the front room and the kitchen had to be shut with a curtain, and Trent sent a case of wine from the island and Marisol came up from Grand Isle to help, and afterward Marisol would describe it for years as a banquet with flowers in tubs and wine in gold cups, which it emphatically was not. What it was: eight people eating too well in a room too small, with the fig tree scraping the tin roof and everybody a little drunk and a little in love with her, and Marin at the head of her own table for the first time in her life, and she sat there and looked at the eight of them and thought: I am free. And then, immediately and without any transition at all: free to do what.

Reed was there. He was always there. He had begun to want more than she had available, and he was too good at cards to show it, and she watched him watch her across the table with the same mild interest she had brought to the committee in October, and she understood with a coldness that surprised her that she had used him the way she had once been used, and that this was what freedom did to people, and that she had no intention of stopping.

Wyatt's name came up. Somebody mentioned Mérida.

She said, "He's fine," and went on serving.