Chapter 4

The deputy came at ten past nine, Monday morning, while I was eating dry toast over the sink.

Deputy Hale, thirty-one years old, went to school with Trent's cousin, still has his football knees. He stood on our porch with his hat in his hands and looked like a man who had pulled the short straw.

Mrs. Mabry. Your sister-in-law filed a report Saturday night. Says you shoved her into a doorframe in the party room and left marks on her arm.

"She did that to herself," I said.

He wrote nothing down.

She has bruising, he said. On both forearms.

"I know."

Mrs. Mabry, if you want to tell me your side, now's the time. If you don't want to, I'm going to have to tell her she can pursue it.

"Give me your phone," I said. "I'll show you."

"My phone."

"Yours works. Mine's at the bottom of the dish sink."

He looked at me for a long second, and then he took the phone out of the clip on his belt and handed it over, and I sat down on the porch step in my sock feet and pulled up the Mabry Lanes page and opened the video file I'd saved to my own account at two in the morning.

I dragged the bar to 9:12.

We watched my sister-in-law lay a mat in a doorway in a room she thought was empty.

Deputy Hale said nothing for the whole minute. Then she said the line - She came at me first, I put my hands up, she kept coming - and he took one step back from me like I'd gotten taller.

"Ma'am," he said. "I need to take this."

He didn't take the phone. He took the phone number of the file, which is a thing you can do now, and he wrote in his little book with his hand not quite steady.

"Somebody has to report this," he said. "I have to report this. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?"

"Yeah."

"Because this is going to be a whole thing by dinner."

It was a whole thing by lunch.

Trent got the call at eleven. He came in the back door with his boots on, which he never does, and stood in the kitchen with his phone in his hand.

"You showed a cop."

"Yes."

"You put my sister on the internet."

"She put herself on the internet. I put the phone on the counter at seven o'clock so the league could watch a trophy."

"You knew the camera was on." His face was red to the ears. "That's what I keep coming back to. You knew. You knew it was on and you laid there and let her talk and you never said one word to me, not one word, you just let me stand there looking stupid-"

"You did stand there."

He flinched. It was the first time in three years I'd actually hit him, and I did it with a sentence.

Then the OB office called.

Nurse Angela, who has been taking my blood pressure since March, said, gently, that they'd received a call from a family member expressing concern that I'd been drinking, and that I was, quote, unstable and not taking care of myself, and she wanted me to come in.

I went in. I peed in a cup and they tested it and it came back clean because I haven't had a drink since May. My blood pressure was 138 over 88. Dr. Pruitt put a hand on my knee and said the baby was fine and asked me straight out if I was safe at home.

I said I didn't know yet.

And Rennie, who had called my doctor to frighten a pregnant woman, was at that moment at the bank on Third with the forged agreement in her tote, telling Marisol Vega I'd signed it in September.

I found that out Wednesday.

First I needed to know why. Nobody forges a signature and moves a mat and rehearses a lie over pride. Pride doesn't need a plan.

Debt needs a plan.