Hall Pass

SABRINA.

“I want to have sex with a man who is not you.”

My husband has one leg in the truck and one leg still out in the parking deck. He stops right there, half in and half out, with his jacket over his arm and his keys in his hand.

“Say that again.”

“You heard me the first time, D. You just want to hear it twice so you can decide which face to make.”

He sits all the way down and shuts the door. He does not start the engine. The whole cab shrinks the way it does when a big man sits down. He puts the keys in the cup holder and leaves his hand on top of them.

“All right,” he says. “I’m going to need you to back all the way up, Bree Bree, because I walked out of a steakhouse four minutes ago thinking about a slab.”

“One time. One night. Somebody I don’t know and will never know again, somewhere nobody knows my face, and then it’s over and we go on about our lives exactly the way we have been going on about them.” I turn in the seat so he has to look at me. “That is the entire ask. I have been carrying that sentence around since about March. I have rehearsed it in a car at least forty times. Tonight I finally said it, so I would appreciate it if you did not make me do the whole speech twice.”

“March.”

“March.”

“It’s August, Sabrina.”

“I’m aware of the calendar, D. I live by one.”

He sits there and looks out the windshield at a concrete wall with little yellow numbers painted across it in a row. His jaw does the thing. I let him have the quiet. He is a man who needs about nine seconds before anything true comes out of him, and I have known that since 2010.

“Is this about somebody?” he says.

“No.”

“Is this about me?”

“Partly. Not the way you’re thinking, though, so put that down.” I pull my feet up out of my shoes. “I stopped saying out loud what I wanted somewhere around year nine, because saying it made the room go quiet, and I would rather keep the room. I know what it cost me and I am done paying it.”

“Bree Bree.”

“Let me finish. It’s about the fact that I’m going to be a different-looking woman in ten years and I have spent the last nine of them being extremely reasonable, and I would like, one time, to be in a room where nobody needs anything from me and nobody is deciding about me, including you. That is the whole grocery list. That’s the whole grocery list.”

“Nobody’s deciding about you.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t do the noise.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said mm, which is worse than saying something, and you have been doing it since the salad.”

I take my hand out of my lap and I hold the lighter up between two fingers, down low, around the cup holder, where the deck light runs along the lacquer.

My husband looks at it for a long time.

It is a good-looking thing. Red, the deep kind, lacquer over brass, a little gold hinge and a scratch across the bottom, and it was down under the napkins in his console where I went looking for a charger about ninety seconds before he walked up. It smells like a woman. Not smoke. Perfume. Warm, expensive, and gone almost before a person can place the smell.

“That’s not mine,” he says.

“I know it’s not yours. Nobody in our house has smoked since your mother passed and you threw that pack in the kitchen garbage in front of Aunt Cheryl and made Lem pray over the can like it was a casket.”

“Sabrina.”

“That is a three hundred dollar lighter, D. That is a grown woman’s lighter. A woman who buys that does not buy another one, she refills it, and she notices when it’s gone, and somewhere in this city tonight there is a woman patting a purse.”

“Are you asking me something?”

“No.”

“You’re not going to ask me.”

“I am not going to ask you her name, and I want you to understand why. I am not being big about anything.” I set the lighter in the cup holder, standing up, right next to his keys. “If you tell me her name, then her name lives in my house. It’s in my kitchen in the morning. It’s in my car on the way to a showing. It’s at my mother’s table on Sunday with the macaroni. I would be carrying a whole stranger around on my back for the rest of the year. I have got fourteen agents, a mother with a bad hip, and a building on Lee Street that just funded. I do not have the room.”

He has not touched the keys and he has not touched the lighter.

“You’re not even mad.”

“At who?”

“At me, Bree Bree. At me.”

“No.”

“And why is that, exactly?”

“Because being mad is a job,” I tell him, “and I have already got one, and the pay is better.”

He laughs. It comes out of him wrong, down low and only halfway, the way a man laughs when a thing is not funny but his body has to put the air somewhere.

Somebody raps on the glass.

Derrick turns and there is a man standing at his window with his hand already up in apology, and I know him. Lamar Pinkney. Drywall. My husband cut him loose off the Chamblee job in July and I heard about it at my own dinner table for two weeks.

Derrick puts the window down.

“Lamar.”

“I know. I know. I been down here since nine o’clock. I seen you come out and I let you get all the way to your truck. That’s the whole thing I want on the record, that I let you get to your truck.”

“You followed me to my truck.”

“I waited,” Lamar says. “Three weeks I been callin’ Omar. Three weeks. I’m not out here to start nothin’, big dog, I’m out here ’cause I got four people in my house and a boy startin’ at Valdosta.”

“Lamar, my wife is in this truck.”

“Ma’am. Evenin’, ma’am.”

“Evening,” I say. “How is Charlene?”

“She good, ma’am. She at the house.”

“Tell her I said hey.”

“I will. She still got that picture of y’all from the Christmas thing.”

“I’ll say it and I’ll go. Put me on somethin’ in January. Not today. January. And if the answer’s no, say no to my face and I’ll quit callin’ Omar and I’ll go on home.”

Derrick opens his door. He gets out without slamming anything. Then he walks that man about eight feet away from my window, which I appreciate, and which he did on purpose. Then he stands there with his hands down at his sides, the way my husband stands. Whatever he says to Lamar Pinkney is said too low for me to catch one word. It goes on a long time.

I watch my husband through the windshield.

What I see is a man with a boy from his own town standing in front of him. I see Lamar’s shoulders come down first, then his chin, then all of him at once, like somebody let the air out of a float. I see Derrick reach into his back pocket for a card and write something on it against his thigh. And I see him put his palm on the back of Lamar Pinkney’s neck for about a second and a half. Men from Macon do that to each other. I have never once seen my husband do that to a man he had finished with for good.

Lamar goes off toward the stairs with his head down.

Derrick stands under that green light by himself and rolls his shoulders one time. Then he comes back and sits down beside me.

“January?” I ask him.

“January.”

“After Chamblee.”

“He had a boy in the car, Sabrina. Seventeen years old, two levels down, in a Malibu with the windows cracked. There wasn’t a soul at that house to watch the boy.” He puts both hands on the wheel at ten and two. “A man who brings his son to ask did not come up here to fight me.”

“Mm.”

“Now don’t start.”

“I’m not starting. I think it was a kind thing, and I think you had already decided to do it before you ever got out of this truck, which is the part I like.” I put my hand on his forearm. “You want to know what I did today?”

“You closed Lee Street.”

“I closed Lee Street. Forty-one hundred square feet, and the seller cried at the table. Sixty-eight years old, sitting there with the pen, and his whole hand was going like a leaf.”

“Why was he crying?”

“Because he bought that building in 1991 with his brother. His brother has been dead eleven years. And I am sitting across the table doing what I do, which is sliding the pen a half inch closer and talking about the wire.”

“That’s the job, Bree Bree.”

“It is the job. Then I drove back to the office and sat out in the lot ten minutes before I went inside. What I was thinking the whole time was, Sabrina, you are extremely good at the part where other people let go of things.”

He does not have an answer for that. There is not much a husband could say.

“So that is the kind of day I had,” I tell him, “and then I got in your truck and put my hand on a lighter. Then I said what I said. In that order, D. I want the order on the record.”

“The order is on the record.”

“Good.”

“Bree Bree.”

“Hm.”

“Is this a thing you are going to do, or a thing you are warning me about?”

That is the best question my husband has asked me in about four years, and I will not insult it with a quick answer, so I sit there with my shoes in my hand and give the man a real one.

“It is a thing I intend to do,” I tell him. “I don’t know when, I don’t know where, and I don’t know who. But I’m not asking you whether I may. I’m telling you first, because that is what you do when you’ve been married to somebody sixteen years and you intend to be married to them for another thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I heard you.”

“D.”

“Hm.”

“Are we going to talk about what I said, or are we going to ride all the way home listening to the air?”

He lets a breath go.

“Ask me something first,” he says.

“That is the opposite of talking about what I said.”

“Bree Bree.”

“Go ahead.”

“When you picture the man.” He is still looking out the windshield. “The room, wherever that room turns out to be. Am I standing in it with you?”

The ventilation fan up on four picks that exact second to cut off, and the whole deck goes so quiet I can hear my own earring move.

“Derrick Whitfield.”

“I’m asking you a question.”

“You are asking me a question, and I want to make sure I am hearing the question, so I’m going to put it in my own words, and you will tell me if I have it right.” I turn all the way around in the seat. “Are you asking me whether you can be in the room and watch?”

He does not blink. That is the part I will be thinking about later. Sixteen years, and the man does not blink.

“I’m asking.”

“Whaaaaattt?”

“I’m asking, Sabrina.”

“Hold up. Hold all the way up.” I have both hands up now and I am laughing, and I cannot do one single thing about the laughing. “Sixteen years. Sixteen. Two houses, one business, your mother in our front room, my daddy’s funeral, and you pick a Thursday in a parking deck off Piedmont. You could have told me in Jamaica. We were in Jamaica, D. There was a hammock.”

“I wasn’t ready in Jamaica.”

“You were ready in Jamaica. You were wearing a hat.”

“Sabrina.”

“Say the whole thing out loud. I’m not going to help you and I will not finish it for you. I want to hear a grown man say the words with his own mouth, If you cannot say it in a truck to your wife, you are definitely not going to be able to do the thing itself.”

He takes his hands off the wheel. He turns in the seat. He looks right at me, and there is that face, the same one from the sidewalk outside the Fox the year we met, when he told me he had walked four blocks the wrong way on purpose so our conversation would run a little longer.

“I want to be in the room when another man is having sex with my wife,” he says. “Not down the hall, not told about it over breakfast, not a picture on a phone. In the room, with a light on, in a chair, watching your face while it happens. That’s the thing. I have had that in me since I was twenty-two years old and I never said it out loud to one living person. Now I have said it to my wife. You can do whatever you want with the information.”

Lord have mercy.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay?”

“I didn’t say yes. I said okay. Okay is a receipt, not an answer.”

“Sabrina.”

“I am going to tell you two things and then you will drive me home.” I hold up one finger. “The first one is that I asked for a night, and about ninety seconds later it turned into a thing with a chair in it for you. I noticed. I am going to keep noticing it, and you will have to live with a woman who notices.”

“That’s fair.”

“The second one is that I am not sorry about what my body did when you said that, and I will not pretend otherwise just to keep the moral high ground tidy.” I put my shoes back on, one and then the other. “So we’re both going to have to sit with ourselves tonight.”

He starts the truck.

“Where would a thing like that even happen?” I ask him. “Not this house. Not this city. I have sold two hundred and six houses in this town. Every man here either lives in one of them or is working on getting there.”

“Not here,” he says. “Somewhere nobody can pick your face out of a room.”

“And that place exists.”

“Everything exists, Bree Bree. That’s the part about having a little money nobody tells you about beforehand.”

“Mm.”

“There you go again.”

I pick the lighter up out of the cup holder, since my husband will not touch it. I turn it over one time and find that scratch on the bottom with my thumb. Then I hold it out to him flat on my palm and wait. He takes the lighter.

“How long have you had that in your head?” I ask him. “And do not tell me a while. A while is not a number, D.”

He closes his fist around it and backs us out of the space.

“Not long,” my husband says.