What Celeste said
She was angry for exactly one afternoon.
I drove out to her house the next Saturday. She was in the chair by the window with her right hand in her lap, and she saw the folder under my arm before I said anything.
I told her all of it. The ledger, the card, the doors, the payment. I told her what Lucien had done.
She said nothing for a long time. Then, in her halting way, she said, “You had no right to my books.”
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“No, ma’am.”
“It was my yard.” Her chin began to tremble, which made her angrier, and she hated it. “I did not want anyone to know. I have carried that for years, Jude, and I did not need a man to come and carry it for me.”
“No, ma’am. But you did that for me. You waited in the car.”
Her mouth stayed open and nothing came out of it.
I knelt beside her chair and took out the tape measure, the yellow Stanley with the bent hook and the scratched letters. I had carried it every day for four years and never once left it at home.
“I would like to give this back,” I said. “It is yours. But I would like it more if you would keep me on.”
She started to cry, and I had never seen her do it. She took the tape in her good hand and held it against her chest, and she cried for a long time. Then she wiped her face with her wrist.
“Alcide would have liked you.”
“I wish I had met him.”
“You would have been afraid of him. Everybody was. He was soft as butter underneath.” She looked at the tape. “Armand would have liked you too.”
She pushed it back into my hand. “You keep it. A man ought to carry his own tools.”