Henry checked on Jessie shortly after he worked with the colt, and found her sleeping. He finished his chores, went and caught the colt easily, and then it was time for lunch with Jessie. After lunch Henry set to fixing and re-hanging the screen door that had been dangling off its twisted hinges since the night of the attack. Henry unscrewed the old hinges from the splintered doorjamb, pulled the screen door down and placed it across two sawhorses he had brought up on the porch.

As he repaired the doorjamb as best he could with wood glue, screws and putty, he thought about how lucky Chad had been that night in the parking lot. Things may have been very different if the whole thing would have happened six months earlier. With very little to live for back then, Henry believed he wouldn’t have thought twice about actually pulling the trigger on the son of a bitch. Six months earlier, he wouldn’t have had anything to lose, and spending the rest of his life in prison, if that’s what it came to, would have been fine with him. After all, what would it have mattered if he spent the rest of his life behind the walls of some actual prison, or if he spent it in the prison he had built inside himself. Either way, he was locked up. In his mind, he deserved it. But things were very different now. For the first time in a very long time, Henry felt he actually had something to live for. As much as he wanted to make Chad pay for what he’d done to Jessie, he could also see a lowlife like Chad wasn’t worth spending the rest of his new life in jail over.

Henry bent down to put a small screw in the very bottom of the cracked doorjamb and as he did, he noticed three tiny crimson dots between the white boards of the porch decking. It was Jessie’s blood that had escaped notice when Mrs. Rodriguez scrubbed the porch with water and bleach the day after the attack. The dots would be virtually unnoticeable for anybody not kneeling in the doorway and looking down at the porch at the angle that Henry was. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. He thought about how hard Jessie must have fought to save herself that night. He thought about the force that it would have taken to knock the door off its hinges, and he wondered from which cut on her body those three small dots had come. As he sat staring at them, his own blood began to boil. Yes, he thought to himself. Chad was very lucky that night in the parking lot. But luck won’t be enough if I ever see him again.

CHAPTER 35

Henry, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, hung laundry on the clothesline outside the back door of Jessie’s house in the late morning sun. It was one of the many tasks Jessie hadn’t been able to perform since she’d gotten hurt nearly a week before. Back when he and Annie were married, doing laundry was one of the household chores Henry hated to do, and he avoided it all costs. He disliked doing laundry so much that during his drinking days when he rarely had the money, he would rather go to a thrift shop and buy used jeans and shirts then take the time to wash his own clothes. When he did wash them, it was usually in some flea-bitten, coin-operated laundry on the side of the road, or sometimes he used the water in a stock tank or a creek or river.