Chapter Twenty-Four
Roan
Wade is sitting on a milk crate outside the salvage office door at twenty past midnight with a cigarette he is not smoking.
“Roan.”
“Is she asleep.”
“Light is on.”
I stand there.
“Marcus said it is not a guard,” Wade says.
“I know what he said.”
“He said it to me twice.” Wade turns the cigarette round in his fingers. “He said, Wade, that is not a guard, and then about a minute later he said it again, and I have been sat here an hour working out which one of us he was saying it to.”
“Neither,” I say. “He was saying it to the book.”
Wade thinks about that.
“Are you going in,” he says.
“Do you want to ask me not to.”
“I want to go home,” Wade says, “and I cannot, and there is nowhere in this yard I can sit where I am not sat outside a door. So do what you are going to do.”
I knock.
There is a long pause and then she says, “It is open.”
The salvage office has a desk and a filing cabinet and a couch that Hollis had put in about four years ago for reasons nobody has ever explained, and she has made the couch up with a blanket off the back of it and she is sitting on the end of it with her boots off and her back against the arm.
She does not stand up.
“Sol.”
“Roan.”
I shut the door behind me.
“You can leave that open,” she says.
“Do you want it open.”
“I want you to have thought about it,” she says, “and now you have,” and she does not tell me either way, so I leave it about a hand’s width and stand there.
There is a lamp on the desk, which is the only light, and it makes the room orange and small. She has got the same jacket over the back of the chair. There is a bag on the floor by her feet with nothing much in it.
“I have got about eleven things to say,” I say.
“Then say them in order.”
“I am not going to talk about the vote.”
“Good.”
“I want to say that first, because you are going to think everything I say in here is about the vote,” I say, “and I have been sitting in my truck for two hours working out how to say a thing in a way that is not, and there is no way, and I am going to say it anyway.”
“Say it, then,” she says.
So I get down.
I did not plan that. I want it on the record, because it looked like a plan and it was not one. I get about four feet into the room and my legs do it, and then I am on the floor of a salvage office on both knees with my hands on my thighs like a boy at a rail, and she does not move.
“I am sorry,” I say.
She looks at me.
“There were fourteen of them,” I say. “From the ninth of April to the twelfth of August. Her name is Dovey Renard and she is twenty-nine and she is attached to their sergeant at arms and she was theirs from the first day, and I have said all of that in church and I am saying it to you now because you should not have to hear the count from a man in glasses reading it off a page in a schoolhouse.”
“I did not hear it from him.”
“I know. You heard it off thirty men’s faces.”
“Go on,” she says.
“I was in a motel two counties south on fourteen Tuesdays and I lied about every one of them,” I say. “Not with words. I never once lied to you with words and I have been telling myself that for six months and it is the most disgusting thing I have ever thought.”
“Keep going.”
“I put my hand on your back in that bar room on the second Sunday of September and got a coffee off you,” I say, “and I had been in that room the Tuesday before, and I did that. Nobody made me. I was not drunk and I was not in trouble and nobody had anything on me. I was forty-one years old and I got on a bike and rode a hundred and ten miles fourteen times.”
My voice does the thing.
“I broke the only rule this club treats as sacred nineteen times in a row in a sealed room in front of men who would have died for me,” I say, “and I would put that second, behind you, and I want you to know that it is second and not first, because everybody else in my life has got it the other way round.”
She has not moved.
“There is no reason,” I say. “That is the last part and then I am finished. Everybody wants me to have one. Hollis wants it to be pressure and Ellis wants it to be my father and Wendell wants it to be nine years of the gavel. And there is a version with all of that in it that is even true, and I am not going to say it, because if I put a reason in front of you then I am asking you to do arithmetic on me, and you have done eleven years of arithmetic in this club and I am not going to hand you one more.”
I stop.
The lamp buzzes. There is a fridge somewhere in that building that comes on.
“I am sorry,” I say. “For all of it. Fourteen times. I am so sorry, Sol.”
She looks at me for what feels like a very long time.
“That was very good,” she says.
“Sol.”
“No, I mean it. That was better than I expected and I have been imagining it for six months.” She pulls the blanket a bit further over her knees.
“You did not say her name until the second sentence and you did not cry and you did not ask me for anything, and you took the club part and put it second. That is not nothing. Six months ago I would have got a version with your father in it.”
“Then why are you.”
“Because you are apologizing for the wrong thing,” she says.
I kneel there.
“Roan. You could have slept with her four hundred times and it would not have got me into that truck.”
I do not say anything, because I do not have anything.
“You do not believe me,” she says.
“I believe that you believe it.”
“That is what a man says when he has decided a woman is being brave about something.” She sits forward.
“Listen to me. I am not being brave. I am telling you a fact about my own life and you can check it against anything you like. In eleven years I have never once thought you were going to leave me. Not once. Not on the ninth of September in that bar room.”
“Then what.”
“You have not told me a true thing since 2019,” she says.
The fridge hums.
“That is not the same,” I say.
“See,” she says, “you have just done it.”
“Sol.”
“You are going to argue with me about what my own injury is.” She is not angry.
That is the thing. She says it the way she used to tell me a truck was pulling right.
“You have got a list of eleven things and you have come in here on your knees to do all of them, and I said one sentence and your first instinct was to correct me.”
I sit back on my heels.
“Tell me the sentence,” I say. “The one you would have wanted.”
“It does not work like that.”
“Sol.”
“No, it genuinely does not,” she says. “If I tell you the words you will go away and say the words. You would say them beautifully. You are extremely good in a room, Roan, it is the whole reason that club is still standing.”
“Then how do I.”
“You do not,” she says. “That is what I have been trying to say and I am going to stop trying, because it is eleven o’clock at night and I am going in front of that table at eight in the morning.”
I get up off my knees, which takes a second, and I sit down on the desk chair because my legs have gone.
“Six years,” I say.
“Six years.”
“You asked me what church was.”
“About two thousand times,” she says. “Not exaggerating. I have thought about the number. Say four times a week for six years, take out the ones where you were not home.”
“And I said.”
“You know what you said,” she says. “Do not do it out loud, it will make you feel better and I do not want you to feel better yet.”
I put my hands over my face for a second.
“I thought I was carrying it for you,” I say.
“I know you did.”
“I genuinely thought.”
“Roan, I know,” she says, and for the first time there is something in her voice that is not level. “I know you thought that. That is why I stayed for six years. If you had been lying to me I would have gone in 2021. You were being kind at me. There is nothing to push against.”
“I would have told you anything,” I say. “There was nothing in it. That is what I have worked out on a road at three in the morning about ninety times, that there was not one single thing in any of it that would have hurt you to know.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why did I.”
And she looks at me across a small orange room and does not answer, and I understand that she is not going to answer it, not because she cannot, but because she has decided that it is mine to get to and she is done doing my work.
So I say the other thing. The thing I have had in my mouth since I sat in that truck in the lot.
“I will hand the gavel to Ellis,” I say.
She looks up.
“In June, before the meet. Or tomorrow.” I lean forward.
“Hollis says a stripped president is a confession and he is right about the Saints, but Hollis is talking about a room in a schoolhouse and I am talking about you. I will take the patch off. Twenty-two years. I will hand it to Ellis and I will keep the salvage yard and we will run the towing and the scale and I will be at that house every night at six o’clock and you can ask me anything in this world and I will answer it, and there will be nothing to answer, because there will not be anything. ”
I have thought about that speech for four hours.
She laughs.
It is not cruel. That is the thing that takes the ground out from under me, that there is nothing cruel in it at all. It comes out of her all at once, and she puts her hand over her mouth, and then she takes it down and she is still doing it, and it goes on for about six seconds.
“Sol.”
“I am sorry.” She wipes under her eye with her wrist. “I am not laughing at you. Or I am, but not.”
“Then explain it to me.”
“You are still doing it,” she says.
“Doing what.”
“Deciding what I get.” She sits all the way forward now with her elbows on her knees.
“Roan. Listen to what you just offered me. You would take away the only thing you have ever been, so that you could come home at six with nothing in your head, so that I could ask you questions about nothing. That is not you giving me anything. That is you making yourself empty so that being open costs you nothing.”
I sit there.
“And you did not ask me,” she says.
“Ask you what.”
“Whether I want a man who sits in a scale house.” She spreads her hands.
“You have just offered to end the thing this whole valley runs on and hand it to Ellis Brannigan, who is a good man and a worse president, and you did not ask me one question first. Not one. You worked out what would be a big enough sacrifice and then you brought it in here and put it on the floor, the same way you have been bringing me decisions for eleven years.”
“That is not.”
“And there is a woman in this room who spent six months building a corridor in another state,” she says, “and you have offered her a house at six o’clock.”
The fridge cuts out and the room gets very quiet.
“I did not think of it like that,” I say.
“No,” she says. “You did not.”
I sit on the desk chair with my elbows on my knees and look at the floor for a while.
“Do you want the gavel gone,” I say.
“I do not know.”
“Sol.”
“That is a true answer,” she says. “You asked me a question and that is the true answer to it, and it is the first question you have asked me in six years so you can have a bad one.”
I laugh. It comes out wrong and it is a laugh.
“Alright,” I say.
“Alright.”
I stand up.
“They vote at eight,” I say.
“They do.”
“I am going to be in that room and my vote is worth nothing and everybody knows it,” I say. “Marcus took the chair off me at the table tonight and I let him, and he was right to, and if I open my mouth in there tomorrow I make it worse for you.”
“You do.”
“So I am going to sit there and say nothing while six men vote on whether.”
“Yes,” she says.
“I do not know how to do that.”
“No,” she says. “I know. Welcome.”
I stand in the middle of a salvage office at one in the morning with my hands at my sides.
“Sol.”
“Go to bed, Roan.”
“Can I.”
“No,” she says, not unkindly.
I get to the door and put my hand on it.
“You said I have not told you a true thing since 2019,” I say.
“You have not.”
“Anselm Boyer,” I say.
She goes still.
“You said his name at that table tonight and I have never said it in my own kitchen,” I say. “Fourteen months. Four loads. Never one problem. And you got there anyway, and you got there off a bar and a tray, and you built it into a thing this club cannot replace.”
“Roan.”
“That is not an apology,” I say. “I do not know what it is. I have been sat in a truck for two hours and it is the only thing in my head that is actually about you.”
She does not say anything.
I go out and shut the door and Wade is still on the milk crate with the same cigarette.