Chapter 17 Wyatt
Matthew is on the kitchen phone with the cord stretched halfway across the room.
I stop in the doorway. I have come in from the yard with a half-pail of feed for the chickens.
Matthew is standing at the far end of the counter with his back to me and the receiver pressed up against his ear.
Matthew startles when he sees me and his face does the small quick rearrangement it does when he is going to lie about something.
“Who’s on the phone?”
He looks at me. The cord is taut between him and the wall.
“No one.”
“Matthew.”
He puts the receiver down. He puts it down carefully then he ducks under the cord and around the table and out the back door, fast, past me at the threshold and across the porch and down the steps and into the yard.
He’s been antsy ever since I told him about the pregnancy.
He’s excited about being an uncle, but something about it has unnerved him too.
I think it’s because it was unexpected. He’s a sensitive kid.
He picks up on more than he lets on and with everything with the ranch, I think he doesn’t really know what the future looks like and he’s finding that scary.
I set the feed pail on the counter.
The phone rings. On the fourth ring I cross the kitchen and I pick it up.
“Briggs.”
There is a long pause on the other end of the line.
“Wyatt. It’s Julian.”
My hand tightens on the receiver.
“Wyatt?”
“I’m here.”
“I think Matthew called me. I dialed back without thinking.”
“Yeah.”
Silence follows. “How are you?” he says finally.
“Fine.”
He waits. I do not fill the wait. I have been trying to get my breathing under control since I picked the receiver up and I am not winning.
I know what the social niceties are. I need to ask him how he is back, but that old fear of speaking is climbing up through my belly.
It’s Julian on the phone. Julian. I have had so many conversations with him in my head.
What is wrong with me? Why can’t I have one in real life?
“How is the ranch?” he says.
“Fine.”
“And the boys?”
“They’re fine.”
“Wyatt?”
“What?” No, that’s rude. Don’t say that. Ask him how he is.
“I — I don’t know why I’m calling. But I did want to say I’m sorry for not telling you about Linden. I didn’t think I would want to stay. I thought I’d stay out of your hair for two weeks and then leave. It seemed easier.”
I close my eyes for a second.
I have, in the months since he drove away from the barn, told myself a great many things about those last days. I have told myself I was right to send him away. I have told myself I had cause.
And I did. But I should have let him talk to me. I know how it must have looked to him. My father used to do it to my mother. She called it the silent treatment and it was brutal.
I never meant to do that. From where I was standing, it felt like the inside of my throat closing up. I couldn’t handle it.
I open my eyes.
“It’s okay,” I say finally. “It was a complicated situation.”
He breathes out. I hear it.
And then finally, I get the sentence out. “How are you doing?”
“I’m good. I’m being made a partner at work.”
“Good. Then... that’s good.”
The fridge hums. The screen door creaks. The mortgage papers are on the kitchen table inside their folder under a stack of bills. The bank’s confirmation of the six-month payment holiday came in an envelope last week and the envelope is in the same folder.
That’s the decision I made. It’s not really a decision, just a deferred one.
“Right,” he says again, when I do not say anything else.
“I should go,” I say.
“Right.”
“Matthew shouldn’t have called you.”
“He didn’t say anything. I want you to know that. He left the phone on the counter. I heard the kitchen for a few seconds. That’s all.”
“Ah.”
“I’m sorry I called back.”
“It’s fine.”
“Wyatt?”
“Yeah?”
He pauses.
“Take care of yourself.”
“Yeah. You too.”
I put the receiver back in the cradle. I stand in the kitchen for a count of ten with my hand on the receiver then I push off the counter and take the feed pail back out into the yard.
The boys are at the far side of the yard, near the barn, where the dirt is packed flat from years of trucks turning round in it.
Caleb has Matthew’s small lasso in his hand.
He is showing Matthew how to build the loop.
Matthew has his hands on his hips and his head tipped back at his brother, watching.
I cross the yard.
Caleb sees me first. He does not stop the lasso. He keeps the slow easy movement going, the one our father taught him before he left, the wrist turning and the rope sliding. He gives me a small nod over Matthew’s head, and he says, “Try it like that. Slow. Don’t snap it.”
Matthew bends and picks up his rope. He does not look at me as he works the loop.
“Matthew, we need to talk about this.”
He does not answer. He does not look up. He gets the loop wrong and he tries again. Caleb glances at me and raises his eyebrow.
“Matthew called Julian.”
Matthew looks at me. He has my mother’s eyes. His resemblance to her grows stronger every year, and standing here in the yard with the loop in his hand and his face turned up at me, he could be eight-year-old me looking at our mother across this same yard years ago.
“Matthew.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He drops the rope, turns and runs.
He runs across the yard toward the orchard, past the chicken run, past the woodpile, and around the side of the smokehouse, and he is out of sight before I have decided whether to call after him.
I do not call after him.
Caleb keeps working his loop. He raises an eyebrow at me.
“Don’t blame me,” he says. “He gets that from you.”
He drops the loop, gathers the rope, builds it again.
“He’s upset,” Caleb says, after a minute.
“I know.”
“Not because of the call. Because Julian doesn’t know. He thinks Julian should know. About the baby.”
“I know what he thinks.”
“He thinks if Julian knew he’d come back.”
“Caleb.”
“I’m just telling you what he thinks.”
He works the rope. The wrist turns. The loop tightens.
“It’s my choice,” I say.
Caleb looks back down at the rope. His mouth has done the small set thing it does when he has decided he is not going to argue.
I have watched our mother do that with our father a thousand times, when she decided a fight was not worth having and went quiet on him until he ran out of breath.
I have not, until this moment, seen Caleb do it to me.
“I can’t have a child with a man I don’t trust.”
He nods. He does not look up.
“Fine.”
“Caleb.”
“I said fine!”
After a while I sit down on the edge of the water trough beside the barn.
The trough is dry. It has been dry since spring.
I had been meaning, every week for six months, to pull it out and turn it on its side and sell it for scrap, and I have not done it, and I am, this afternoon, glad I have not done it, because I needed something to sit on.
Caleb glances at me.
“You okay?”
“Sit down a minute, would you.”
He sets the rope down. He comes over. He sits on the trough beside me. He is very nearly as tall as I am now.
“I need to tell you something. I had a realtor come out yesterday. I’m putting the ranch up at auction.
She thinks she has buyers. She said she didn’t think it would sell at first but she’s had two phone calls in the last two weeks and she thinks it might.
There’s a viewing tomorrow at one. Two parties.
Maybe three. I haven’t said yes to the auction yet but I’m going to. ”
The wind has come up from the south the way it does in the afternoons, and it is moving the long grass in the near pasture in slow waves.
Somewhere out beyond the ridge a tractor is moving and the sound of the engine reaches us across the valley. Caleb’s hands are on his knees. They are still.
“Why?”
“I don’t think I have a choice. The mortgage is too big and I can’t afford the payments.
The bank has given me a payment holiday but that just buys us time.
It doesn’t buy us the place. If I can sell it in the holiday, the bank gets paid out clean and we walk off with maybe a little.
If I can’t sell it in the holiday, the bank takes it and we walk off with nothing.
The realtor thinks if she lists it now we have a chance. If we wait we don’t.”
He looks down at his hands.
“Where do we go?”
“I don’t know yet. I was thinking the apartments above the hardware store in Eastfield. Mr. Halsey said he’d ask his cousin. There’s school there. There’s work there for me, maybe. I was thinking we’d go and have a look at the apartments next week, the three of us.”
“For all four of us.”
“What?”
“There’s four of us now.”
The wind moves the grass.
“Yes,” I say. “For all four of us. You’re right.”
He does not say anything for a while.
He nods slowly. He puts his hands on his knees and pushes himself up off the trough and he stands a minute with his back to me, looking out at the pasture, and he does not turn round.
I stand up and I put a hand on the back of his neck the way I did when he was little and he was worried about something.
He does not lean into it. He does not pull away from it. He stands and he lets me have my hand on the back of his neck and he looks out at the grass.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I know.”
“I’m going to tell Matthew tomorrow. Just don’t say anything until I’ve had a chance please. I think it needs to come from me.”
I drop my hand. He picks the rope up from where he had set it down. He wraps it round his elbow. He does not build the loop again. He walks toward the barn with the rope coiled over his arm, and he does not look back.
I sit on the trough for a while. Long enough that the shadow of the barn has moved across the dirt and the chickens have come out of the run and started doing their slow afternoon foraging round my boots. I do not move. The sun is on the side of my face. The wind is in the grass.
The waistband of my jeans is too tight.
I put my hand flat against the side of my belly, low, where the band of the jeans is digging in. The skin is warm under my palm. I am four months along, near as I can work out. I am told you do not show much for the first one until five months or so.
It’s not going to be much longer until I’m showing.
I think, sitting on the trough, of Matthew’s old baby things.
I think there is still a box of Matthew’s old baby things in the attic above the front hall.
My mother kept everything. The crib is in the box.
The little soft sleepers are in the box.
The cotton hats. The blanket she made him before he was born, the one she taught herself sewing for.
Caleb’s things were in the same box for a while, and went to charity when Matthew outgrew them, but Matthew’s things stayed because by then she was sick and the box did not get sorted and after she died I did not have it in me to sort it.
I close my eyes and sit with my hand on my belly.
And the baby moves.
It is a small flutter, nothing more, like a butterfly has become trapped under my skin.
This baby is going to be the first Briggs in five generations to not grow up on this land. I wish there was something I could do about that but I can’t.