Chapter 19 Wyatt
Mary’s Diner hasn’t changed since I was a boy. It has the same eight booths upholstered in fake red leather and the same posters on the walls. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was like that back in my parents’ day too.
The titular Mary is long gone. She was old Mr. Follett’s mother and he’s old as the hills now and set in his ways.
I can’t help wondering if Mary’s is going to survive Linden. The development is going to be huge. There’s a business park, warehouses, housing and a small mall. Part of their sales pitch was that it’d allow the big chains to move in.
The food at Mary’s is okay if you’re a local and know what to order and what to avoid. They’ve got away with that for a long time because they’re the town’s only option. They won’t be for much longer.
Matthew is sitting across from me with the laminated menu, working his way down the breakfast list one item at a time, even though he knows the menu by heart. Caleb is next to him, slumped against the window with his hood up. Nobody is speaking.
Mr. Follett comes over. “Coffee, Wyatt?”
“Please. Decaff.”
“And cocoa for Matthew,” he says with a wink. “I’ll do it just the way you like it. What about you, Caleb?”
“Coffee please.”
He gives us a minute to make up our minds about food and goes to get the drinks.
I look at the clock above the till. Quarter to twelve. The realtor said they’d be at the gate at one. I didn’t want to be there. I told her I would be in town. She said that was sensible, said it was easier on everybody if the owner was not standing in the kitchen while the buyers walked through.
“Wyatt.”
I look at Matthew. He has his thumb on the menu where it says blueberry pancakes. He has said barely three words to me all morning.
“Can I have the pancakes?”
“You can have whatever you want, bud.”
He nods once. He closes the menu and pushes it across the table toward Caleb, who does not look at it.
The bell over the diner door rings.
I don’t look up. The bell rings every two minutes in here. People come in for coffee and a slice of pie.
Caleb’s head moves about an inch. That is what makes me look.
A man has come through the door and stopped one step inside. He is in a dark jacket and dark jeans and his hair is shorter than the last time I saw it. He has not seen me yet. He is looking at the chalkboard above the till where Mr. Follett writes the specials.
It hits me low in the chest, before my brain has caught up.
I feel myself go completely still.
Caleb says, low, “Wy.”
“I see him.”
Matthew looks up. He turns his head and he sees what we are seeing and he goes still. He looks at me. He looks at Julian. He looks at me.
Julian turns from the chalkboard and sees me.
I watch it land. The half-smile goes. Then it comes back, smaller. He starts walking. He is across the room in an instant.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He looks at the boys. His face changes for them. It softens at Matthew, who is sitting bolt upright with his mouth open. Caleb pushes his hood back.
“Caleb. Matthew.”
“Hi,” Matthew says. His voice has come out higher than he meant it to. “Hi, hi.”
“Hi, bud.”
“Are you back?”
“Matthew,” I say.
“Sorry.”
Julian glances down at me. He does not answer Matthew. He is reading my face. I don’t know what he finds in it.
“I came in for a coffee,” he says, to me. “I didn’t know you were here. I’m not — “ He stops. He starts again. “I was on my way out to the ranch. I was going to call from the road. I stopped here for the coffee first. I didn’t know you were here. Could I — could we talk for a minute?”
I look at the boys. Matthew looks thrilled. Caleb’s face is closed, the way it goes.
“Okay.”
Mr. Follett comes back with the coffees and the cocoa. He sets them down and looks at Julian. His bushy eyebrows raise an inch.
“It’s okay,” I say.
Mr. Follett frowns but he doesn’t argue with me. Instead he turns to Julian and says, “What can I get you?”
“Black coffee, please.”
He goes. Julian does not sit.
Julian looks at the booth seat next to me and I realize that I have not asked him to join us. I can smell him. My stomach moves. Not the sickness from earlier in the pregnancy, which has gone. The new thing, which is worse, which is the way a body remembers a body.
He goes still.
I watch his nostrils move. It is the small involuntary thing he did the very first day in my yard, the thing he did when he was trying not to breathe me in. He is doing it now.
He has gone the color of a man who has been told something he did not want to be told.
His eyes drop, fast, then come back up.
He has worked it out.
He does not say it. He does not say one word. He looks at me and he holds my gaze for a long count and then he looks at Caleb and he looks at Matthew and he looks at me again. “Outside,” he says.
“Yes.”
I push the coffee away and slide out of the booth. I do not look at Caleb. I do not need to look at him.
“Order the pancakes,” I tell Matthew. “Tell Mr. Follett I’ll have pancakes too. I’ll be back.”
“Wyatt — “
“Bud. Pancakes.”
I follow Julian to the door. The bell rings as he holds it open for me. The cold air comes in past him. I go through.
Julian walks me round the side of the building. There is a strip of dirt along the wall where the kitchen extractor blows out and where Mr. Follett puts his cigarette ends in an old coffee can. We stop there. The wall is cold against my back.
He stops in front of me. He is closer than he should be.
“You’re pregnant.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
He puts his hands behind his neck. He turns in a half circle on the dirt. He turns back. His hands come down.
“You weren’t going to tell me?”
“No.”
He looks at me. He puts one hand against the wall beside my head. He does not lean in. He stops his hand on the wall and he leaves it there and he looks at me, and when I drop my eyes he puts his other hand under my chin and he lifts my face back up.
His hand is warm. It is colder out here than I had registered.
He keeps looking at me. The hand under my chin moves. It goes back to the side of my neck where his palm is flat against my skin, the same place he put it in the kitchen the night the heat started, and my whole body remembers.
I breathe in. I cannot help it. I get the full of him, soap and travel and Julian, and the thing in the pit of my belly that has been dormant since spring rolls over and stretches.
“Don’t,” I say.
He takes his hand off.
“I’m not — Wyatt. I’m not trying anything. I’m just — God.”
“I know.”
“It’s mine.”
“Yes.”
“Of course it’s mine. Sorry. That came out — “
“It’s okay.”
He is looking at my middle. I am wearing a flannel over a t-shirt and the flannel is loose. There is not much to see yet. He looks anyway. I want, suddenly and stupidly, to put his hand on me. I do not.
“You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“You should have called. You should have written. Wyatt, I would have come. I know you hate me but I--” He breaks off.
Is that what he thinks? That I hate him?
“I don’t hate you,” I say. “I don’t trust you. I didn’t trust you.”
He is breathing carefully. I can see his shoulders.
“Listen to me,” he says. “I am not asking you for anything. I just am telling you. I want to be in this child’s life.”
He takes a step back. He runs the hand he had on my neck through his hair. The newer cut suits him. I should not be thinking about whether the cut suits him.
“All right. Okay. Tell me what — tell me what you need. Walk me through it. You’re four months. You’ve seen a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Eastfield. They’ve got a clinic. I went the first time at eight weeks.”
“Just a regular clinic?”
“It’s the closest one that does it. They send the omega-specific stuff out to a hospital an hour past Eastfield. I haven’t had to go up there yet. It’s just been the clinic.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s all right. I had a scan at twelve weeks.
There’s another one today this afternoon at three o’clock.
That’s why I’m in town. I’m killing two birds with one stone.
The realtor’s at the ranch and I was going to take the boys and go on through to Eastfield once we’d eaten. I had it on the calendar.”
He stops. “Realtor? You’re selling?”
I had not meant to say that part. I had been thinking it under the rest of what I was saying and it had come out with the rest and now it is out.
“Yeah, there’s a viewing today. That’s why we’re in town. I didn’t want to be there.”
He stares at me. He stares at me long enough that the man with the dog comes out of the hardware store and unties the dog and walks the dog past the alley where we are, glancing in once and then politely not glancing in again.
“You said on the phone you were fine.”
“I was fine. I am fine. The bank gave me a payment holiday. I either sell or they take it. The realtor thinks she can move it. I’d rather she got me out clean than the bank get me out dirty.”
“How long?”
“How long what?”
“How long have you known you were going to have to sell?”
“Always.”
He shuts his eyes.
I stand there with the wall against my back and my hands in my jacket pockets and watch him.
“Let me come to the scan.”
“There’s no room in my truck,” I say stupidly because it’s the only thing I think of first. “Three of us up front is tight. Four is not happening.”
We stand in the alley. The wind has picked up. There is a candy wrapper blowing along the gutter at the end of the alley, end over end, slow in the cold. I watch it go.
“We can go in my car.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a four-door. There’s room.”
“I said all right.”
He almost laughs. It does not come all the way out, but I see it try. His face does not quite know what to do with itself.
We walk back round to the front of the diner. Through the window I can see Caleb watching us come, not looking like he is watching us, and Matthew with his face an inch from the glass and his breath fogging it.
Julian opens the door. The bell rings.