Chapter 3 A drink instead of an opinion
The screen door was propped open on a beer crate and the inside door stood back against the wall, and from twenty feet out in the gravel Maeve could hear a jukebox playing something with a saxophone in it that had been old when her mother was young.
She stood in the lot a while. Long enough for the neon to finish coming up to color.
Long enough to count the bikes — ten, nosed in at an angle along the front wall in a place where the gravel had gone flat and pale with years of it — and to look across at the church with no cross on it and the pickup sitting at the foot of the steps like a dog that had been told to wait.
There was nowhere else. That was the arithmetic. West was a road with nothing on it for forty miles, and east was back, and the sun was going to be off the top of that mountain in an hour.
She lifted the front of the skirt out of the dust and went in.
The room turned. It did not do it all together, which was somehow worse — a head first, then a shoulder, then a whole table coming around after them the way cattle come around on a slope, and by the time she was three steps in, every face in the Broken Spoke was pointed at a woman in seventeen pounds of ruined ivory satin with the bodice hanging off one shoulder and road dust to the knee and a cake knife in her right fist.
Sixteen people, give or take. Six men in leather with the same patch across the back — a crowned wheel between two curved rockers, COLDWATER KINGS over it and MONTANA under.
Two women at a table with a basket of fries between them.
Two old men at a cribbage board at the far end who did not look up, and never had.
A pool table with a low light over it, still swinging slightly, as though somebody big had walked under it in the last ten seconds.
Smoke thirty years into the wood, and bleach under it, and beer.
“Shut the door,” somebody said, “you’re letting the goddamn flies in,” and half the room laughed, and the other half didn’t, and Maeve stood on the mat with her heart going like a bird in a box.
The woman behind the bar put down the glass she was drying.
She was somewhere in her fifties, iron-grey hair scraped back off her face with a pair of reading glasses shoved up into it, fair skin gone weathered across the forearms and the backs of the hands the way it goes on somebody who has spent thirty winters going in and out of a back door.
She came down the inside of the bar without any hurry in her at all, favoring one knee, and she did not look at the dress.
She looked at the hand with the knife in it.
“Give me that,” she said.
Maeve looked down. She had honestly forgotten again. Six inches of stainless with a scalloped edge and a white plastic handle with a ribbon still tied around it in a bow, tied by somebody at the hall that morning, and she had come ninety miles and one pass holding it like a train ticket.
Her fingers would not come open right away. When they did, the woman took it off her, turned, dropped it into the sink behind the bar with the glasses, and ran the tap over it for two seconds.
That was all. It went in the sink with the rest of the dirty ware, and the tap went off, and it took about four seconds, and nobody in the county was ever going to be able to say a word about a knife again.
“Sit down.”
Maeve got herself onto a stool. It had tape across the seat. The skirt would not go anywhere useful, so she gathered it in her lap in two fistfuls and sat there holding it like a load of washing.
A glass came down on a paper mat in front of her. Then a bottle, and the woman poured a measure of something amber into it, then looked at her and poured another half on top.
“I don’t —” Maeve said. “I’ve got ten dollars.”
“Did I ask you for money?”
“No.”
“Then drink it.”
She drank it. It went down like a lit match and she coughed on it and her eyes ran, and the woman took a rag to a wet ring on the mahogany that Maeve was fairly sure was not there, and did not say anything else at all.
That was the part Maeve could not manage.
Not the whiskey. She had sat down in a room full of strangers in a cut-open wedding dress and the woman pouring had asked her precisely nothing — not where she’d come from, not who he was, not whether she was hurt, not what in God’s name she thought she was doing — and the silence where all those questions should have been was so wide and so unfamiliar that Maeve had to put both hands flat on the bar to keep still inside it.
She got three minutes of it. Afterwards she thought that was probably a record for Coldwater.
“Okay, but you can’t just leave it,” one of the women at the fries table said, to the room, not to her. “Look at her.”
And the room came in.
It came in the way water comes into a boat, from everywhere at once and none of it unkind.
“Honey, who do we call?”
“Has she got a phone? Sweetheart, have you got a phone?”
“I’ll run her down to Ellery, I’m going Monday anyway —”
“Monday’s no good to her, look at her.”
“Don’t you go back. Whatever he did — you don’t go back. My sister went back.”
“Nobody said she’s going back. Did anybody say that?”
“Gracie went back and it was eleven more years.”
“You want me to call Brennan? I’ll call Brennan.”
“Ah, hell, what’s Dale going to do about a wedding?”
“Call her mother. Somebody call her mother, her mother’ll be out of her mind.”
Her mother. Maeve looked into the bottom of the glass and thought about her mother in the good blue dress, standing in the side room at the hall with her hand flat on her own breastbone, telling Charlene Bidwell that Maeve had always been highly strung, and the strange hot rush that came up through her was not grief.
“Get her a room at the motel down in Verlon —”
“Verlon’s where she came from, Dee.”
“Well how do I know that? Nobody knows that.”
A man in a cut came along the bar with a chair turned backwards under him, riding it two feet at a time, delighted.
Thirty-two or so, Japanese American, narrow as fence wire through the hips.
Black hair he shoved back off his face with the flat of his hand.
Old ink down the right forearm, koi and running water, the black lines gone soft and blue with age.
A grin that came up out of nowhere and went out the same way.
“I’ll take her,” he said. “Where you going, though? Because I’ll take her anywhere, I just need a direction. This is fixable. Ma — this is fixable —”
“Jesse.”
One word, from behind the bar. He put both hands up off the chair back, still grinning, and did not say anything else.
It had gotten to four or five voices going over the top of each other, and Maeve sat in the middle of it with her hands around an empty glass and felt the thing happening that she knew from the inside out, the thing that had been happening to her in rooms since she was nineteen: the moment where a room stops asking a woman a question and starts settling it.
Another minute and there would be a plan.
Two more and there would be a driver and a bag and somebody’s cousin in Ellery with a spare bed, and Maeve would say thank you, because she would be grateful, because it would be kind, and because she had never in her life been able to find the place in a sentence to put her foot down.
She could feel herself going. That was the horrible part. She could feel herself sinking back into it like a hot bath.
“Where do you want to go?”
It came from the far end of the bar, from her left, and it was not loud. It was in fact the quietest thing said in that room in ten minutes. It carried because it did not have anything else in it.
Maeve turned her head.
He was sitting at the last stool with his back half to the wall, and he had been there the entire time, and she had not seen him once.
Long. That was the first thing — even folded onto a barstool with his boots on the rail he was built out of more distance than the other men in the room, all forearm and back and wrist. Older than the rest of them — forty-five, she thought, or near it — with black hair gone grey the whole way through, not at the temples but through the lot of it, pulled back off his neck and tied.
Olive skin gone leather-brown across the face and down the arms. A jaw he had not shaved in three days.
A beer in front of him with two inches out of it and a wet ring around it that said it had been sitting there a long while.
He had his head turned slightly away from her, offering her his left ear, which she did not understand and filed.
“Sorry?” she said.
“Where do you want to go.” Not a question the second time, particularly. He said it the way a man reads a number off a gauge. “Not where can you go. Not where ought you. Where do you want.”
The room did the thing. Somebody started to answer for her — she’s got people in — and got about four words into it.
He did not raise his voice. He did not look at whoever it was.
He just waited, with his eyes on Maeve and his head cocked over, and the four words ran out of road on their own, and the Broken Spoke went quiet enough that she could hear the neon buzzing through the glass and the tap dripping into the sink where her knife was.
Everyone was looking at her. Waiting. For her.
Maeve opened her mouth and nothing came out of it.
Three years. Three years of two-second pauses that somebody else always filled, until she had stopped even loading a sentence, the way you stop putting money in a machine that eats it.
She sat there with her mouth open and her heart slamming and she could not find one single word, and she watched him watch her not find it, and she waited for the moment he got bored and finished it for her.
He didn’t. He picked up his beer, drank about half an inch of it, and put it back down on the exact wet ring it had come off, and went on waiting.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know yet.”
“All right.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s a better one than nowhere.” He turned a little further toward her, which put his left side to her more squarely.
“Here’s what’s outside. A bike. It’ll go anywhere you name.
Ellery’s sixty miles, there’s a bus out of it if you want to be four hundred miles from here by Monday.
Verlon’s ninety the way you came. There’s beds in this town.
You say a place and we go, and if you change your mind at the gas station I’ll turn it around and I won’t say a word about it. ”
“And if I don’t say anything?”
“Then we don’t go anywhere,” he said, “and I finish my beer.”
Nobody in the room said a thing. The man with the koi on his arm had his chin on the back of the chair and his eyebrows up near his hair.
“What do you think I should do?” Maeve said.
“No.”
She blinked at him. “No?”
“Everybody in here’s already told you.” He said it without any edge on it at all, which made it worse and also, somehow, made her want to laugh. “You’ve had about nine of those. What you haven’t had is a ride.” He tipped his head very slightly toward the bar. “Lo. Is there a room over the shop.”
The woman behind the bar had been drying the same glass for a good while.
“There’s a room over the shop,” she said.
“There’s a room over the shop,” he said to Maeve, and left it lying there on the mahogany between them, and did not pick it up, and did not push it an inch nearer, and went back to his beer.
Maeve looked at it.
It was the strangest few seconds of her life. Something was sitting in front of her that she was allowed to take or not take, and no one was reaching over the top of her head for it, and she understood with a kind of vertigo that if she sat there long enough it would simply still be sitting there.
Her voice came out low and it came out of her chest, the way it had done in the cab at the stop sign, and it was steadier this time.
“That one,” Maeve said. “The room.”
The end of the bar moved. He got up off the stool and kept going up — six-three of him, and Maeve was five foot ten in flat shoes and had spent her whole life being the tallest thing in the room — and pulled a set of keys out of his jeans, and did not say good girl, and did not say you’re doing the right thing, and did not say anything at all.
Behind the bar, without being asked, the woman filled a paper cup with water and pushed it across.
“Drink that in the lot,” she said. “It’s cold up there after dark.”
Then, as Maeve got the skirt gathered and slid off the stool: “What’s your name?”
“Maeve.”
“Loretta.” She put the glass down at last. “The knife stays in my sink.”
“Okay.”
“Wasn’t a question, sweetheart.”
And the man was already at the door, holding the screen back off the beer crate with one long arm, waiting on her in front of all sixteen of them.