Chapter 5 Sunday at the Sanctuary
The clothes came up the twelve steps at half past nine in a feed store bag with the top rolled over twice.
She heard him coming and had the bolt back before he knocked, and then had to stand there while he worked out that she had been waiting on the other side of the door.
It was the kid from the lot. Twenty-four at the outside, lean and long-boned, brown-skinned, with black hair he had plainly cut himself and cut too short at the back, and dark eyes that told her he was embarrassed about two full seconds before the color came up under his ears and went down the back of his neck.
“Danny,” he said. “Rivera. That’s — Loretta sent those up.”
“Thank you.”
“She said if none of it fits, that’s your problem and not hers.” He looked at the bag, and then at the doorframe, and then at the bag. “She didn’t say it mean.”
“No,” Maeve said. “I don’t think she says much of anything mean.”
“She does.” He got his eyes up for about a third of a second and lost them again. “Four. Four o’clock. Somebody’ll come.”
And he went down the stairs fast enough that she heard his hand squeak on the rail.
There was a pair of jeans in the bag, worn through white at one knee and three inches too short in the leg, which she had expected, because everything had been three inches too short in the leg since she was fifteen.
A grey T-shirt. A men’s flannel, soft as a dishcloth, that smelled of cold cigarette smoke and a woman’s soap.
Two pairs of socks, one still in its band.
A hairbrush, new, with the sticker on the back of it.
She stood in the middle of the room and held the hairbrush for a while.
Then she took the wedding dress off the chair where it had sat all night like a person.
She had gotten out of it standing up, some time after midnight, working it down over the ribs an inch at a time until two of the lower eyelets tore through, because there had been nobody to ask here either and she had not been going to sleep in it.
She folded it in on itself and put it under the bed where she could not see it.
She had slept on top of the covers and woken at seven and lain there while the light came all the way across the floor and started up the far wall.
Sunday took its time in that town. He came at ten to four and he came in the flatbed, not on the bike, which she was ashamed of how much she noticed.
It was an International with a hundred and eighty thousand miles on it and a winch bed behind the cab and a passenger door you had to lift on the hinge to get shut.
There was a clipboard on the seat with a county recovery sheet on it, and he moved it without a word, and she got in.
He did not say anything on the way down.
Neither did she. She had ten dollars in the pocket of somebody else’s jeans and her hair brushed out straight for the first time in two days and she sat with her hands turned down on her thighs, watching a town go by that she had come into after dark and had never actually seen.
It was smaller than the noise it made. A Main Street about four blocks long with a drugstore and a hardware and a bar with a dead letter in the neon, and a diner with its blind down that said THE EMBER in gold on the glass, and then the grid going up the hill behind it in short streets of frame houses with the paint gone chalky on the south sides.
Trucks. A lot of trucks and not many cars.
Quarry Street ran north out of the top of Main until the asphalt gave up entirely and turned to gravel with grass in the middle of it, and at the end of that, where the town stopped pretending, was a church.
Stone. A hundred and some years of it, square-shouldered, with a squat bell tower and a slate roof, and up at the peak a place where the cross had come off and nobody had ever bothered to match the slate, so there was a pale bald patch up there like a healed-over scar.
The glass was all still in the windows. A little before four, with the sun coming across the valley, it was only lead and dull color from outside, all that red and blue firing the wrong way, inward, into a room she could not see into.
There were bikes along the wall of the yard, nose-out, front wheels all cocked the same way like a hand of cards.
“That’s a church,” Maeve said.
He put the truck in against the wall and turned his head to give her his left side, and did not answer, because it was not a question and he was not a man who filled up a silence to be kind.
The doors stood open and the noise came out of them like heat off a range.
Three trestle tables run end to end down the middle of a room with sixty feet of ceiling over it, so all the smoke and all the talk went straight up and hung there.
A bar built along the old altar rail with the brass still showing through the varnish where forty years of forearms had been.
A pool table under a strung work light. Up by the arch at the front, cut into the woodwork deep, with a chisel, by somebody who had meant it to be legible when he was dead, a column of names she did not know.
And thirty-one people who all, in the space of about a second and a half, stopped what they were doing.
Maeve had been looked at before. She had been looked at by four hundred people at a Verlon Fourth of July in a sash. This was not that. This was a whole room deciding something, and doing it fast, and doing it in front of her.
A woman came out of the back with a pan the size of a car hood held against her apron, put it down on the end table, and took stock of Maeve the way you take stock of a delivery.
Forty-five or so, short and square through the shoulders, black hair cut off at the jaw and pushed back behind her ears, brown skin gone shiny across the forehead off the range, sleeves to the elbow, a clipboard under one arm with a pencil through the clip.
“Coats go on the hooks under the names,” she said. “Thirty-one tonight, thirty-two with you, and there’s twenty-eight chairs, so somebody’s on the end of a bench and it isn’t going to be me. You’re on plates.”
“I’m — sorry, I’m on plates?”
“Plates.” The woman was already going back for the next pan. “Nita.”
That was the introduction. Nobody said this is Maeve.
Nobody said she’s the one from the wedding.
She stood there with a stack of mismatched plates in her arms and worked her way down a trestle table in somebody else’s flannel, and by the time she got to the far end the room had gone back to being loud, and she understood that she had just been handled with enormous skill by a woman who had not looked at her twice.
She counted them as she went around, because she counted things.
The one from the bar was carving a shoulder of pork with a knife much too big for it and an authority nobody at any point had given him, talking the entire time to a man who had stopped listening two minutes before.
A heavy-shouldered man of about thirty-seven with warm brown skin and black hair gone iron at the temples sat at the corner of the table with a ledger open in front of him at a family dinner and both forearms up on the wood, ridged and shiny to the elbow with old burn scars.
He said something short to the man beside him.
The man laughed for eight seconds. The one with the ledger did not.
A tall lean man, deep brown skin gone wind-scoured dry across the cheekbones, hair cut down to a grey shadow all over the skull, sat with his back to the wall where he could see the door, writing a phone number on the back of an envelope in block capitals with a hard hand, and put a vicious little line through the seven.
Loretta Hale was there, behind the bar end of it, iron-grey and quick-handed, with her sleeves down for Sunday.
Somebody across the room shouted Ma and two women answered at once — Loretta and the one with the clipboard — and the whole table laughed at a joke that was clearly older than the table, and neither woman gave any sign of having heard it.
And the man who had brought her up the mountain sat down two-thirds of the way along on the bench side with his back to nothing and his left ear to the room, talking to nobody, and nobody appeared to find that strange.
Somebody put a fist on the open door while she was still on plates.
He was about forty and red in the face, in a seed-corn cap gone grey at the crown, and he had a tire iron down along his leg where he thought nobody could see it, and he wanted to know which one of them had put his brother’s car on a county hook Thursday night.
The room did not get up. That was the first thing she noticed.
The second was that the man who had brought her up the mountain did.
He came off the bench without hurrying. He crossed forty feet of stone floor with his hands open at his sides and stopped a long stride short of the door, further off than she expected, and she worked out a second later exactly how far that was. It was as far as a tire iron goes.
He said eight words. She counted them out of habit and did not hear one of them.
The man looked at his face for about two seconds. Then he put the iron back through his belt loop like he had only ever been carrying it, and said something about Thursday, and went out across the yard without turning his back on the room.
The man from the lot pulled the door to and came back up the room and sat down. Nita set a plate in front of him without a word. Somebody at the far end went back to a story about a dog.
Maeve stood at the end of the trestle with two plates in her hands.
He had not touched the man. He had not even been loud. It had taken less time than it took her to set a plate down, and every person in that room had known how it was going to go before he was out of his seat.
So that was the other half of him.
And it had not been pointed anywhere near her. Not once. Not for a second.
Deacon came out of a room off the front at four exactly.