Chapter 7 Reasonable, at length, in front of fifteen people
Marla squared the swap at two o’clock without discussion.
“You took Ronelle’s Monday, so she’s got tonight and you’ve got hers Thursday. Don’t argue with me about it, I’ve already written it down.” She tore the page off the carbon pad and stuck it on the nail. “Go home. Put something on those hands.”
So Maeve had an evening, which was a thing she had not had since Friday, and had no idea what to do with.
She went up the twelve steps and lay on top of the made bed for an hour with her knuckles stinging and her phone face up on the sill, and at ten to eight she came back down because the room over a shop with the shop shut underneath it was a very quiet place to be by herself.
Danny was locking the roll-up. Twenty-four years old and built like a length of wire, and he had the padlock in one hand and a rag in the other and he went a shade darker under the ears when she came off the bottom step, the way he did about four times a day.
“You going down?”
“Am I allowed?”
“It’s a bar,” Danny said, delighted, and then looked away fast, as though he’d said something enormous. “I’m going down anyway. Three miles is a long walk for an inch of whiskey.”
So she came into town on the bench seat of Danny’s truck with the window down and twelve dollars in ones folded into her jeans pocket, and when he swung off the old highway onto the gravel at the edge of town the neon was on and buzzing pink into the last of the light, one letter of it dead, br KEN SPOKE, and behind it the church sat black and squat with its windows gone gold.
A dozen bikes nosed in along the wall. A screen door propped open on a beer crate.
Maeve got down and walked over, and the whole way across the lot she was aware of having chosen to do it, which was still new enough to feel like walking on a floor that had just been mopped.
Inside it was smoke under the bleach, and the jukebox playing something from 1979 that nobody in the room had chosen, and the light over the pool table swinging a little because Gil Medeiros had gone past it.
Vault, the table called him, which Marla had had to tell her outright over a counter rag, because nobody in Coldwater explained anything to anybody twice.
Fifteen people, maybe sixteen. Two old men at the cribbage board at the far end who had been there in the Carter administration and would be there after.
Two women sharing a basket of fries. Torch turned backwards on a chair near the end of the bar with his eye on the gravel, because that was apparently a job.
Ma put a glass down on a paper mat in front of her without being asked and poured about an inch into it.
“Twelve in ones,” Maeve said, getting it out of her pocket.
“There isn’t a tab,” Ma said, and went and did something at the till and came back with nothing in her hands at all.
Hitch was at the far end with his back half to the wall and a beer he was not drinking.
He did not get up and he did not wave her down and he did not look at her for a good ten seconds, and then he did, once, and went back to the bottle.
Maeve sat two stools along from Danny and put her hands around the glass and was, for about nine minutes, completely and stupidly happy.
Then Torch said, “Whose is the white truck,” in a voice that was not his usual voice at all, and the chair legs came down on the boards.
Maeve knew it before she turned around. Crew cab, white, washed inside the week, the Ready-Mix decal on the door with the little cartoon chute on it that she had looked at from a passenger seat for three years.
It came into the lot slow and respectful and parked away from the bikes, out where it wasn’t crowding anything, which was so exactly like him that something went cold all the way down the backs of her arms.
Ma reached under the mahogany and set a two-foot length of galvanised pipe on the bar top, forty years of hand polish on it, the way you put down a pen you might want in a minute.
One man got out. No one else was in the truck. He stood a second and squared his cuffs and came in through the screen door with his hands open and empty at his sides.
“Evening,” Everett said, to the room.
He had had a haircut. That was the thing Maeve’s head went to first and could not get off — he had driven ninety miles and one pass to stand in a bar in Coldwater and he had had a haircut for it, and the shirt was pressed, and he was not drunk and not angry and not going to be either of those things at any point in the next ten minutes.
“I’m not here to make a scene,” he said. “I want to say that first, because I know what you’re all thinking when a man comes through that door.” A small, rueful lift of the shoulders. “I’d be thinking it too.”
Nobody said anything. The jukebox finished, and did not start again, and Maeve understood from the quality of the quiet that Ma had done something to it.
“My name’s Everett Bidwell. My family’s got the ready-mix down in Verlon.
That’s her home.” He did not point. He had not once looked at her.
“Three days ago, at two in the afternoon, Maeve and I were getting married. And she’s not well.
She hasn’t been well since the spring, and that’s my fault as much as anybody’s, because I let it go on and I told myself she was just tired. ”
That was when Maeve understood what was actually happening in the room, and everything in her went down a degree at a time, like a building losing its heat.
He was not talking to her. He had not come here to talk to her at all.
He was building something out loud in front of a roomful of people who would each be somebody’s cousin, in the one room in the county that leaked, and every single sentence was a brick laid straight and level: she is unwell, I am not angry, I have behaved beautifully.
By Thursday it would be back over the pass with a shape on it.
By Friday her mother would have heard it from three directions and each one would sound like the others confirming it.
“She’s been through the clinic in Ellery.
There’s a history in the family and I’m not going to stand in a bar and discuss it.
” He said it kindly. He said it the way you close a door for somebody whose hands are full.
“I’d just ask you all to understand that a woman who walks out of her own wedding and goes up a mountain with people she’s never met isn’t making a free choice.
That’s not what that is. Somebody I love is in trouble and I’d like to take her home. ”
And Maeve watched it land.
That was the part nobody could have told her about.
The two women with the fries had stopped eating.
One of the old men at the cribbage board had turned around on the bench and was looking at her, at her men’s flannel and her three-inch-short jeans and her hands, and there was nothing cruel in his face, nothing at all — there was concern in it, which was infinitely worse.
Because it was a reasonable speech. Because it accounted for everything.
Because a woman who runs out of a church hall in a wedding dress has, on the face of it, something wrong with her, and the man in the pressed shirt had the better story and had always had the better story and knew it the way other men know how to lay a slab.
Half the room half believed him. She could feel it moving across the floor like cold off a window.
“I heard about her sister,” Everett said, and now there was real trouble in his voice, the first crack in it.
“Dara lost her job Monday and I want to say in front of witnesses that I had nothing to do with that and I am sick about it and I’m doing what I can.
There’s two kids in that house.” He let a beat go by.
“I’ll settle up whatever she’s run up in here, by the way. Whatever she’s cost anybody. Just say.”
“There isn’t a tab,” Ma said.
“Then I’ll leave it anyway.”
“You’ll take it back off my bar,” Ma said, “or you won’t come in again.”
He smiled at that. Not nastily. He smiled the way a man smiles at a dog barking behind a fence, and Maeve saw four or five people in the room see him do it, and saw that it cost him nothing, and knew with total clarity that she had exactly one thing left and about six seconds to use it.
She stood up.
Five foot ten in flat shoes, and the stool went back on the boards with a noise that got the whole room, and her heart was going so hard she could feel it in her split knuckles.
She had spent her whole life saying the first half of sentences.
Three years of letting a room finish them for her, because the room was so pleased with her for being lucky; three years of I couldn’t and it’s just that and the gap afterwards that somebody else always filled, gratefully, on her behalf.
She had stood outside the Ember yesterday morning and rehearsed a whole sentence in her head before she dared take it in through a door.
She did not rehearse this one. There was no time and, it turned out, no need.
“No,” Maeve said.
Everett turned his head, finally, and looked at her, and his face did something gentle.
“Sweetheart —”
“No.” It came up out of the floor of her and it carried.
“I’m not unwell. I’ve never been to that clinic for one thing you’re implying and you drove me to the two appointments I did have, so you know that better than anybody in this room.
I left because I didn’t want to marry you.
Not because I’m sick and not because anybody up here took me anywhere.
I walked out of that hall on my own two feet at twenty to two on Saturday afternoon and I’d do it again tomorrow and I’d do it with the same knife. ”
She got all the way to the end of it. She put the period on it herself. Nobody took it off her.
The room had gone entirely still. Somewhere behind her a bottle touched a bar top and stopped.
“I’m not coming home,” Maeve said. “I have a job and a room and I’m not owed to anybody in here and I’m not owed to you. Go on back over the pass, Everett.”
For a moment — one moment — she saw what was underneath. Not rage. Something much flatter than rage, a kind of patient arithmetic, the look of a man recalculating a route.
Then it was gone and he was sorrowful again.
“You’ll call me by Friday,” he said. “I’m not angry with you.
Nobody is.” He got his keys out. “Your mother’s not sleeping, and she won’t say it to you, so I will.
And whatever’s yours I’ll send on up, I’ll box it myself.
” He paused at the crate propping the screen door, and said it as mildly as a man asking for a tool back.
“What isn’t yours, I’d like returned. That’s all. ”
The screen door went, and the gravel, and the truck.
Nobody clapped. That surprised her — she had half expected the room to do something, and it did not, it simply started up again in pieces, a chair, the jukebox coming back on where it had left off, one of the old men saying eight-for-two as though the world had not tilted.
Maeve sat down because her legs had quit.
“He’s good,” Danny said, to the bar, too loud and too young. “That’s the thing. He’s really good at it —” and then went dark red to the collarbone and shut up.
Hitch had not moved.
She made herself look down the mahogany at him and he was sitting exactly as he had been when she stood up, one long hand around a bottle he was still not drinking, and he had not stood up and he had not said a word and he had not so much as put his weight forward on the stool while a man stood in that room and told that room she was crazy.
His face gave her nothing. He turned his head a little, left ear up, the way he did.
She had no name for what that did to her, and she did not much like it.
Then the cue ball went into the pocket at the far end, and Deacon came up the room chalking his stick, not hurrying it. He stopped beside her and looked at the door for a while as though the truck were still in it.
“You said it out loud,” he said. “In front of the room.”
“I did.”
“Fifteen people heard it, and this bar leaks like hell, and by Thursday it’s in Verlon and it’s in Ellery.” He set the chalk down on the mahogany, square. “That’s you on record. Good.”
“Thank you,” Maeve said.
Deacon looked past her, at Hitch, and then at Ma, and then out at the lot again, and he said the rest of it to the room over the top of her head, in the calm, absolute voice of a man deciding something.
“That’s the table’s business now.”
The room made a sound of agreement, low and immediate and all at once, and Maeve sat in the warm middle of it with her ruined hands around a glass nobody would let her pay for, and felt herself go under it like a stone into water, and was so grateful she could have cried.
It was ten past nine before she worked out what was wrong with that.