Chapter 16 Forty miles
He came up the outside stairs at seven in the morning and she knew before she had the door open that something was wrong, because he came up them fast.
Sixteen days since her sister had last picked up a phone.
That was the count she kept, and she had gotten very good at it.
Dara had not answered since the Monday of the first week.
Maeve had left four messages and then stopped leaving them, the way you stop knocking at a door with the lights on behind it, and she had gone on saying she’ll come round to a woman who ran a diner and a man who fixed trucks, and had believed it about half the time.
“Dara,” Hitch said, in her doorway, with his hat already in his hand.
Everything in her stopped.
“What.”
“She’s out of the house. She left Verlon last night and she’s gone to your aunt’s at Trosper and she wants you there.” He turned his head a few degrees to put his good ear at her. “Word came at half five this morning. Get a bag.”
She did not say how do you know, and there was no better answer for it than this: she had wanted a sentence like that so badly, for so long, that when it came she took it out of his hand without looking at it.
She got a bag. Eleven minutes, and most of that was the hot water, because she washed her face and did her teeth like a woman who had been raised to arrive somewhere decent.
Two pairs of jeans. The green coat off the hook.
Her tips out of the jar on the windowsill in a fold, forty-one dollars, which was hers in a way nothing in that room had been three weeks ago, and she was so pleased with herself for having it to take that she said so out loud on the stairs and he said, “Good,” and took the bag off her shoulder.
“I’m on at eleven.”
“I’ll get word to Marla.”
“I can call her from the road.”
“Sure,” he said, and put the bag behind the seat.
The flatbed smelled the way it always smelled, of diesel and cold chain and the cardboard of some part that had ridden up there in July, and the heater blew grit until it warmed.
She got up into the passenger side and buckled in and sat on his deaf side, because in that truck there was nowhere else to sit, and did what she had done since the night he told her: turned herself square to him, and said it once, and said it to the side of his face that could take it.
She cried a little before they were out of town. Not badly. He let her.
“Sixteen days since she picked up,” she said, when she could. “I thought she’d wait for the wedding.”
“What wedding.”
“His. The new one. The rescheduled one.” She wiped her face with the flat of her hand.
“Saturday. Mom’s going. Dara was going. There’s a whole town going to sit in that hall on Saturday and be sorry for him, and I thought — I don’t know what I thought.
I thought she’d wait till after and then hate me quieter. ”
Hitch drove a while before he said it. “He still wants it, then.”
“He doesn’t want me.” She was surprised how flat it came out, and how true it was once it was out in the cab where she could look at it.
“He wants the Saturday. Everett Bidwell has never in his life been the thing that happened to somebody — he’s the thing that happens.
So he’ll stand up in that hall and be gracious about it in front of four hundred people, and in a year it’ll be a sad business he got through, and not a woman who cut herself out of a dress and went.
That’s the whole of it. The dress was never the point and neither was I. ”
Hitch drove. The sun was up off the bench behind them and the road was dry.
“She called you,” Maeve said. “She called you.”
“She called the shop.”
“She doesn’t have the shop’s number.”
“Everybody in four counties has the shop’s number.” He said it the way he said that a hub was hot or a chain was rated wrong, flat and without any of himself in it, and she took that off him too.
Highway 12 goes west out of Coldwater in nine slow miles and then it stops pretending and climbs, and she had never been up this one at all, and never once over the top.
Everything was still blue in the cuts. Grass gone the color of a paper bag on the high side.
A hawk sat a fence post with its back to them and did not move for the whole length of it.
She tried Dara at the second switchback.
Nothing — not even the ring, just the small dead clunk of a call giving up.
She tried again at the top and got the voicemail she had gotten sixteen days running, Dara’s voice too bright, the one she used on the phone and nowhere else on this earth, you’ve got me, leave it.
“She’s driving,” Hitch said.
“She’s driving,” Maeve agreed.
“Service quits after the summit. Comes back at the junction.”
She put the phone face down on her knee. Three weeks, and the plan Everett paid for was still live in her hand — because of course it was. A phone she carried was a phone he could reach, and he had never in his life cut a wire he could hold instead.
She looked out at four hundred miles of nothing going gold and thought about her sister’s kitchen: the calendar, the wipe-clean one with the kids’ swimming on it, the mortgage that eleven years at that front desk had been paying every month.
She thought about Dara in a car in the dark with two kids asleep in the back, out over the state line, going to the aunt they had both been parked at as children when things at home got loud.
She thought, and she did not want to have thought it, that if Dara had run then Dara had finally seen it — the whole shape of what a family looked like when it was being managed — and that meant she was not mad any more, and Maeve was so grateful for that that her eyes went hot again.
Gratitude. She had had a bellyful of gratitude in this county and it had gone down as smooth as milk every time.
“Your aunt know we’re coming?”
“You said Dara wanted me there.”
“I did.”
“Then she knows.” She looked at the side of his face. “I’ll call ahead. Mom’s got the number, I’ll — no. She’s not answering either.” A short laugh. “God. There isn’t a phone in my family that works.”
“Call at the junction,” he said. “There’s a payphone on the wall outside.”
“You know there’s a payphone.”
“I’ve been coming off this road seventeen years.”
Which was true. Every single thing he said was true, and it was going to be true all the way to the state line, and this was the part of it that got in and would not come out: he did not lie to her more than once.
He laid one down at seven in the morning in her doorway and then he drove forty miles on it and let her build the rest herself, and she had built it, she had built the whole house — the kitchen, the calendar, the kids in the back seat — out of her own wanting, with both hands, while he watched the road.
He drove the last of it with the window down and nothing on the radio.
The junction at Cutbank is a wide gravel apron where the highway lets go of the mountain: a fuel stop with two pumps and a phone on the block wall, a steel bin chained to a post, a row of motel units set back off the gravel with one door propped open, and the road going away north across the flat as straight as something drawn with a ruler.
The town itself stood up off that flat a mile along — mill stacks and a water tower and nothing between here and there but the road.
He pulled in at ten past eight and put the nozzle in and went inside to pay because the card reader on the pump had been broken since the spring.
Maeve sat where she was for a second. Then she got her own phone up off her knee and found it had three bars and nothing else — no missed call, no message, sixteen days of her own name in her sister’s silence — and it occurred to her, sitting there with the smell of diesel coming in the window, that she could get the aunt’s number off him.
He had it. He had spoken to somebody at five-thirty in the morning.
His phone was on the bench seat between them, under the folded recovery sheets, face up.
She had it in her hand before she had decided to want it. No lock on it, because he was a man of forty-five who used a phone for one thing. The call list came up in green on grey.
Monday, 8:21 a.m. Ellery Dispatch. Four minutes.
Under it, Sunday. Under that, the Broken Spoke, Saturday afternoon. Then a number with no name against it, the week before.
Nothing at five-thirty. Nothing at all that morning.
Nothing since Monday morning, in or out, and no Verlon number anywhere on the whole first screen.
And there was nobody in a shut shop at five-thirty in the morning to pick up that line either, which was the whole reason the yard number rolled onto this one at night; anybody wanting him at that hour had this phone and nothing else, and this phone had not rung.
Maeve sat in the cab of a flatbed at a fuel stop forty miles from her own bed and felt the bottom go out of the day so slowly and so completely that she had time to watch it go.
She put the phone back exactly where it had been and squared the sheets over the corner of it.
He came out with two coffees he had not been asked for and got up into the truck and passed her one, and she held it and did not drink it.
“Nobody called you,” she said.
Hitch stopped with his own cup halfway.
“Nobody called the shop and nobody called this phone and my sister is asleep in her own house in Verlon this minute.” Her voice came out level. “Say it’s not that.”
He set the coffee in the well of the dash. He took his time, and she understood that she was watching a man decide, and that whatever came out of him next was the actual size of him, and she was not ready for it either way.
“It’s not that,” he said. “She’s in Verlon. Nobody called.”
“You said —”
“I know what I said.” He turned his head to get her properly, the way he did, the small courtesy, and she could have screamed at him for it. “I’m not putting another one on top of it. Ask me and I’ll tell you.”
“Why am I in this truck.”
“Because you’re better off out of that county for a while.” Flat. Not a flinch in it. “Your aunt’s a good four hours on and she’ll have you, and Trosper doesn’t have one thing in it that belongs to Verlon. It’s for your own good, Maeve.”
For your own good. There it was, out in the open at last, in the plainest voice in Ellery County, on a gravel apron with a payphone on the wall.
“Keep going,” she said.
“That’s it.”
“That is not it and you know it isn’t, because you don’t take a woman’s morning off her for a while, you told me to pack a bag. Keep going.”
The pump clicked off behind them. Neither of them moved to it.
“County pulled my rotation Monday,” Hitch said.
“All of it, off the north end, effective that morning, no reason written anywhere. It’s Verlon.
Same hand as your sister’s job and the ring and the sheriff — a man who paves four-fifths of this county sat in a chair and wondered out loud and that’s the whole machinery, and I’ll be four months living on what’s in a coffee can.
” He said it like a recovery sheet. Load, weight, where it wanted to go.
“The table would get it back for me inside a week. Tuesday I stood in that room and told them no.”
“Why.”
“Because I’d have had to ask.”
“Then ask me.”
“And have you carry it.” Something moved in his face and went again. “You’d have been up out of that chair before I finished saying it. You’d have stood up in a room and done something on my account and it would never have come off you as long as you lived.”
“So instead,” Maeve said, “you’d rather drive me forty miles.”
“Yes.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“That’s the rest of it.” His hands were on the wheel of a truck that was not moving. “I’d rather move you four hours up a road than stand in that chapel and ask for something on my own account. That’s the true version. I’ve turned it over and there’s nothing on the other side.”
The flat went on out north with the sun getting hard on it. Somewhere behind the block wall a compressor ran and shut off.
“I cut myself out of a dress,” she said, “with a cake knife. Because a room full of people had decided every single thing about my life and had all been so nice about it.” She was not crying.
She noticed that with a sort of distant respect for herself.
“And your table cut up my bank card in a saucer to be kind, and I stood in your kitchen and told you what that did to me, and you didn’t say one word, and I thought that was you agreeing. ”
“It was.”
“No, it was you listening.” She got the door handle. “You’ve done it better than any of them. You used Dara. You knew I wouldn’t ask you a single question if you said her name and you were right, I got a bag in eleven minutes, I thanked you on the stairs.”
He said, “Maeve —”
“Don’t.” She pushed the door open on the cold and the diesel smell. “There’s one thing I came up that pass for. One. I’d have gone anywhere you asked me to go if you’d asked me.”
She got down onto the gravel and pulled the bag out from behind the seat and stood with it against her hip.
He did not start the truck. He sat in it with the door open on her side and the morning coming in, and he looked at her, and he did not put one word in front of her feet.
“Get back in,” he said at last. Quiet. Not an order — she knew what those sounded like, she had been engaged to a man who never once needed to raise his voice — and this was not one. It was a man asking, badly, on the only account he had never in his life been able to open.
“No,” Maeve said.
And he took it. That was the thing. He sat there for the better part of an hour while she stood by the bin with her bag and her tips, and he did not come around the truck, and he did not carry her, and he did not say a word about the four hours or the state line or the money, because she had said no and he was the only man in three counties who had ever heard that word off her and let it stand.
At a little after ten he put it in gear.
“Ember’s got a phone,” he said, out the window, not quite at her — at the gravel, at the bin, at whatever it is a man talks to when he has run out of people. “You’ve got wages coming. Marla’ll hold them.”
Maeve said, “I know.”
He pulled out onto the highway and went back up the way they had come, and she watched the flatbed get small against the mountain, and the payphone on the block wall behind her started to look like the only thing in the world she had left to use.