Chapter 18
RYDER
The flatbed came at seven the next morning. All four sidewalls were gone and the rims had settled into the gravel overnight. The driver looked at the sidewalls, then at the clubhouse, and asked whether he should bill the compound office for vandalism.
I gave him my own card and told him nobody had vandalized anything. The truck was mine. So was the bill. Filing it as damage would have made the last person who acted the problem, and the last person who acted was the only one out there who had told the truth in two weeks.
Men watched from the windows while it was winched up. Nobody offered me a ride. Gage sat under the awning with the cane across his knees and waited until the flatbed had turned onto the county road before he lifted two fingers at me.
“Leah says Eden will give you an hour. Four o’clock, side room.
Don’t thank me, I didn’t ask for it.” He shifted his weight off the bad leg.
“Mia and Leah inside, Bear in the hall, Eden runs the clock and the door. And if you spend that hour telling her you were scared, I’ll do to the Harley what she did to the Silverado. ”
“She won’t hear the word frightened out of me.”
“You’ve been saying that for two weeks.” He pushed himself upright before I could think about reaching for his elbow. “She spent five years believing your word was the end of a dangerous thing. Bring her something better than another one.”
The shop is in Hadley Creek, sixteen miles out, twenty minutes in a truck.
I walked it in a little under four hours with the county road throwing heat up under my jeans, and I paid the shop, and I drove the Silverado back on four new tires at noon, and none of that was worth anything to Eden.
It kept me from writing answers in my head, which was the most useful thing I did that day.
The side room used to hold fundraiser supplies.
June had cleared it out after the first strike and put a long table under the only window.
Eden sat at the far end with the medication pouch hooked on her chair, Leah beside her, Mia across.
My chair faced her from the other end. Bear stood in the open doorway.
Mia set a kitchen timer at Eden’s instruction and put it down where I could see the face of it.
Eden wore dark green and no ring. Her hair was up off her neck in the clip with the broken tooth.
I looked at her bare hand before I looked at anything else, and some part of me was still looking for the woman who wore my shirts to bed and kept my name on her forms. She saw me find it and turned her hand over under the table.
“You speak when I ask you a question,” she said. “You don’t correct anything I say because you know what was going on in your head. I lived with what you showed me. If you say Denver, or the photograph, or what you meant, the hour ends.”
“I answer questions. I don’t put my intent against your experience.”
“If I have to say it twice, you don’t get another meeting until I want one.”
She started the timer and looked at the wall behind me.
“I thought my lungs were why you left.”
Nobody wrote anything.
“You told me on my own porch that you were tired of planning around whether I could breathe. Six days later the gate is shut and there’s smoke in the common room and thirty people have to rearrange a building because of me.
Fans off. Kitchen closed. Tessa can’t use the cleaner she’s used for nine years.
Every man in there watching the doorway to see how I was doing.
” Her voice stayed level, which was worse.
“And the healthy one is sitting in a chair with a jacket, and the person who resented the planning is doing all of it for her.”
“I understand.”
“You understand words fast. You always have.” She pulled the pouch closer without opening it.
“When my inhaler stopped working I did not think I was dying because of you. The smoke did it. The cleaner did it. I need you to hear that so you can’t take the attack and put yourself in the middle of it.
What you did was make me afraid to ask. I was on that floor working out whether reaching for you would mean the whole room got to watch the discarded wife beg another woman’s man for help.
So Leah had to be the one, because I couldn’t stand to need you after you’d told me you were done. ”
Leah’s hand went flat on the table beside her own arm.
“And I apologized to your baby,” Eden said.
Mia’s pen stopped above the page.
“Not out loud. In my head, on the floor, with Aris counting at me. I thought if I died in that room, the child would hear one day that their mother’s first week with their father got ruined because his sick wife couldn’t manage a little smoke.
That is where I was. That’s the sentence I had in me while somebody was cutting my shirt open.
” She let it sit in the room. “There was no child. You put a child in my head to apologize to.”
I had nowhere to put my hands, so I left them on my thighs. Bear had gone very still in the doorway.
“At the hospital I woke up wanting you,” she said.
“I was ashamed of it before I got my eyes open. I knew you’d left me, I knew she was pregnant, and I wanted my husband anyway, and then I remembered you weren’t mine to ask for, so I asked Leah whether you’d gone back to her.
” She looked up. “When did you find that out?”
“Gage told me at the vehicles.”
“Say the day.”
“Monday. Ten minutes before we pulled out for the appointment.”
“So you had it in your hand.” She sat back. “You knew I’d come up out of an oxygen mask asking for you, and you put her in my seat and drove her past my house.”
“I had it in my hand for ten minutes and I got in the truck. There wasn’t a second in there where I didn’t know.”
“Which is a smaller thing than the next one.” She turned the transcript face down. She hadn’t looked at it once. “Your right side.”
Leah looked toward the window. Bear’s hand stopped against the doorframe.
“You never asked me for it,” Eden said. “That’s what I want in that recorder.
You never once asked. Six years ago at Tessa’s cousin’s wedding you missed the same question twice and answered something nobody had said, and I saw your face do a thing I’d never seen it do, and I got up and moved my chair to your right, and I never sat anywhere else again.
Not once. Not in a restaurant, not in church, not at that table, not on your bike, not on a porch.
Do you know I have not chosen a seat in a room in six years?
I choose the ear. That’s it. I’ve never once sat where I wanted to sit. ”
“I knew you moved. I never once counted what it cost you to keep doing it.”
“You don’t know all of it, because I never told you any of it, because telling you would’ve made it a thing you had to feel bad about.
” Her hands stayed flat. “I answered questions twice at parties and made the second one sound like I’d just thought of something to add, so nobody would work out you’d missed it.
I put my hand on your left arm before I spoke so you’d have turned by the time the words got there.
I cooked on the wrong side of my own stove for five years.
When your mother called I put the phone in your right hand before you asked.
I did all of it, every day, and I never once made you say the word deaf, and I would have done it for another forty years and never mentioned it. ”
Mia had stopped writing entirely.
“Then you put her there.” Eden’s voice went somewhere I had not heard it go.
“In front of the whole compound. In the chair I would have burned a building down to keep for you. And when I came through the common room on your left, you made me stand there and repeat where I’d sent your things.
You made me say it twice. You put me in the place I had spent five years keeping you out of, and you did it in front of men who had watched me move my chair for you at every fundraiser this club has ever had. ”
“I took something you gave me and used it to make the lie stand up.”
“And when I stopped doing it, you looked hurt.” She was not crying.
“You looked hurt, Ryder. You had a woman sitting in my place because you put her there, and when I walked past on the wrong side and didn’t repeat myself, something went across your face, and I saw it, and I have never in my life wanted to hit anybody the way I wanted to hit you in that room. ”
“You should have.”
For nine years I had mapped that ear. Which side of a doorway to stand on.
How far a man could get behind me before I lost him.
Which seat at church, which end of a bar, how much road noise swallowed a voice.
I had built my whole working life around the angles of it and never counted the ones she was walking.
She had been solving it for five years, silently, every day, and I had let her do it and called it luck.
“Don’t tell me what I should have done.” She waited until her hands were still.
“The worst part isn’t the chair. It’s that the instinct is still in me.
Every time you miss a word I still want to move.
Two days ago you turned your head on the porch to catch what Mia was saying and my body started to step left before I stopped it.
You put that in me. It took five years to build and it doesn’t come out because you turned out to be a liar. ”
“It won’t come out quickly. I let your care become something I expected, then used it where I knew you would see. There’s no part of me that can undo that for you.”