Chapter 6 The Hotel Supper
The hotel dining room in Pinecrest was not, by any standard that would have been applied in Columbus, Ohio, a remarkable room.
Mercy had dressed carefully for the occasion, by which she meant she had put on her second-best dress, which was a dark blue wool that was not especially decorative but was well-made and said something honest about the person wearing it, which was: I have taken care with my appearance because this matters to me, but I am not attempting to be something I am not.
She arrived at seven precisely. She was a punctual person. Nathaniel Horne was already there, which meant he was also punctual, or had arrived early, which were different qualities with different implications and she filed both.
He stood when she came in. The automatic courtesy of it — the reflex, the immediate rising without calculation — told her something she filed alongside the punctuality.
He was not in his sheriff's coat tonight.
A dark coat, better than the work one, the coat of a man who had dressed with some care for the occasion.
His face, out of the winter air and in the lamplight, was different from what she had seen on the street — not softer exactly, but less managed, the way faces were in warmth and light versus cold and outdoors.
She sat. He sat. The waiter brought water and a menu that was briefer than it was trying to appear, which was a quality Mercy found endearing in a menu.
"Thank you for coming," he said.
"Thank you for asking," she said. "I wasn't sure you were going to."
He looked at her. "Why?"
"Because you look like a man who made a decision and surprised himself with it," she said. "Which suggested the asking was not fully planned."
Something moved in his face that she had not seen before — a quality of being caught, and then, briefly, something that was almost humor. "It wasn't," he said.
"Good," she said. "The unplanned things are usually more interesting."
"You believe that?" he said.
"I came to Colorado," she said. "That was not planned, three years ago.
It became planned once I started planning it, but the original impulse was not planned.
It was the sense that there was something in this direction worth going toward.
" She looked at the menu. "The beef, I think. What do you recommend?"
He recommended the beef. They ordered. The waiter went away.
"Tell me something," she said.
He looked at her. "What?"
"Anything true," she said. "I've been talking to you in increments for five days and I know your professional history and your opinion of the weather and your approach to road robberies and nothing else. I find that asymmetric. I've told you considerably more than that without trying to."
He was quiet for a moment. Not the avoidance kind of quiet — she was learning his silences — but the finding-the-true-version kind.
"I was born in Pennsylvania," he said. "A small town in the western part of the state. My father was a farmer. I was seventeen when the war started and I enlisted because it seemed to be the thing to do and I was seventeen and thought I understood what the thing to do was." He stopped. "I didn't."
"No one at seventeen does," she said. "About anything."
"No," he said. "But some things teach the lesson more thoroughly than others.
" He looked at the table. "I was at Gettysburg.
Both days. After the war I came west because east meant the farm and the farm meant everything I had believed in 1861 before I understood what believing in things cost, and I was not ready to be around any of it.
" He paused. "I came to Colorado. I was good at keeping order. I've been keeping order since."
"Twenty years," she said.
"Twenty years," he agreed.
The food arrived. They ate for a moment in the comfortable silence of two people who have said something real and do not need to fill the space immediately after it.
"Your turn," he said.
She looked at him. "I told you a great deal of this already," she said.
"You told me the facts," he said. "Columbus and eleven years and the carpetbag. Tell me something true that isn't a fact."
She considered this. He was using her own framing back at her, which suggested he had been paying attention to how she framed things. She found this — the evidence of someone who listened carefully enough to internalize — more interesting than most questions.
"I have been looking for the right place for three years," she said.
"Not restlessly — I'm not a restless person.
Deliberately. I knew what I had in Columbus and it was good and it was not sufficient, and I knew what sufficient felt like from watching my father, who had found it.
He was entirely in the right place for his entire life and it showed in the quality of his presence.
He was the most present person I've ever known.
" She paused. "I have been looking for the place that makes me that present. "
Nathaniel looked at her. His food was in front of him, partially eaten, and he was looking at her with the specific quality of a man who has heard something that is organizing around a point he hadn't expected.
"And Pinecrest?" he said.
"I've been here five days," she said. "But yes. Something about it."
He looked at his plate. He ate a bite. He was thinking about something and she did not press.
"My father was like that," he said, finally. "Present. In the right place. The farm was right for him in a way that I could see as a child but didn't understand until later. You understand what the right place looks like when you see it and you haven't found your own."
"Exactly," she said.
"And after the war," he said, "I couldn't find it. Everything I tried was — adjacent to right. Close enough to be functional. Not right."
"Is the sheriff's office right?" she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. "The work is right," he said, carefully. "The work I understand and I'm good at it and it matters. But the life around the work — " He stopped.
"Is adjacent," she said.
"Yes," he said.
The dining room was warm and the lamp was doing its work and outside the Colorado December was doing its work and between them on the table with the half-eaten food was something that had been building for five days and had arrived, over the course of a supper at the Pinecrest hotel, at the state of being real rather than potential.
Neither of them addressed it directly. They talked for another hour about other things — her work, his county, the Caldwell family, the mountains in summer which she had not yet seen.
The other things were not beside the point.
They were the point, in the way that ordinary things between two people become the point once the people have decided, without saying so, that they are going to keep talking.
He walked her back to Mrs. Connelly's. They stood on the step for a moment in the cold.
"Thank you," she said.
"Thank you," he said.
There was a pause that had in it all the things that could be said and were not yet ready to be said.
"Good night, Sheriff," she said.
"Good night, Miss Alcott," he said.
She went inside. He walked home. The street was empty and the mountains were invisible in the dark and the stars were doing their Colorado thing, which was everything.