Chapter 18
The sign went back up on a Saturday in June, a year later, and it took four people and most of the morning because Nikki Brenner would not let anybody do it badly.
They had bought it in February. Both names on it, which Mila had insisted on and which Jason had argued about for a week — he had wanted it in hers alone, and she had said no, and they had gone around and around about it at that kitchen table like two people who were allowed to disagree, and in the end she had won by pointing out that a house in one name was how they had gotten into trouble in the first place.
He had laughed and said that was a low blow and entirely fair, and signed it.
Her mother came up for the sign. Lorraine Kovacs stood in the lane in the June sun with her arms folded and looked at it for a long time and then said, “Your father would have hated the lettering,” and cried about it for twenty minutes in the truck where she thought no one could see.
* * *
Here is what a year of it looked like.
Jason Shepard ran his company, which he had gone back to in September with a different arrangement and a board that had stopped asking him about his marriage. He worked four days a week and was worse at pretending not to mind about things and better at nearly everything else.
Mila was three weeks from delivering the second series, which was about foster care, and which was better than the first. Almost no one had believed that was possible.
She had known it by the third week, the way you know, and had not said so to anybody except Jody, who had said a word Mila’s mother would not have cared for and then gone back to coiling cable.
The heater in the barn office had finally been replaced. There was a second chair in there now, which got used about every other week by a man who came in, sat down, and read a newspaper with his headphones off while she worked, and who had learned not to ask how it was going.
She rode five days a week. Her hands still shook when she was tired. She had a knob built out of inner tube on a recorder that a manufacturer had since offered, twice, to replace with a proper one, and she had said no thank you both times.
Larry Shepard lived at Greenspring in the back room with a bell on the rail and about a hundred words.
He was extremely rude with all of them. Verity stayed on, on her own terms and for a great deal more money, and the night aide who had replaced the one who quit was a large man named Wally who played Larry the racing and swore at the television with him.
And Christina got divorced in the spring and moved into the spare room for eight weeks and was, by everyone’s account including her own, unbearable and much happier.
She told her father herself, in the back room with the door shut, the first Shepard in three generations to walk out of a marriage by saying so.
She came out an hour later with her eyes red and would only say that he had spent one of his words on it, and it had been yes, and he had not said it with contempt.
Neal came to Thanksgiving. Nobody could work out how that had happened, and everyone was glad it had.
* * *
The house changed, which she had not expected and which happened almost entirely by accident.
Greenspring had been his grandmother’s and had never once felt like hers, and she had said so out loud in that kitchen in July with her keys on the table, and Jason had said, “I know,” and then, after a moment, “I’ve never liked it either.”
They had stared at each other for a second.
Eight years. Two people living in a house neither of them wanted, each of them assuming it was the other one’s.
So they did it slowly, over the fall, the way you do a thing with no urgency in it.
The dining room became a room with a sofa in it.
Four of his grandmother’s chairs went to an auction in Frederick and Mila did not miss one of them.
The blue room stopped being the blue room and became somewhere Jody could leave a case of cable.
And in November, on the anniversary of a discharge no one mentioned, Mila took her own barn coat off the third hook and moved it to the first one, which was nearer the door and which she had wanted for a decade.
Jason noticed inside a day and said nothing about it for a week, and then, at dinner, entirely deadpan: “I see the coat’s moved up.”
“It has.”
“Bold.”
“There’s going to be more of that,” said Mila.
“I should think so,” he said.
* * *
The bad days happened and they were allowed to.
That was the other thing about that year that no one tells you, and Mila thought it worth being honest about in her own head: there were perhaps nine days in twelve months when the whole of it came up out of the floor and took her — a chair dragged over tile in a waiting room, a woman’s flat expensive shoes on a sidewalk in Washington, and once, disastrously, an intercom in a hotel corridor.
What was different was what happened next.
She told him. Every time, the same day, usually within the hour, on the phone from wherever she was. And he did not fix it and did not flinch and did not offer to buy anything.
The first time, in October, he said, “Do you want me to come and get you?” and she said no, and he said, “Okay. Then tell me the whole thing and I’ll stay on the line.”
He stayed on the line for fifty minutes in the middle of a working day.
Afterward she sat on a bench outside a building in Washington and thought, clearly: this is the marriage. This right here. Not the horse and not the recording. A man on a phone for fifty minutes who did not once try to make it better.
* * *
The mare came home in September.
Cathy brought her down to Nikki’s herself and stood in the yard looking around with her hands in her pockets and said, “Well, this is better than most endings I get.”
Ivy walked off the trailer, looked at the hill, and screamed.
Every horse on the place answered her. It went on for about a minute and a half and Mila stood in the middle of it with her hand over her mouth and Jason’s arm around her shoulders, and Nikki, who had trailered horses for twenty years and considered herself immune, had to go and be busy in the feed room.
Mila rode her at a walk four days after she came off the trailer at Nikki’s. Nothing dramatic. Around the sand ring twice with the swallows going over, with her husband sitting on the gate with his forearms on his knees, not saying anything, watching her.
She moved down the road to Kovacs Farm in February with everything else, and stood in her own box in her own barn.
* * *
In May she got in foal.
They had gone back and forth about it for a month — she was fifteen, she had a repaired hind leg, and Cathy had been straight about what that meant.
In the end it was the vet who settled it, a practical woman named Tessie who ran her hands down the leg and said, “She’ll carry it fine.
She’d rather be doing that than standing in a field being a monument. ”
The scan was on a Tuesday in June, four days before the sign went up.
Mila drove home from it with the picture on the seat beside her, and Jason came out of the house before she was out of the truck, because he had been watching the lane, and she held it up through the windshield and watched her husband put both hands on his head in the middle of the gravel like a man at a football game.
* * *
The party was the sign, in the end.
There was no plan for a party. Nikki brought the sign and four people and a ladder, and then somebody called somebody, and by two in the afternoon there were about thirty people at Kovacs Farm eating off a trestle table in the yard.
Roger Dunham came with two more ancient bottles.
Ardith Fairbanks came with a hat. The girls from the barn came, and Corby drove down from Towson, and Jody came with a boyfriend no one had heard about, and Nate Halloran arrived at four with Cathy from the Pennsylvania yard, whom he had met at Nikki’s in September on the day the mare came home, and had been extremely quiet about ever since.
Mila looked at the two of them standing by the gate and caught her husband’s eye across the yard, and Jason mouthed I know, and she had to go inside for a minute.
They brought Larry out at five.
Wally got him down the ramp and into the chair by the mounting block in the sun, and people came to him in ones and twos the way they do, and he was rude to most of them, and enjoyed himself enormously.
Mila sat down on the block beside him at some point in the early evening with a glass she was not drinking.
“Well,” Larry said.
That was his big one. He had gotten well back in the winter and it had joined no as a load-bearing word and now did the work of about four sentences depending on delivery.
“It’s all right, isn’t it,” Mila said.
“Well.”
She looked out at the yard — at the sign at the end of the lane, and the trestle table, and the hill behind it going gold.
“You told me not to be like you,” she said. “Last April. With one word, about nine times, until I got it.”
Larry turned his head.
“I got it,” said Mila. “I wanted you to know I got it.”
And Larry Shepard, who had said perhaps a hundred words in eighteen months and had never in ten years asked his daughter-in-law a single question about herself, worked at it for a while with his jaw and produced, with enormous effort and total clarity:
“Good girl.”
Then, after a moment, because he was still himself:
“No.”
“No what?”
He moved his hand at her glass, and then at the yard, and then, unmistakably, at his son across the grass.
“Go on,” he said.
Mila stayed where she was for a second.
“Did you ever tell him?” she said. “About the building.”
Larry looked at her with an expression she had spent eighteen months learning to read and had gotten good at, and which on this occasion said, plainly, that a man is entitled to some privacy in his own life.
“Well,” he said.
Which meant yes, and that it had been done properly, and that she was not going to be told one word about when or how.
* * *