27. The Towns Unraveling Gifts
THE TOWN'S UNRAVELING GIFTS
COLE
The town keeps trying to give me things, and the strange part is I've started letting it.
Ed put me on the books. Not as a favor — Ed Larsen doesn't do favors, he'd sooner eat the wrench — but because a man who can field-strip a harness between a flat and an oil change is worth real money, and he said so in the flattest, least sentimental way a man can say a thing, which is the only way it would've landed on me.
"I'm not getting younger and you're not going anywhere," he said, wiping a clean wrench.
"Mornings, anyhow. Afternoons you'll want for whatever a man wants afternoons for.
" A look. "Don't make it weird." So I've got grease under my nails again and a bay to stand in and a reason to be on Main at seven, and the noise in my head goes quiet under a hood the way it has since the first day I lasted a minute watching another man lose to a bolt.
That's the mend, if you want to call it a thing. It doesn't feel like mending. It feels like waking up somewhere you didn't expect to still be alive in, and slowly noticing the place is yours.
Reyes and Hagen stay through the federal end of it — the statements, the boxes, the careful work of handing a war over to the people whose job the after is — and then it's time for them to go back to the lives Holt died for, so guys like us could finally build.
Hagen's got a baby who's apparently tripled in size in the three weeks her father's been gone.
Reyes's mother wants him home for reasons that are mostly an excuse to have him home, which is the best reason there is.
We say it the way men like us say goodbye, which is barely. In the gravel lot at dawn, kit loaded, a handshake that's a half-second too long and nobody mentioning it.
"You do the mountain with her," Reyes says, before I can bring it up, because Reyes reads me the way the whole world apparently reads me now.
"I know we said we'd all do it. The whole team, the way we drew it up.
But that's not the trip anymore, brother.
We already did our op together. Ours was the living one — we went and got somebody breathing, the way he'd have wanted, the way he died teaching us.
" He grips my shoulder. "Yours up that mountain is the one where you get to start living.
You don't bring the surviving brothers to the door of your own after.
You bring the woman you're walking through it with.
" A grin, the old one, all the way back now.
"Bring her. Not us. We'll see Holt at the wedding. "
"There's no wedding."
"There's gonna be a wedding," Hagen says, climbing in. "I've got eyes, Mathison. There's gonna be a wedding, and you're gonna make me wear a tie, and I'm gonna cry, and you're never gonna let me forget it. Wave at the trucks."
They pull out. I lift two fingers off the air.
They lift theirs. And then they're gone south toward an airport and their lives, and I'm standing in Ed's lot — a man with a town and a job and a woman and a team that will come the next time I call, which I now know down to the bone they will, because they just did.
I came to this state to be nobody after. I file the size of what's happened to me instead, and it's almost funny, except it isn't, it's the opposite of funny, it's the thing I didn't believe a man like me got to have.
I go to Holt that evening, the way I have most evenings since I broke down in this town. He's where he's been — Eleanor's front room, wrapped, set solid where he can't tip, two doors down now from a girl named Grace who's learning the road was only ever eight miles.
I crouch and fold the blanket back and put my hand on the cool metal that never warms.
"It's time," I tell him. "You've been patient.
You were always the patient one — first through every door and last to complain, and you've sat on three different floors going on fifteen months waiting on me to get my head right.
" My voice doesn't do the thing it used to do.
The cold's not holding it anymore; something steadier is.
"I couldn't take you before. I told myself it was the truck.
Then the war. Then her. It was none of those.
It was none of those. It was that scattering you meant being nowhere after, brother.
I drove out here to put you on a mountain and then just—stop.
Be done. A man with nothing left can't lose anything else, and that sounded like peace to me for a long time. "
The metal doesn't warm. It never does. And for the first time, all the way through, that's all right.
"I've got an after now. That's what changed.
I can lay you down up there because I'm not laying myself down with you anymore.
I get to walk back out. I get to come home to a five-foot-two bartender who calls me cowboy and a town full of people who keep handing me things and a job under a hood and a phone full of brothers who'll come when I call.
You didn't get to be old, Holt. I'm going to be old.
I'm going to be old here. And the only way I get to do that clean is to take you up that mountain and finally let you be where you spent your whole life wanting to be.
" I square the blanket. "So it's time. We're going.
And then I'm coming back, and that's not me leaving you up there alone — that's you finally being home, and me finally getting one. "
It's only standing up from the floor that I let myself look at the part I've been not-looking at, the way I've been not-looking at it since the funeral.
The mountain was never the hard one.
I told Sloane that, on Eleanor's floor, the day I gave her the dose and Mary both.
The mountain's just rock. Mary's the reckoning.
An hour north of here, in Pinedale, there's a woman with Holt's eyes and lace in her windows who taught third grade for twenty-six years and gave me a peach cobbler recipe on a yellow card eleven years ago and said Cole, I want you to make this for someone someday.
She's been waiting a year and change for me to come up her drive.
She knows her boy is dead. She does not know how, not the true way, not the eleven minutes and the dose and her son asking me with his last clear breath not to make him ride it out alone.
And here's the thing the map of this state did me the mercy of arranging: the road to the Cirque runs through Pinedale.
Lander, then up toward Boulder and the trailhead, and Pinedale sitting right there on the way, the way it's been sitting there on every map I've avoided looking at.
I cannot drive Holt to his mountain without driving past his mother's door.
The two undone things were always one undone thing.
The universe stacked them on the same road so I'd have to do both or neither.
So I do the thing I've been unable to do for over a year. I sit on Eleanor's step in the cold with the one gold light burning down at the end of Main, and I take out my phone, and I call Mary Holt.
She picks up on the second ring, in a voice I haven't heard in eleven years, a third-grade-teacher voice that's gentled a thousand crying kids and buried a husband and a son.
"Cole Mathison," she says, before I've said a word. Like she's been holding my name ready all this time. Like she always knew I'd be the one to call. "I wondered if it'd be you."
"Yes, ma'am." My throat's a straw. "I've got him, Mrs. Holt.
I've had him the whole time. I'm taking him up to the Cirque the way he wanted, the way he made me swear.
And before I do—" the words won't come and then they come "—I need to come up your drive.
I need to tell you something about your son I should've driven up and told you a long time ago, and I was too much a coward, and I'm done being one.
It's not a thing for a phone. Can I come? "
The line's quiet a moment. Not the hard quiet. The other kind.
"Cole," Mary says. "Honey. I've known there was a something since the day they told me.
A mother knows when a man can't make himself call.
I've made my peace with not knowing, and I'll make a different peace with knowing, and either way, you're a boy my son loved like blood and you're welcome up my drive any hour of any day.
" A breath. "You bring him. You bring whatever it is you've been carrying.
And Cole—" the teacher voice, the one that's gentled a thousand kids "—you're not coming up here to confess to me.
You're coming up here so we can take my boy to his mountain together.
Those are different things. Try to know the difference by the time you get here. "
I can't answer that. I don't have to. She's a mother. She knows when a man can't.
"Yes, ma'am," I manage. "We'll come."
We.
I notice the word after I've hung up, the way you notice you've stepped off a curb you don't remember deciding to step off.
Because here's where the mend shows itself — not in the job or the town or the team, but in a pronoun. A year ago, every plan I made was I. I would drive. I would climb. I would scatter him. I would be nobody, after, alone. The whole architecture of the man who came to this state was built for one.
And somewhere in three weeks of war and a kitchen and a couch I learned to stop taking, the I turned into a we without my permission, the way my body once turned toward a woman before I gave it the order.
I'm going to the mountain. I'm going to Mary.
And I'm not doing either one the way I did everything for the last fourteen months, which is alone, because alone is the thing I came here believing was the only safe way left to be, and a five-foot-two woman and a town full of strangers and three brothers and a dead man's mother have spent a month proving me wrong about it from every direction at once.
The trouble is the same trouble it's always been with her, the one we both carry bone-deep.
We're both fluent in doing the hard thing alone.
I'd assumed I had to spare her the mountain — a woman three weeks out of a compound doesn't need a man's grief stacked on her own.
She'd assume she had to let me have it alone — a man should get to bury his brother without an audience.
Two people fluent in walls, each one ready to wall the other out of the hard thing for the kindest possible reason, which is exactly the reasoning that nearly killed us both a month ago.
I'm not doing that again. I gave her my word the wall stays in rubble, and a wall built out of I'll spare you this is still a wall.
So I'm going to ask her. Out loud. The way we do everything now.
I'm going to tell her I'm taking Holt to the mountain, and that the road runs through the hardest door I've got, Mary's door, and I'm going to ask her to come — not because I can't do it alone, but because I'm done choosing alone when I don't have to, and because she told me once, on a stranger's floor, then we'll go to Pinedale, together, you don't have to make that hour alone either, and I believed her, and I've been carrying it like the cobbler card ever since.
I head back up Main toward her house in the dark, the truck running clean in Ed's lot behind me, finally pointed the right direction for the right reason.
The last undone thing isn't the mountain and it isn't even Mary.
It's the asking. It's letting somebody walk the hard road beside me when every instinct I own says the hard road is a thing you walk alone or you don't deserve to walk it at all.
I'm going to ask her in the morning.
I've got a feeling — the operator kind, the kind that's never once been wrong about her — that she's going to be a step ahead of me, the way she was crossing that street the first morning, the way she was across the bar the first night, the way she's been every step since.
I've got a feeling she's already packed.