Chapter 16 #2
Sunny didn’t need anything from him anymore, which meant he was about to be the obstacle standing between her and what she wanted. It was time for him to get over what he wanted and step aside.
He didn’t pull back all at once because there were children involved and they wouldn’t understand the way an adult would that it was for their own good.
He did it the way frost comes, slowly and quietly, with nothing left to point to in the morning except that the garden had gone black at the edges overnight.
Tuesday, he had charts to finish when tea hour came around, which was even true, and excused himself to go work.
Wednesday, he drove Madison to Tessa’s for a 4-H club meeting and stayed to help clean up afterward.
Thursday he went to sit with Lucas and was there late.
The kettle sat cold on the stove three nights running.
The house noticed. He told the house to mind its own business.
Thursday night, Reno’s truck was sitting in front of the house when he came home from the Shoemacher place, and Reno himself was sitting on the porch steps with two root beers from Rose’s, holding one out like bait.
“Madi let me in, fed me, and went back upstairs to her book,” Reno said. “Your daughter’s better company than you are, these days. Sit.”
Hank sat because his brother was the only Steele fully as stubborn as he was. They drank root beer in the dark and the crickets and frogs filled the night with sound.
Reno, who could break down the hardest witness under cross-examination, sat there without saying a word, letting silence do the work for him. Hank knew and was annoyed by what his brother was doing, but that didn’t make it any less effective.
“So,” Reno said at last. “Sunny’s money came through.”
“Good. Lord knows, she deserves every penny of it after what he put her through.”
“Uh-huh.” Reno turned the bottle slowly in his hands. “I talked to her on the phone today. She sounded like a woman who’d won a lottery at a funeral.”
Hank’s gut twisted. It was for the best. He was doing right by Sunny. She would see that soon enough.
Reno continued, “And now I’m sitting on this porch with you, and the kitchen’s dark at nine o’clock. The stove’s cold, and you’re as grim and doleful as she is.” He tipped his head back against the post. “I got a conviction once on less circumstantial evidence than this.”
“Long day, Reno.”
“They’re all long days. You’ve had long days since you were nine.
” Reno looked over at him and the courtroom came into his voice gentle as it ever got.
“Whatever you’re doing, big brother, and I can see the shape of it because I’ve watched you do it my whole life, I want you to think hard about one thing.
There’s a difference between opening a door for a woman and standing behind it so she can’t see you anymore. ”
Hank looked at the lake for a while. “Bedtime for me. Goodnight, Reno.”
“Yeah.” Reno stood, set his empty bottle on the rail, and went down the steps.
At the bottom he stopped, the way lawyers stop, with the one question they actually came to ask. “Did she find you worth keeping and you got scared and bolted? Or did you not stick around long enough to let her make that decision for herself?”
He was gone before Hank had to not answer.
Friday he wrote the final check.
The restoration account had one invoice still outstanding. She’d submitted it to him two weeks ago, typed and itemized down to the last hinge. He’d let it sit on his desk, untouched, because paying it made the contract between them finished. And that wasn’t a word he’d wanted to let into the house.
He paid it in full Friday morning, first thing, before the part of him that wanted her to have a reason to stay could lodge an objection. He put the check in an envelope and wrote her name on the front of it. Odd, but writing her name took longer than writing the check had.
She came by that evening. He heard her car, her light, quick footsteps on the porch, and the squeak of the front door opening for a woman who’d stopped knocking weeks ago.
He was in the office, standing, with the envelope in his hand, and the kitchen was dark.
He watched her clock the unlit room from the hallway the way another woman might clock a door slammed in her face.
“The last invoice,” he said, holding the envelope out. “Paid in full. I added the supplier refund that came back on the wallpaper. It was yours. You fronted the deposit.”
She took it slowly. “You could’ve left it on the desk.”
He took a deep breath. He’d rehearsed this in the truck, which had done him no good at all because every version of it had come out sounding like exactly what it was.
He leaned into it and plowed ahead anyway as if he was walking into sleet.
“The house is finished. I walked every room of it this week and there’s not one thing left in it that needs you. ”
Her face went still. He’d watched a hundred patients take bad news, and the brave ones all did it the same way. Everything quit moving except their eyes. He made himself keep going.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said. That you don’t know yet what you’ll do.”
He set his shoulder blades against the bookcase, hands quiet, voice level.
“So here’s what I’ve been thinking, and then I’m done.
With that money you can give your kids any life in any town in this country.
Schools we can’t match around here. A house of your own that you choose because you love it, not because it was the nearest thing standing when rain started.
“You’ve spent ten years doing what you had to do. You finally get to do what you want to do. That choice ought to be made in the clear with nothing leaning on it. Don’t let this valley put its thumb on the scale. Don’t let me put a thumb on it.”
The grandfather clock in the hall ticked ponderously in the heavy silence.
“Is that what you want?” she asked. Her voice was as level as his. Two professionals being calm at each other across six feet of antique rug.
“What I want was never the question,” he said. “I want you free to choose. That’s the end of it.”
It was the truth, and he delivered it the way he’d been taught to deliver hard truths, plainly and without flinching.
Only a person standing inside his chest could’ve known it for the amputation it was and the internal bleeding his words caused.
She looked at him for a long moment with those perceptive eyes of hers, hunting for the words he wasn’t saying.
He made sure to give her nothing to find because giving her nothing was the whole point of this conversation.
Then she nodded once and thanked him for the check with the formal politeness she kept for strangers.
He watched her don her armor piece by piece until she was suited up in it the way she had been when she first walked into his office.
He told himself the strangely unreadable expression on her face was hiding relief.
She didn’t rise up on her toes in the dark of the porch. She said goodnight from the bottom step with the envelope in her hand and she left. Her taillights went around the corner and the street stayed empty for a long time afterward.
He went back inside and walked the house the way he did every night, turning off lights. The rooms she’d opened stood around him, tall windows and honest scars, smelling of beeswax and old wood.
In the dining room, Presley’s drawing of his hands stood on the dish rail in the frame his hands had made.
He stood in front of it exactly as long as he could stand to, which wasn’t long, and then he pulled the pocket doors closed.
She’d finally got around to actually oiling them, and they rolled shut without a sound.
The soft click of their magnets catching was worse than any slam.
In the office he stopped at the side table by the front window where the small lamp had burned every evening for weeks now. An invitation, he’d told himself when he started leaving it lit. A light for one person to find her way here any night she needed its warmth.
You ruined my life. You ruined me.
The old words came up the way they always came, except that sometime in the last few days, they’d changed sides. For ten years they had been an accusation he carried, a wound he argued with at three in the morning. Tonight they read like a chart. Proof, confirmed at last by a second case.
He’d needed Lorraine to need him, and his need had rotted her where she stood.
Sunny had needed him for one bright season, and that season was over, ended by a dead man’s unintentional gift.
The evidence pointed in the same direction it always had.
The people he loved were better off the moment they stopped needing him.
He’d known that going in. Falling in love with her was his error, not hers, and he would not compound it by making her say out loud what her taillights had already said.
He turned off the lamp.
Then he climbed the stairs in the dark of a house that, for all its open doors and refurnished rooms, had remembered overnight exactly how to echo.