Chapter 17 #2
Sunny reached the pair in time to hear Bonnie say, “I reached all seven of them. It took me four days and one call to a ship’s satellite phone, but I reached every one of Lucas’s children.”
“And?” Hank said.
“They’re coming. All seven.”
“How on earth did you manage that?” Sunny blurted. The way she heard it, the Shoemacher children had scattered to the four winds after the fire, vowing never to return here again and wanting nothing to do with their father.
Bonnie shrugged modestly.
“Ellie booked a flight while we were still on the phone. Apparently, she called Trent after I did and talked him into driving down Thursday. The others were . . .” she chose the word carefully, “. . . correct. Kind to me, every one of them. Cold as the lake about him.”
“Mm,” Hank responded, as if that didn’t surprise him.
Bonnie’s gaze came up and complicated grief warred with old anger. “Hank, in all those phone calls, not one of them asked me how their father was doing. Most of them just asked how soon they have to get here and how long they have to stay.”
The party roared on behind them, warm and bright. In the little pocket of quiet by the coats, Sunny stood between the town’s new mayor and its only doctor and felt the other story, the one underneath the election, turn itself one notch closer to its ending.
“I’ll do my best to see to it they get here in time,” Hank said. His phone buzzed at the end of that sentence like punctuation.
Sunny watched him read the screen and watched any vestige of the party leave his face.
The day nurse’s name was visible to Sunny at the top of the message.
Bonnie took his Styrofoam cup of coffee from him as he pocketed his phone, transforming from guest to doctor in the blink of an eye.
It dawned on her that she’d never once seen him resent having to make that instant shift.
“Go,” Bonnie said.
He was already three steps toward the door. On impulse, Sunny caught up to him at the edge of the crowd.
“Lucas?” she asked.
“His heart’s throwing rhythms the nurse doesn’t like the look of.” He settled the hat. “Probably the start of the last lap.”
“I’ll get word to Bonnie if you need to tell her anything tonight. I doubt she could hear her phone ring in all this noise if you tried to call her.”
For one second his gaze came all the way back to hers, the way they used to across a kettle. Something in his eyes strained toward her like a dog at the end of a chain. Then it disappeared.
“Thank you,” he said, with terrible courtesy.
She stood in the swirling noise and watched the Grange door shut behind the only man in the valley who hadn’t gotten to celebrate one single thing all summer.
The rental was dark and quiet when she got home, all the WoWS kids farmed out to Natalie’s in a heap of sleeping bags so their mothers could see democracy work.
Sunny made her own tea, in her own kitchen, with nobody to put the kettle on for her, and took it out to the back step.
She sat down with the night smelling of cut hay and the lake.
She knew exactly what she’d been doing all week, even while she’d been pretending not to watch herself do it. She’d been gathering evidence on Hank.
The cold stove. The dark kitchen. The white envelope. The house is done. There’s not one thing left in it that needs you. That was circled in red and underlined in her mind.
Don’t let me put a thumb on the scale.
It was a damning collection of facts that told a clear, undeniable story.
That was the maddening truth of it.
But it was also true that he’d defended her to the gossips in town. He’d built her daughter a desk with his own hands. He’d handed the key to recovering three million dollars, knowing, she saw it clearly now, knowing exactly what it might cost him.
She’d tried really hard this week to file Hank Steele in the same category of man as Winston Perry. But it simply didn’t work.
Winston had pulled away from her to hide something. Hank had pulled away from her to give her something and had paid out his own heart to do it. Even his goodbye had been generous.
She thought about what she’d told Madison back in the spring with a brass lamp in her hands. You don’t strip an old thing to punish it. You take it down to what’s true and you keep what’s honest and you mend only what’s actually broken.
She’d built a whole second life on the first half of that wisdom and somewhere along the way lost the second half entirely. She knew how to strip a thing to the studs. Ten years with Winston had made her a master of it.
What she’d never once done, not with a house, not with a town, not with a man, not with her own heart, was the part that came after. The part where you stop tearing up things when you’ve found something honest and good and solid, keep what you’ve found, and live there.
Excavation was supposed to end at bedrock. That was the whole point of bedrock. You got down to it so you could finally build.
She went inside and sat down at the kitchen table and took both envelopes out of her purse and laid them side by side.
The heavy linen one, with a dead man’s last secret in it, awaiting her signature.
The plain white one, with a living man’s careful handwriting on it that she understood now had been him signing himself out of her life so cleanly, so generously, that she’d almost missed it was goodbye.
Looking at the linen envelope, she finally admitted to herself the real reason it had ridden around in her purse for almost two weeks.
It wasn’t the obscenity of the money’s source, though that was real.
It wasn’t even the ugly reminder of Winston’s escape plan passing to her like an inheritance of cowardice.
The real reason was simpler and worse. The moment she signed to accept it, the money stopped being a fact and became a choice.
Unsigned, she was still a woman whose life was decided by the things she had to do to survive.
Signed, she would be free of the worries that had shaped and defined her life ever since Winston died.
She would be exactly as free as Hank had wished for her to be in that careful, terrible little speech.
And that freedom meant it was up to her to choose what she wanted going forward.
Two endings. Both of them written by men. One based on the assumption that he would leave, the other based on the assumption that she would leave.
She didn’t sign anything tonight. Instead she got out the yellow legal pad, the one with David Merrill written at the top of the first page, and she turned past that to a clean sheet.
There was exactly one question no ledger on earth could answer for her, and she had spent three years hiding from it.
She picked up a pen. Not a pencil. A pen.
At the top of the clean page she wrote, What I want.
She stared at it for a long time, and the page stayed empty. But it was ink, and it was her own handwriting, and it was a start.