Chapter Twenty-Five
Sol
They do not let me in the room for it, and I am glad, and I have never said that out loud to anybody.
I sit on the milk crate outside the salvage office at eight in the morning where Wade sat all night, and Wade stands about four feet away with his hands in his pockets and does not talk, and it takes fifty-one minutes.
Then the bar room door opens and Deacon comes across the gravel on his own.
He stops in front of me.
“Stand up,” he says.
I stand up.
“There was one vote available and it was on who,” he says.
“There is no vote on the sentence and there never has been and I am not going to tell you otherwise standing in a yard. The vote was on who carries it out. It went to me, five to nothing, with the president abstaining and Junior abstaining.”
“Alright,” I say.
“So it is mine.”
“Alright, Marcus.”
“And I am not going to tell you when,” Deacon says.
I look at him.
“That is not mercy,” he says. “I want that very clear, because you are about to walk away from me and start building a version of this in your head where an old man was kind to you. There is a sentence, it is mine to carry, and I am not going to name a day. Not this week and not in June and not in a year. You will not be told.”
“You want me to live in it.”
“I want it to be true,” Deacon says. “It is true. That is the only thing I have got left that I know how to do.”
He puts his hands in his jacket pockets.
“Now the rest,” he says. “The table has voted terms with you and Wendell has written them and Hollis will bring you a sheet. You are not welcome at this yard except when you are called. You will not sleep on this property. You will do what you said you would do about Boyer and about the east side, and Hollis will handle the money in and out, and you will be paid what a counterparty is paid and not one dollar of it will come through the tin.”
“And Roan.”
“Is your husband,” Deacon says, “and that is not this table’s business and I have told them so, and I will keep telling them so until somebody makes it an item.”
He turns to go and then stops.
“Marisol.”
“Marcus.”
“I have not slept,” he says. “In case you were wondering whether I found any of that easy.”
I move back into Unit 3 at the Verdigris that afternoon.
My mother does not say anything about it.
She takes the key off the board and puts it on the counter and says the toilet in that one runs and I say I know, and that is the whole conversation, and then she goes and stands in the office with her back to me for a minute holding the edge of the counter.
That night she cooks and I eat it.
And then April, which is the part nobody would put in a book.
Because what actually happens is six weeks of nothing.
I get up in Unit 3 and I make coffee in a machine that takes eleven minutes and I take calls on a phone that four people have got, and Ferrell wants to know about a thing in Rock Springs, and Boyer wants to know if I am dead, and Sipe wants a thing in May that I say no to because May is stupid.
I work. That is what I do in April. I sit at a table in a motel room I first slept in when I was nine years old and I run a corridor in another state on a phone, and about every third day a man on a bike comes up the 379 and parks by the ice machine.
He comes eleven times.
I am not saying that for effect. I counted, and I know exactly why I counted, and I know exactly what number I was counting toward, and I have never once told him that.
“No,” I say, in the doorway, the first time.
“I have not asked you anything.”
“You have driven a hundred and ten miles to a door.”
“I have,” he says. “Alright.”
And he goes.
The fourth time he brings a swamp cooler pad, because he has been on the roof, because my mother let him up there and did not tell me, and I stand in the doorway and look at a man holding a filter in both hands like a boy at a recital.
“That is not going to work,” I say.
“It is the right size.”
“Roan.”
“I know it is not going to work,” he says. “I was on the roof anyway.”
“Why were you on the roof.”
“Because Curtis is not,” he says, and puts the pad down against the wall and goes.
The seventh time he tells me the corridor is at fifty-eight percent and that Hollis has stopped saying the number out loud in church because it upsets Junior, and I say why are you telling me that, and he says because it is true, and I shut the door with him still standing there.
I stand on the other side of it with my hand flat on it for about four minutes.
The eleventh time is a Tuesday in the first week of May and it is raining, which happens about twice a year out here and turns the whole lot to soup, and he comes to the door soaked through with his hair flat and says nothing at all.
Just stands there.
And I look at him for about two seconds and I say, “Get in.”
I want to be honest about what that was, because there is a version where I was overcome and there is a version where I was lonely and neither of them is it.
I had been deciding for six weeks. That is what April was. Six weeks of a woman deciding, on her own, on a schedule she set, and then a Tuesday came and I was finished deciding, and it had nothing to do with the rain.
I get a fistful of his shirt and pull him in and kick the door shut behind him and he is already saying my name.
“Do not,” I say.
“Sol.”
“Do not talk.”
“I need to say.”
“You have said everything you have got and it was very good and it did not work,” I say, “so do not talk, because if you talk I will remember all of it.”
He gets both hands in my hair and he is wet through and cold and I get him back against the door hard enough that the number falls off it, and it is not tender for one second of it, at any point, from either of us.
He gets my shirt off over my head. I get his belt open and his hands are shaking and mine are not and I notice that and I like it, and there is a thing that happens in me right there, which is that for the first time in eleven years I am the one who knows what is going to happen next in a room with this man.
I put him on the end of that bed and get over him and I do not let him turn it round.
He tries. He gets a hand round the back of my neck and starts to come up off the bed and I put my palm flat in the middle of his chest and push him back down, and he goes, and he looks up at me and something in his face opens up like a door.
“Stay there,” I say.
“Sol.”
“Stay there.”
He stays there.
It is loud, and I do not put my teeth in his shoulder to keep it down, and I have thought about that since.
Eleven years of doing that in a house with nobody in it for forty miles, and I do not do it, in a motel with six units occupied and my mother two hundred feet away, and I want him to hear all of it and I want to hear all of it and I do not care.
He says my name about four times and the last one is not a word.
And when I finish it is with both hands flat on his chest and my head down and my hair everywhere and him holding my hips like a man holding onto a rail, and it goes through me so hard I make a noise I have never made in my life, and then it is quiet and there is rain on a metal roof.
I get off him and I lie down on my back beside him and we both look at the ceiling.
“Sol,” he says.
“That was not forgiveness.”
He does not say anything for a moment.
“Alright,” he says.
“I want to say it now, and not in the morning, because if I say it in the morning you will have had a whole night to build something out of it.” I am still getting my breath.
“That was not forgiveness and it was not a beginning and it does not mean anything is starting. I wanted it. I have wanted it since about the third week of April and I did not do it, because I was not ready to have a conversation about what it meant, and tonight I decided I did not have to have that conversation, because I am allowed to want a thing.”
“I know.”
“You do not know. You have already got a plan.”
“I have not got a plan.”
“Roan.”
He puts his arm over his eyes.
“I have got about four,” he says.
“There it is.”
“Yeah.”
“Bin all of them,” I say.
We lie there a while. The rain gets harder and then stops the way it does, all at once, like somebody turning off a tap.
“Can I ask you something,” he says.
“Go on.”
“In there. When you.” He stops. “You made me stay down.”
“I did.”
“Why.”
And I lie in the dark in Unit 3 with my arm against my husband’s arm and I decide to give it to him, because he has asked me a question, which is twice now in six weeks, which is twice in six years.
“Because for eleven years you have been the one who knows what happens next,” I say.
He does not say anything.
“Every single time,” I say. “In this bed, in that house, in the truck, in a bar room with your hand on my back. You always know what is coming and I always find out when it gets there. And tonight I wanted to be the one who knew, and I got it, and I am not going to apologize for it.”
“I am not asking you to.”
“I know. I am telling you anyway.”
He takes his arm off his eyes.
“Sol, what did you want,” he says. “For six years. You said in the office that if you told me the words I would just say the words, and you were right, and I have thought about that every day since. But I am asking you now anyway, because I have got nothing. I have sat on a road at three in the morning about forty times since March and I have got nothing.”
I look at the ceiling.
“You know what I want you to say,” I say. “You think it is that I wanted you to come home and tell me about church.”
“Yes.”
“It is not.”
“Then what.”
“Roan, I did not want to be told,” I say. “I have never wanted to be told. Being told is what you do to a person after.”
I turn my head and look at him.
“I wanted you to bring me something you had not decided yet.”
He does not move.
“That is it,” I say. “That is the whole thing. Six years. One time. One night, you come in that door and you sit down and you say, Sol, there is a young deputy sniffing round the Junction and I do not know whether to slow the corridor down or feed him the Nevill brothers, and what do you think.”
“You would have said feed him the Nevills.”
“I would have said feed him the Nevills,” I say, “and I would have said do it in two weeks and not one, because Junior cannot keep his mouth shut inside a fortnight, and you would have said that is right, and then it would have been ours.”
“Sol.”
“And it would not have mattered whether I was right,” I say.
“That is the part you are about to get wrong in your head, so I am going to head you off. I am not saying I would have been useful. I am saying I would have been in it. There is a difference between a woman who gets told what was decided and a woman who was in the room while it was still a question, and one of those is a wife and the other one is furniture that gets updated.”
He is completely still beside me.
“Eleven years,” I say, “and you brought me four hundred decisions and not one question. Not one. And you did it kindly every single time, and every time you did it you took a little more of me out of the house.”
“I thought,” he says, and stops.
“Go on.”
“I thought the choice was whether to tell you,” he says.
His voice has gone somewhere. “That is what I have been doing on that road for two months. I have been going over it thinking, why did I not just say it, there was nothing in it, I could have said any of it. That is the whole argument I have been having with myself since September.”
“I know.”
“And I could not work out why I did not, because there was no reason.”
“There was no reason,” I say, “because you were answering the wrong question. It was never whether to tell me. It was whether I was a person you decide things with.”
He lies there.
“And I never once,” he says.
“No.”
“Not once in eleven years.”
“Not once,” I say.
And I watch it land. That is the thing I will remember about that night more than any of the rest of it, more than the rain, more than what happened before.
I lie on my side in a motel bed and watch a forty-one-year-old man understand something for the first time, and it goes across his face like weather, and his mouth opens slightly and nothing comes out of it.
“I did not know that was available,” he says.
“No,” I say. “You did not.”