Epilogue
Sol
The door still seals. That is the thing I notice every single time, eighteen months in, and I have stopped expecting to stop noticing it.
Hollis shuts it and the bar room goes away.
“April the ninth,” I say. “Eight in the morning. Six present.”
There are two books on this table now. The old one and the other one, and I have got the other one, because when Wendell went the minutes went to Hollis and the corridor book went to nobody for four months and sat in a safe getting out of date, and in June of last year Deacon said, at this table, before he was gone, that a book nobody keeps is worse than no book.
So it is mine.
Forty-one pages in Wendell Cobb’s handwriting and about ninety in mine, and I have not taken his out.
That was a vote and it went five to one and I moved it myself, and the argument I made was that a man who was right for five years is not made wrong by what he did about it, and Junior voted against me and still would.
His hand is on pages one through forty-one. Mine starts halfway down forty-one, in the middle of an entry about a scale at Ivanhoe, because I was not going to waste half a page being ceremonial about it.
“Right,” I say. “Merle Dowdy.”
“He has retired,” Hollis says.
“He has not retired, his daughter has retired him.”
“Same outcome.”
“It is not the same outcome at all, because a man who retires stops sending invoices and a daughter who retires her father goes through nine years of invoices,” I say. “Has anybody spoken to her.”
“I have,” Roan says.
Everybody looks at him.
“I went up on Tuesday,” he says. “Her name is Charlene and she has known since about 2019 and she has never said a word to anybody, and she wants the work. She wants it in her name and she wants it done properly with a contract and she wants paying by transfer.”
“That is a paper trail,” Torch says.
“It is a paving contract with a salvage company,” Hollis says slowly. “That is not a paper trail. That is a normal thing that a normal business does and we have spent nine years paying cash to avoid it and I have never once understood why.”
“Because my father did it that way,” Roan says.
“Well,” Hollis says.
“Put it in,” I say, and write it, and read it back out loud, and Wade says one word about the schedule and I change it and read it again.
That is what church actually is, and nobody who is not in it would believe how boring it is. It is two hours of a scale and a paving contract and a man in Reno whose fee has gone up again, and about eleven minutes at the end where something happens that matters.
I have got a chair.
That is the part I want to put down plainly, because I have thought about how to say it for a long time and everything I come up with sounds like a speech.
Nobody made a speech. That is the whole point.
In November of last year there was a vote on whether the corridor counterparty holds a seat, and it went four to one, and Hollis wrote it in the minutes in one line, and the following Tuesday I came in and there was a chair at the table between Hollis and Wade and nobody said anything about it and nobody has said anything about it since.
That is the thing men never understand about being counted. It is not the ceremony. It is that on the four hundredth Tuesday nobody looks up when you sit down.
I do not wear a patch. There is no patch for what I am and I do not want one, and when Junior raised it in January I said no before anybody else could, because the second there is a patch for it, it becomes a thing that can be taken off.
Two months ago a man from a club in Arizona sat in that chair I am sitting in now, as a guest, and worked out what I was about halfway through and could not keep his face still about it.
Roan did not say anything. He let it sit for about four seconds, and then Wade, who is thirty-two and has been sergeant at arms for nine months and does not know how to do it yet, said, “That is the corridor, and if you have got a question about the east side you ask her, not him.”
And I have thought about that more than I have thought about the vote.
“Anything else,” I say, at ten past ten.
“One,” Hollis says. “Ada.”
The room stops the way it does.
“She is seventy-nine,” he says. “She fell in February and she has not said anything about it and the pumps have been shut two days in six weeks, and I have got a proposal and I would like to say it out loud.”
“Say it,” Roan says.
“We buy the station,” Hollis says. “Properly, at a fair number, with a lawyer, and she stays in that house for the rest of her life and she does not work one more day if she does not want to and we do not tell her it is charity because she would rather die.”
“She will say no,” Torch says.
“She will say no to me,” Hollis says. “She will say no to Roan.”
Everybody looks at me.
“She will say no to me as well,” I say. “She will say no to anybody who goes out there with a proposal in a folder. So nobody is going out there with a folder. I will go out on Sunday and I will sit on that apron with her for about three hours and I will not mention it, and then I will mention it the following Sunday, and it will take about five weeks.”
“Five weeks,” Junior says.
“Junior, that woman has watched every vehicle on this road for thirty-four years and never taken one dollar,” I say. “It is going to take five weeks.”
“Vote it,” Hollis says.
Six hands.
“Doors,” I say, because it is my church to close this week, and Torch opens the door and the bar room comes back.
He is outside.
Not in the bar room. Out in the yard, sitting on the wall of the north bay with two coffees, and he has been there for about forty minutes because church ran over, and he has not once come to the door and put his head round it.
That took about a year.
The first six months he used to wait in the bar room, and then he stopped, because I said one thing about it in a truck in the winter and he heard it.
The thing I said was that if he is standing in the bar room when that door opens, then every man coming out of church has seen the president waiting for his wife, and if he is out in the yard, they have just seen a man with two coffees.
He hands me one. It is terrible. Junior has made it.
“Long one,” he says.
“Two hours on a paving contract.”
“Charlene.”
“Charlene is going to be more trouble than Merle and worth about four times as much,” I say. “She has got a bookkeeper’s mind and she has been waiting nine years to be asked.”
“That is what I thought.”
“I know it is what you thought,” I say. “You went up there on Tuesday and you did not tell me until you told the table.”
He looks at me.
“Yes,” he says. “I did do that.”
“Why.”
“Because I wanted to bring something in,” he says.
“And about an hour into the drive back I worked out that I had gone up there on my own and then walked it into a room, and that is exactly the thing, and I have been sat on this wall for forty minutes trying to work out whether to say it before you did.”
“You did not say it before I did.”
“No,” he says. “I did not.”
We sit on the wall.
That is where we are, eighteen months on, and I am not going to pretend it is finished.
He is at the house. I am at the Verdigris, in Unit 3, which my mother now refers to as the office, and about four nights out of seven one of us is at the other one’s and about three nights we are not, and there is no plan for that.
There has been no conversation about a plan for that.
He has stopped asking. That is the actual progress.
The dogs come across the yard and put their heads under my hand.
And this is the part I have never said to him and I am not going to.
There was a girl who worked a bar at the Verdigris Motel from the age of fourteen, in a place with a hole in the mirror and a sign about colors gone the color of tea, and by the time she was seventeen she knew every rule that book has got in it and could have recited them cold.
She knew what the second Sunday of the month meant.
She knew what it meant when a man came in and sat with his back to the wall and did not take his jacket off.
She could tell you which two of the men at the corner table would still be alive in ten years and she was right about both of them.
And in twenty-two years, not one person in this entire valley ever once thought to count her.
Not out of cruelty. That is what I have had to make my peace with, and it took the whole of last year and I am not sure I am done.
Nobody decided it. There was no vote. There is not a man alive on this road who sat down and worked out that Marisol should not be counted, and if you had put it to any of them in a bar in 1999 they would have laughed at you and said of course she counts, and meant it, and then gone back to talking over the top of her.
It cost twelve crates and six months in another state and two men in the ground before there was a chair.
I do not think that was worth it. I want that written down somewhere, since I am the one who keeps the book now.
There is a version of this that people in Ivanhoe will tell in about twenty years where a woman went east and came back and took a seat, and it will be a good story, and every one of them will leave out Curtis Nakagawa on a road in December and a boy of nineteen in a lake bed and a man in Las Vegas who cannot hold a wrench.
I would give the chair back to have Curtis fixing my mother’s roof.
But nobody is offering that trade, and there is no version of it available, and so I sit on a wall in the sun with a coffee that is a war crime, thirty-eight years old, with a book in my truck in two people’s handwriting and a clause with my name in it and a chair that nobody has to explain.
“What,” Roan says.
“Nothing.”
“You have got a face on.”
“I have got a face because Junior made this coffee,” I say.
He laughs. The dogs go off after something. Out past the yard the road runs three miles straight to the 379 and then two hundred and forty miles between the Line and the Junction, north to south, with a canyon in the middle of it and one way through.
“Ada,” I say.
“What about her.”
“Sunday,” I say. “I am going out there, and I am going to sit on that apron for three hours and not say anything, and I want you to come.”
He turns his head.
“And say nothing,” I say. “I mean it. You are going to sit there and drink a coffee and let two women not talk about a thing for three hours, and it is going to be the most useful thing you do this month.”
“Alright,” he says.
And that is it. That is the whole of it, and it is not a wedding and it is not a house with a light on over the sink, and if somebody had told me on the ninth of September that this was where it ended I would have thrown something at them.
He finishes his coffee. He does not ask me what we talked about in there for two hours, because he was in the room, because he is at that table and so am I, and there is nothing left in this club that he knows and I do not.
That is the marriage. Whatever else it turns into.
The End