Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The phone calls had gotten shorter.
Stephen turned that over while he restrung the north fence, the wire biting through the worn place in his glove.
A week ago Elise would talk till her battery warned her.
She’d read him the ridiculous parts of Robert’s calendar and laugh at her own running commentary, and he’d lean against the porch post in the dark and let her voice do the work of company.
Last night she’d begged off before he’d gotten his boots untied.
He’d taken to leaving his phone face-up on the workbench through supper, so he’d catch it the second it lit. It hadn’t lit much.
He set the stretcher and pulled the line taut.
Work. That had to be the whole of it. Robert was chasing the Abilene buyer, and when Robert chased a buyer the whole office ran through Elise. She was tired. A person went quiet when they were tired. He’d lived it himself, the kind of season where a body had nothing left over for talk.
The other answer sat at the edge of his thinking, patient, and he wouldn’t pick it up. A man could ruin good ground digging where there was no call to dig.
He’d meant to walk her through the rear of the old house this week, where the new pantry would go, the mud porch, the room he’d raise before any other when the weather turned. That thought he’d carried around all week, warm as a banked coal. He left it where it was now.
So he gave the trouble the name that let him sleep. Just a hard stretch of work.
She came out to Bolton on Thursday.
He had the lead rope in his hands, coiling out a knot some hand had left on the rail by the office, when her little car came up the drive and parked crooked the way she always parked when she was in a hurry. His hands went quiet on the rope.
For a breath, gladness moved through him plain and simple, the way it had every time that crooked little car turned in at his gate.
She didn’t head his way. Up the office steps she went, a folder pinned to her hip, looking for Annie.
It landed wrong, and he stood with the wrongness a moment.
If he’d been out at the east line where he’d meant to spend the morning, she’d have come and gone and he’d have been none the wiser.
She hadn’t come out to find him. She’d run the catering invoices over for Annie, and he happened to be standing where her path ran.
He set the rope on the rail and went to meet her anyway. A man didn’t let the woman he was courting pass by without a word, even when the word came hard.
“Didn’t figure you for the Bolton run today,” he said.
She turned. For half a breath her face opened, the way it used to, and then it smoothed over into something careful.
“Last minute.” She shifted the folder. “Annie wanted the catering numbers before the weekend.”
“She’s inside. Went in right after breakfast.”
“Good.” Elise’s glance went to the office door, not to him.
That small slide of her eyes did more damage than anything she’d said.
A week ago she’d have crossed the whole yard to him, paperwork or no, and stood close enough that he’d have caught the soap-and-coffee smell of her. He counted the feet of open dirt between them now and made himself stand easy in it.
Stephen hunted for the easy ground. It had come natural enough at the pond, on the tailgate, over the coffee she gave him grief about doctoring with cream.
Now his own yard turned strange under his boots, and he stood the way a green hand stood his first morning on a new outfit, hat in his hands and no notion what to do with them.
“How’s the north fence holding?” she asked.
“Holding fine.”
He had more than that. The whole story of young Wes stapling his own shirt cuff to a post and not catching it till he went to walk off sat right there, ready.
It would have made her laugh once. He turned it over and couldn’t work it loose, and the quiet stretched out between them with nothing in it.
They traded a few thin lines. Whether the heat might break by Sunday. The price of feed corn, of all the fool things. Talk a man might make with a vendor, or with a stranger waiting on the same order down at the feed store. Nothing that touched the ground they’d stood on together.
He reached for the lightness that used to come free. “Annie’s had me on barbecue cleanup so long I’m fixing to bill her for hazard pay.”
It dropped flat between them. The corner of her mouth moved, polite, the curve a person gives a clerk who’s counting out change. Not the laugh, nowhere near it.
“I’d best get these to her,” she said. “I’ve got payroll sitting on my desk.”
“Sure.” His voice held level. Years of practice held it level.
She climbed the step, then paused and looked back, and for one foolish breath he let himself hope.
“It was nice to see you, Stephen.”
Nice to see you.
That was the thing a person said to a man they’d run into outside the grocery store. Or to the fellow who’d put a new transmission in their truck. Not to the one who’d held your hand on a pond bank and shown you the only patch of Earth that ever meant a thing to him.
He’d driven her out to Earl’s land and let her sit in Earl’s mended chair under the live oak. And she stood on Annie’s steps with a folder against her hip and handed him the same light words, that it had been nice.
The question came up in him whole.
Are we through, Elise?
Four words. He could set them in the open air and have his answer, clean, the way a man would rather have it out that a post was rotten than keep leaning on it.
His mouth stayed shut.
He’d never been a man who asked. Asking put the answer in another person’s hand to do with as they pleased, and the quiet had always sat easier on him than that kind of risk. Earl never pried at a thing, and Earl had come out fine. A door left shut couldn’t be slammed in your face.
So he touched his hat brim and stepped back to give her room to go.
“Tell Annie I said hey,” he got out.
She nodded and went inside. The office door clapped shut behind her, and the sound of it carried clear across the yard to where he stood.
Stephen looked at that closed door a long moment.
The rope went around his arm, loop over loop, the motion older than thought.
His grandfather had taught him that a man kept his hands moving when his head got loud.
Earl had put his wife in the ground, and a few years on his son and the boy’s wife both, and never let the place slide over it.
What would mend, you mended, and the rest you left to weather.
But Earl had taught him the other thing too, even if the old man never said it plain. A fence, a body could mend in silence. People were a different animal. And Stephen had no other language for the trouble, only the quiet, and the quiet was the very thing carrying her off.
Then he took up the rope and coiled it down to the end, and kept his eyes off the office.