Chapter 32
Twenty-One Days Until the End of the Summer Excavation Season
Ripley dissociates in a pleasant way when she’s in Hercules’s combination feed store and hardware store.
The no-frills industrial vibe reminds her of a research collection: bare steel girding, concrete floors, and plenty of fluorescent light.
Tall racks hold hundred-yard rolls of fencing wire next to improbably large fasteners, chicken feed, and tractor oil.
The whole place is permanently perfumed with bulk fertilizer.
She wouldn’t normally make a weekday run to town, but now that James hounds her out of the canyon whenever she shakes the tingles out of her hands, she might as well volunteer for other chores.
Illogically, James insisted on coming with her. The power drill died, so he’s over in the tool section picking out the new one Griff needs to build the shipping crate for Beast, as the crew immediately named the new fossil.
Earlier in the summer, she might not have been able to trust anyone but herself and Cara and maybe Griff to work on Beast. But with almost three months of experience, Jordin and the twins are ready for the easier elements, freeing up Cara and Griff for the fine work.
Even Matteo is proving useful at brushing.
Everyone rotates in and out, keeping themselves fresh, pushing as hard as they can while staying careful.
It helps that Beast’s bones are folded together, so he’s compact.
What took Ripley nearly three months to do with Beauty by herself can hopefully be done for Beast in a tight four weeks with the whole crew.
Hopefully.
She should be thinking about the excavation right now. Instead, she’s loading twenty-five-pound bags of plaster onto a cart and remembering last night, when she and James lay boneless and sweaty in each other’s arms.
“Six million dollars is a lot of money, you know,” she said.
“I so love your oblique conversation openers. Do go on.” He idly traced patterns on her back: wings, tails, and crested spines.
She raised her head. “I’m ballparking, but say we send Beast to your mysterious donor for cleaning and casting and then auction him at Christie’s for twelve million. Half of that, minus fees and taxes, would be mine. I could buy a lot of tickets to London with six million dollars.”
She knew even before his face changed. She’d studied him so carefully, she could feel his thoughts in the density of the air.
“I won’t tell you not to visit, Ripley. If it were only about me, I would send you all the tickets you needed. But how long could that go on?”
“As long as we need it to.”
He finger-combed her hair away from her forehead. “I’m not saying we won’t find a way. Someday. I care about you more than I ever thought possible.”
He didn’t want them to say I love you. It was the only conviction he hadn’t given up, this idea that not saying the words would prevent the feelings from happening and thus protect them—protect her—from at least some small measure of grief.
“But time won’t wait for some things, Ripley. If you want…children,” he said, an indecipherable note in his voice, “that wouldn’t work if I were in London. A parent who’s more of a bedtime story than a person, who shows up with gifts for the odd weekend—you wouldn’t want that for your family.”
“People do it. Military families do it.”
“A thing can be possible and still be something you wouldn’t want for yourself.”
He was right. She didn’t want to watch her child wait for James the way she’d waited for her mom. James might not want that either.
“This sucks,” she said, her voice thick. A hot tear dripped onto his chest.
“Yes,” he said, brushing her cheek. “And it’s also the best thing that’s ever happened to me or ever will happen to me, no matter where our lives take us. I don’t want to think of you sad after I’m gone. I want you to remember this and feel happy.”
“Will you feel happy?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “I will. Now kiss me some more, my darling. Let’s forget the world for a little while.”
She kissed him, but she didn’t forget.
“That’s a lot of drywall you’re installin’.”
An older white man—a rancher by the look of him, wizened and wiry and a little bowlegged, his hat set back on his head in a mild concession to the indoors—is scrutinizing Ripley curiously.
He’s maybe Geraldine’s age, but it’s hard to tell with a face that’s taken so much weather. Still, he looks kind.
“It’s for fossils,” she says, wincing at the slip. Couldn’t she have said something vague about flipping a house? Also, there are way too many sacks of plaster on her cart. This is why she’s not allowed to go shopping alone.
“Oh, yeah,” the man says. “My grandson does that.”
“Hope he has good luck this summer. Have a good day.” She grabs her cart and wheels the whole teetering business over to the next aisle.
Once she’s sure the rancher has moved on, she pushes it back again and unloads bags until she’s within the weight limit for the Charger’s rear axles.
It was impractical to drive it here, especially because they’ll have to load everything into a jeep when they get back to Yellowtail, but it’s bringing her a lot of pleasure these days.
She shoots James a text from the checkout line: Meet you outside.
She’s arranging bags Tetris-style in the trunk when a man says, “Need some help?”
She smiles, a little embarrassed to have the rancher see how few bags she ended up buying. “No, thanks, I’m—”
It’s not the rancher.
It’s a tall blond man wearing expensively distressed jeans and an elbow-patched tweed jacket, a sardonic expression tugging at one side of his mouth. She used to think that one-sided smile was cool and a little wicked. Now it looks like a baited hook.
“Will,” she says, her tongue stunned and clumsy. “What are you doing here?”
Will’s wearing his hair longer, in a shaggy style that curls around his ears. He’s grown a short skim of a mustache along his full, exaggerated upper lip. A thick class ring adorns his right middle finger, and if a gold-plated fuck-you doesn’t sum up Will Stone, Ripley doesn’t know what would.
“What a coincidence” is the first lie out of his mouth. “I was walking down the street in Hercules, Montana, and bam! There’s Steve Adams’s car at”—he shoulder-checks the sign—“Millar’s Feed-n-Seed. How is your dad, anyway?”
Will doesn’t care about her dad. And whatever he’s doing here, it isn’t a coincidence.
She could text James. He’d come barreling out of the store, possibly in the act of tearing off his shirt to reveal a tight spandex superhero outfit underneath. Except that Will is definitely the kind of asshole who’d grab a woman’s phone while she was calling for backup.
“What do you want, Will?”
In the next row of vehicles, the wiry rancher stops loading sheets of plywood into his F-150.
Will tempers his smile. “I don’t blame you for holding back, Ripley. We both made mistakes. It’s really too bad we fell out of touch.” His impeccably sincere gaslighting reminds her of the bad old days.
“We didn’t fall out of touch, Will. You broke up with me, then tried to take credit for my paper.”
“Hmm, agree to disagree,” he says, grabbing a sack of plaster so she has to either take it from him or let him load it into the car.
“You know what your problem was back then? You had no idea what it’s like to be unlucky.
My projects were good. Better than yours, most of them, but science is a game of chance.
You won; I lost. Meanwhile, my grant money was running out.
Ballard kept hinting that I should consider other careers. ”
She keeps loading bags. “Maybe you should’ve taken the hint,” she says humorlessly.
“Fuck you, Ripley,” he says, but without much venom.
“You weren’t the only one who loved dinosaurs.
I deserved a chance to be a paleontologist. You knew I had a pile of student loans and my parents wouldn’t pay for anything but a business degree.
If Ballard had given me the boot, I would’ve had nothing to fall back on.
I needed that paper. And when I asked you to put my name on it, you said no, so what was I supposed to do? ”
Ripley presses the heel of one hand to her forehead. “Will. I had nothing to fall back on. And the paper wasn’t yours to take.”
“It was my idea, though. You said so in your acknowledgments.”
Done with the other bags, Ripley grabs the one in Will’s hands. He doesn’t let it go.
“I was trying to find my hat, Will. If you recall, you were being a dick about it because we had an intramural softball game with phys ed, and you wanted to get there early so those smug jackasses couldn’t hog the diamond during warmup.
You said, and I quote, ‘If you can’t find your fucking hat, it’s because you’re looking in the wrong place.
Pick another hat and let’s go.’ That’s when I—I—had the idea, it’s true.
But there is no universe in which you mansplaining headgear is the same as you having an original idea about the migratory and evolutionary history of bird ancestors in Pangaea, Will! It wasn’t your idea!”
His expression slides into something cold and greasy. “It was enough of my idea. You wouldn’t have had it without me. You could have taken second author, and everything would have been fine.”
“Oh my God,” she breathes, yanking the sack out of his hands and slamming it into the trunk. In the next row of cars, the rancher looks up from scrolling on his phone—or pretending to scroll?—and sends her a questioning look.
She feels a burst of gratitude for this town. It has its flaws, but it’s full of good people. She nods: I’ve got this for now.
She glares at Will. “Why don’t you tell me what you want so we can wrap up this conversation.”