Chapter 6
six
ZACH
My grandmother put her hand on the back of my chair at dinner and told a room full of people that it goes to the boy now. Then she had to sit down, and I had to look at the tablecloth for a second.
Dan started clapping. Petey whistled with two fingers, which my grandmother hates. Somebody’s kid woke up under the table.
My grandfather has been dead eleven years and she still says his lines like she’s quoting somebody who stepped out for a minute.
So I came up those stairs about nine feet tall. That’s where I was starting from, at least.
Lydia was on the end of the bed with her shoes still on and the pearl earrings I bought her for our first anniversary in her fist.
“Romina is a menace,” I said, working at my tie one-handed and losing to it. “She tried to buy the Telluride land off me at a dinner table. In front of Dan.”
“Zach.”
“In front of Dan, Lyds.”
“Zach.”
I stopped.
“What’s up?”
“Did you know she was going to be here?”
I held very still because I was still working over how to answer that question, should she ask it. And here she was, asking it.
“Yeah,” was all I could manage to say.
Now it was her turn to not move. There was a beat, and then, “Okay.”
“Listen, I wanted to?—”
“No, it’s okay. It’s fine,” she cut me off, her lips together in a firm line. She got one shoe off and set it down. “I just wondered.”
There’s a way my wife says fine where it comes out bleeding through everything around it, and it feels like her passing me a grenade, about to pull the pin.
I sat down next to her and put my hand around her ankle, rubbing the pale skin there.
“Jill talked her into it. Dan mentioned it on a call about the paperwork, a week or so back. I said great and forgot about it.” I made myself finish it, which was hard work. “And then I didn’t tell you in the car.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were happy.”
She looked up at me then. Really looked, like it was the first time since I’d come out of the bathroom.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the actual answer. It’s just not a good one.”
And she almost smiled. She nearly gave me it. I watched it move across her face and decide against.
“So, I have another question.”
I braced myself. “Of course.”
“When she came into the room last night, I looked over at you and wouldn’t you know it, you were already watching me. You were waiting to see my reaction,” she said softly.
“I was?—”
“You’d only be checking if you thought there was something to check.”
I didn’t have an answer for that one.
What I could have said was yes. Yes, I was checking, because I knew and I hadn’t told you and I’d been carrying it around all day like a stone in my shoe.
That would have taken about four seconds.
So, I gave her a different answer.
“Baby, me and Shayna have been over for so long that I sometimes forget we were ever really an item. That was all before I met you. Nothing’s gone on between us since.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you’ve got the face on.”
“I don’t have a face on.”
“Oh, you definitely have the face on.” I bumped her knee with mine, going for the laugh, because I can nearly always get the laugh out of her. “She’s Dan’s daughter. She’s been at so many of these things that if I started leaving her off the list, that’s what people would talk about. Not this.”
“I didn’t ask you to leave her off the list.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I asked if you knew she was coming.”
“And I said yes.”
“You only said yes after I asked.”
She got the other shoe off. She set it down beside the first one, very square, which is what Lydia does instead of throwing something.
“Should I have told you beforehand? What’s the difference?”
“There’s a difference,” she said. “You know there is.”
“I’d have had the drive up,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying. I’d have had the drive up to get my face ready, and instead I got it in a room.”
“Lyd—”
“I’m not fighting with you.” She rubbed her eye with the back of her wrist. “I’m telling you what happened to me.”
I went and sat on the arm of the chair by the window, which is where I go when I’d rather be looking at something else, and I gave her the whole history.
It went on longer than it needed to. On and off through our twenties, finishing on the end of a bed in Jackson before I’d ever laid eyes on her. Loud, stupid, exhausting. Two people who were excellent at fighting and better at making up and had nothing much underneath it.
“She’s a family friend,” I said. “Same as Dan’s a family friend. That’s all it is now.”
“Does she think that?”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She pulled her knees up. “Keep going.”
So I kept going. I said in eight days we’d be off this mountain and none of it would have been anything. I said the Lemonts have been at every family thing since before I could drive and if I made it strange now, it would be strange forever.
“Jackson,” she said. “That’s where it ended.”
“That’s where it ended.”
“You never told me the town before.”
I hadn’t. There’d never been a reason to, and there wasn’t one now, and I said it anyway because she asked.
I was gentle about it. I never raised my voice and I didn’t once tell her she was being ridiculous, because she wasn’t. She was being quiet, which with my wife is a different animal altogether.
“Okay,” she said, when I ran out.
“You sure?”
“Okay,” she repeated. She stood and put the pearls in the dish on the dresser. “I’m going to wash my face.”
She stopped at the bathroom door with her hand on the frame.
“Was she surprised?” she asked. “When she saw me.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
I thought I’d taken something off her.
She’d asked, I’d told her the truth, I’d given her every bit of context I had, and she’d said okay and gone to wash her face. Job finished. In my head we were completely fine.
There was a second, while the water was running, where the walk came into my head. Shayna on the logging track asking whether Lydia was all right. Her hand flat between my shoulders above the lodge.
I didn’t bring it up, because it was nothing obviously, but also because bringing it up would have made it something.
I got her book off the nightstand and put it where she’d find it. I turned her lamp down to the setting she likes. Then I got into bed feeling like a man handling his marriage well.
She came out with her face scrubbed pink and got in and put her cold feet on my legs, which she has done every night of this marriage.
“God, woman.”
“You’re warm. That’s your fault.”
“I’m divorcing you over these feet.”
“You won’t. Nobody else would have them.”
She laughed. A real one, the low one she does when she’s tired and stops guarding it.
I got my arm under her and pulled her back into me, and she went, the way she does, all the weight at once.
Then she rolled over and said, “Night, babe,” and I lay there a while feeling all right about myself.
She said one more thing. I nearly missed it, because she said it into the pillow and I was most of the way under.
“You said it was over before you met me.”
I cracked an eye open into the dark. “Mm.”
“Does she know that?”
I made a noise. That’s all it was. The noise you make at somebody asking whether you locked the car.
It’s a good question. It’s a better question than anything I’d said all night, and my wife had been carrying it around since the great room and had waited until the lights were off to put it down.
I didn’t hear a question. I heard my wife worrying, and I’d already fixed that once this evening.
She didn’t say anything back.
And then I went to sleep anyway.