Chapter 8
eight
ZACH
Dan got me alone after breakfast, which he’d been angling to do since the day we arrived.
“Walk with me.”
“I’ve got calls, man.”
“You’ve got calls after you walk with me.”
So we went out to the end of the deck where the ground drops away. He leaned on the rail and looked at my mountain and said nothing for a while, because Dan Lemont has never once said a thing before he was ready to say it.
“The other thing.”
“Dan, we really don’t have to right this moment.”
“Zachary. Your grandmother signs at the end of the week. There’s a page in that folder with a blank on it, the blank has a job title above it, and I’d like us to stop pretending we aren’t going to fill it.”
The new structure has a design lead in it. An actual one, with a line on the chart and a budget and a seat at the table when we buy something.
We’ve never had that. We had my grandmother’s taste, and then my grandmother’s taste plus a firm out of Denver, and for the last couple of years we’ve had my wife doing every bit of it out of the back of her car for free.
Dan wanted his daughter in the seat.
He didn’t put it like that. He said the Lemont stake has been passive since his father’s day and he isn’t going to be alive forever.
He said it would mean something to him to see a Lemont doing work in this company instead of collecting off it.
He said Shayna ran a gallery for four years and ran it well, and not one person in her family has ever treated that as a job.
That part got me. I’d been thinking about it since the logging track.
“She’s qualified,” Dan said. “Ask anybody who isn’t related to her.”
“I know she is.”
“Then say yes and let me sign my paper.”
I stood there looking at the run of the hill, taking it apart in front of myself the way I do, checking every piece.
The stake came first in my head, because it always does. Dan signs, the structure closes, my grandmother gets to hand this thing over with everything tidy, which is the only favor she has asked me for since my grandfather died.
Then Shayna. She is good at it. That isn’t me being generous about an old girlfriend. She walked onto my hill and clocked the flooding on the east border before my grounds crew did.
And then the third one, which is the one I’d hand over to somebody smarter if I could.
I thought it would help my wife.
Lydia has been asking me to formalize her position for two years.
A contract, a title, something with her name on it somewhere in that company.
And every time I’ve gone at it head-on she’s pulled back.
She doesn’t want it handed to her. She doesn’t want my grandmother thinking she asked.
She told me once that if I made her a director in front of that family, every person in the room would know I’d done it because she’s my wife.
So it sat on a list for two years, and I let it sit, because every time I picked it up she asked me to put it down.
And I stood on that deck and thought: if the design lead is somebody else, then Lydia isn’t the wife with no title anymore. She’s the one who actually does the work, next to somebody who holds the seat, and nobody in that family gets to look at her sideways about any of it ever again.
I thought I was taking the politics off her.
I even got as far as picturing it. The two of them out at a property with a tape measure and a bad coffee. Shayna handling the family, Lydia handling everything that actually matters, and my wife coming home lit up the way she gets after a good day.
They’d been getting on all week. I’d watched them. Sitting on the floor of the bar together with their heads down over a joint in the wood.
“All right,” I said. “Do it.”
Dan shook my hand on the deck of my building and went inside to tell his wife.
And I stood out there feeling like a man who’d solved something before the breakfast plates were cleared.
I did think about telling Lydia. I thought about it standing right there with my hand still warm from Dan’s.
And then I thought, not this week.
Not with the signing coming and the house full and my grandmother going at every meal. Not while my wife is already up and down about Shayna being here. I’d tell her on the drive home, with the mountain behind us and nobody else in the car. I’d lay it out the way it deserved, and she’d see it.
A week. That was all I was giving it.
Shayna found me in the still room off the kitchen where the good glasses live, which is not a room anybody finds you in by accident.
“Dad told me.”
“He’s quick.”
“He’s been quick since about March.” She had her arms folded, and she wasn’t doing the bright thing she does. “Did you say yes because I’m good at it, or because he asked?”
“Because you’re good at it.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“Because you’re good at it,” I said. “And also because your father is a bully.”
She laughed. Then she stopped laughing, and the room went somewhere I didn’t care for. The tension was an old kind of familiar.
“I’m going to say something maybe a little out of order.”
“You really don’t have to.”
“It’s not that.” She pushed her hair back off her face. “I’m going to be around. Actually around, all the time, in the building. And I don’t want it to be strange, and it’s going to be strange, because you and I never once had a conversation about it.”
“There’s nothing to have a conversation about.”
“You text me on my birthday.”
I found myself already formulating my quick replies to whatever was ahead, but my mouth didn’t want to work. It was like my face had just frozen and I was forced to listen to her.
“Every year,” she said. “Four years. You sent flowers when my granddad died. We had lunch in Denver in the spring. And none of that is anything, I know that, I’m not sitting here building a case out of it.”
“Then why are we?—”
“Because you’ve never said the words to me. You never told me it was like really, truly over.” She said it plainly, without any heat in it at all, which was worse. “Not once. And I’ve never asked you to. And now I’m going to be in your meetings every week for the rest of my life.”
I could have done it right there.
It’s a short thing to say. It’s over, it’s been over since Jackson, I should have said it out loud years ago and I could’ve done it.
Ten seconds. My wife has been circling a version of that question since the night we got here.
I could have walked out of that room and gone and told her I’d finally answered it.
What I did was reach past her and pick two glasses off the shelf.
“You’re going to be great at this,” I said. “Come on. Gran wants us for the photographs.”
Shayna looked at me a second longer than she needed to.
Then she smiled, and said, “Right,” and followed me out.
Petey got us all lined up on the steps with the light going. My grandmother put Shayna on her left because she’s known her since she was seven, and me on her right, and Lydia next to me with Simon on the end pulling a face.
I put the glasses on the table in the great room. I went and stood beside my wife for the photographs with my hand flat on her back, and she leaned into it the way she always does.
And I didn’t tell her about the deck.
I didn’t tell her about what wasn’t said to Shayna, either.