Chapter 15
fifteen
ZACH
I finished the walk-through.
My wife drove off that mountain with a bag in the back of my grandmother’s car, and I stood on the slope for the rest of the afternoon going over drainage with Dan Lemont.
I could say I don’t know why, but I know exactly why. Because she asked for the house to herself and I am a man who does what he’s asked. Because Dan was standing right there with his boots in the mud, and because if I had got in a truck and gone after her, that would have looked even worse.
It made more sense for me to stay. I stood in the wind agreeing about culverts, and the whole time I was writing the version where I had this fixed by the end of the week.
Gran got me in the hall on my way through.
“Where’s Lydia?”
“She went back home.”
“Why?”
“She’s tired, Gran.”
And my grandmother arranged her posture in a way that was downright scary.
“Zachary. What have you done?”
I froze. “Nothing.”
“You shouldn’t lie to me because you know I’ll know when you do,” she said, and went off down the hall carrying a vase.
I hadn’t lied though. I rubbed at my chin for a moment, replaying the whole scene when Lydia left. She was tired, she was cranky, and she was still fretting over me texting Shayna a happy birthday. Was I missing something?
I called Lydia from the deck.
“Hi.”
“You get down all right?”
She made a soft, distracted noise. “I did. The roads were clear.”
“Hey, listen?—”
“I’m going to go to bed early. There’s a lot to do here.”
“Is there?”
“There’s always a lot to do here, Zach.”
And she said goodnight, quietly. She was tired, clearly.
Shayna came out onto the deck while I was standing there not calling her back.
“She’s gone, then?”
“Yeah, for a couple of days.”
“Zach.”
And then she told me. Straight out, holding her elbows in the cold, shivering to herself.
“She asked me in the great room this morning. Early, before anybody was up. She wanted to know what I meant in the car, and I told her the truth. She deserves it.”
The road heading out was looking longer and darker by the minute. “What are you talking about? What truth?”
“That I’m not going to pretend I don’t want you.”
I put my hands on the rail, her words like a shotgun going off somewhere in the woods. “You said that to my wife.”
“She asked me.”
“Christ, Shayna! No wonder she’s been the way she’s been!”
“Oh no, you don’t.” It came out hard. “Don’t you stand there and be shocked at me like it’s some huge surprise.”
“You have been in my grandmother’s house all week, being nice to her.”
“I have been nice to her because I actually like her.” Not a wobble in it anywhere. “Both of those things are true at the same time. You should know the truth, too, but she deserved to hear it from me.”
“I ended it, though.”
“Us? This?” She gestured between us. “When?”
And I opened my mouth to tell her when. I went looking back through years for a day. A room. A speech… something I could hand her.
There wasn’t one. I wanted to slam my fist into the wall.
There was a car in Jackson. There was me putting a bag in the back of it. There was me driving out and not calling, and that being, as far as I was ever concerned, an entire conversation between two adults.
“I got in the car,” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded slowly. “You’d done exactly that every other time. And every other time you came back. So I sat down and I waited, because that’s how the two of us worked.”
“Shayna—”
“And then you texted me on my birthday. And the next year. And the one after that.” She wasn’t crying. She was furious. “What was I supposed to think?”
“It was two words.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s what makes it cruel, Zach.”
I stood there with my hands on the rail of a deck in a place my grandfather bought with a napkin, and I could not think of one thing to say to that.
“But I never touched you,” I said lamely, miles too late.
“Don’t I know it?” There was a harsh laugh that made the hair on the back of my neck stand. “You never did anything at all. That is what I am telling you. You had me, you held me, you pushed me away and then ignored me like none of it happened. And then she happened.”
She went to the door and stopped with her hand on it.
“I’d have left here if you’d asked me. I told your wife that. I told her to ask you to ask me to leave.” She looked back. “Maybe it was cruel of me, but I told her I knew you wouldn’t.”
I sat in the truck a while with the heater going and called Romina.
“Draw up a role for Lydia. Head of interiors, sourcing, whatever it needs to be called. With a title, contract, and a real number. I want it on paper tonight.”
The pause went on long enough that I took the phone off my ear and looked at it.
“Zach. Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“Am I?” I brought the phone back up to my ear.
“I’d say so. I had that contract drafted in the spring. You asked me for it in April. Then you told me to hold onto it.”
“Hold it why?”
“You said she wouldn’t take it because she’d hate how it looked.” Another pause. “And then Dan asked about Shayna in June, and you never mentioned it again.”
The muscles in my jaw ticked. I sat in a truck with the fan on full and let a woman who has worked for my family since I was in high school explain my own marriage to me down a phone.
“Please send it to me.”
“I will.” And then, “I don’t think it was about the contract.”
“Why do you say that?”
There was a soft sigh on her end. “Because she never wanted a contract,” Romina said. “She just wanted you to think she was worth one.”
I drove down that mountain in the dark.
I’ve driven that road since I was old enough to be trusted with it and I have never once done it in silence, but this time I did. Past the cattle gates, around the bend, and I looked over at the empty seat and kept both hands on the wheel.
It took less time than usual to get home, like I’d blinked and was suddenly there.
The house was dark when I pulled up. She’d left the porch light on for me.
There was a plate in the fridge with a cloth over it. Chicken, and the potatoes she does with the lemon. Nothing written on it. Nothing needed to be.
I ate it standing at the counter with my coat still on because I didn’t have it in me to sit at the table.
Then I went through the downstairs turning lamps off, watching each room vanish into the dark one by one. I took a good look at them.
The table in the hall came out of a school in Pueblo.
The mirror above it was in pieces in the back of her car for the better part of a year.
The lamp I put my keys down under, she rewired herself at the kitchen table off a diagram on her phone, and I remember walking past her while she was doing it and asking what we were having for dinner.
Every room. Every single room in that house is my wife, and I’d never thought to give her the credit for it all.
Then I went up.
Our door was locked.
I stood in the hall with my hand flat on it. There’s no key to that door. It has one of those little turn buttons in the middle of the handle, the cheap kind, the kind she’d have swapped out years ago if she had ever once imagined needing it.
“Lydia.”
Nothing.
“Baby. I’m home.”
Nothing.
So I sat down on the floor outside my own bedroom with my back against the wall. I got my phone out. I went all the way back through a thread with Shayna Lemont’s name on it, and I read every single thing I have ever sent her.
There was hardly anything there. Four years of my wife going quiet about this woman, and there was almost nothing in it at all.