Chapter 19
nineteen
ZACH
My wife sang all the way up that mountain.
She doesn’t. She never has. She found something out of Grand Junction that I would have told you she hated and she did the whole performance, the drumming on the door, the pointing at me on the chorus, the wounded look when I didn’t come in.
I came in eventually. She knows I will.
Somewhere past the second cattle gate she reached over without looking and put her hand flat on my knee. She left it there for the rest of the climb, and I drove the last stretch of that road trying not to make anything of it.
Simon Gold got me in the mudroom before I had my coat off.
“A word.”
“Simon.”
“No, sir. My turn.” He had a dish towel over his shoulder and he was as white as I have ever seen a man get. “She stood in the mudroom at your grandmother’s house and told me what Shayna said to her in the car, and I told her she was building a case out of nothing.”
“That’s on me. Not you.”
“It is on both of us and I’m not splitting it evenly with you tonight.
” He got the towel off his shoulder and did something violent with it.
“I have been that woman’s person since before she ever laid eyes on you.
And I spent that entire week steaming a coat for the other one.
Like an absolutely terrible friend—which I am not.
I am a good friend to her and this made me look otherwise. ”
There was nothing I could say to that which wouldn’t have made it about me.
“You get one more,” Simon said. “One. And I don’t care whose name is on the building.”
“Understood.”
“Good.” He put the towel back on his shoulder. “She’s in the great room and she’s talking to the dog.”
There were more people at Snowden Ridge than my grandmother had said there would be, which is standard.
Dan came. He shook my hand at the door the way you shake hands with a supplier, and he did not once let it get warmer than that all night, and he never went near my wife, which I understood to be the closest thing to an apology I was going to get out of him.
Petey had brought somebody. Romina drove up from Denver with a folder and put it in the truck without opening it. Jill Lemont held everybody’s hands.
My grandmother put Lydia at the top of the table, in the chair with the arms, which is her chair and has been for forty years.
Nobody said anything about it. Everybody saw it.
And then, before anybody had a fork in their hand, Magda stood up.
“I want to say one thing and then I want you all to eat before it goes cold.” She had her glasses in her hand.
“I have said a certain name at this table a great many times over the last few years, and I have said it out of context. Lydia, dear.” She looked down the table at my wife.
“You have been such a wonderful blessing for our family, but most importantly, to Zachary.”
Lydia opened her mouth.
“Magda—”
“Eat,” my grandmother said, and sat down.
I got through most of the dinner before I did it.
I picked up a glass and hit it with the flat of a knife, which is a thing I have watched Dan Lemont do at every dinner I have ever sat through, and which I have always thought was ridiculous.
“Come here,” I said. “All of you. Come on over.”
A room full of people put their drinks down and came over and stood in a half circle around me this time.
“I’m not good at this,” I said. “I’m good at talking for an hour and none of you remember a word of it afterward. So I’m going to do this badly and short.”
Lydia had gone very still by the fireplace.
“Everything you are standing in, my wife found.”
Somebody laughed, because they thought that was the joke and the rest was coming.
“The floor came out of a gymnasium in Pueblo. The lights over the bar were in a barn outside Craig with pigeons living in them. That table all of you have had your elbows on since you got here, she drove to Cheyenne for twice, in February, on her own, because I was busy.” I had to stop for a second.
“Every stick of this building is Lydia. Not one of you knows that, and the reason not one of you knows it is that I have never once said it.”
The room had gone quiet in the particular way a room goes when people would rather it hadn’t.
“At the signing I stood right there and told all of you my wife was tired.”
Nobody moved.
“She wasn’t tired. She was right. She wanted that job, and I have been calling it something else. You took my word for it, because I’m the one who talks your ear off and she’s the one who stands by the door.”
I looked at her then. I made myself do it in front of everybody instead of after.
“She’s the best thing in this family. She’s the only one of us who has ever actually made anything.”
I ran out of steam and stood there with a glass in my hand and nothing left in my head.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s all I’ve got. Now somebody eat something.”
And my wife, who hasn’t voluntarily said a word in front of more than four people in the whole time I have known her, put her glass down on the mantel.
“The pigeons were the worst part,” she piped up.
Everyone in the room burst into laughter, and there was a moment where her smile warmed her face.
She stood in the middle of that room with her chin up, smiling, and let a house full of people look at her. She did not go and find a wall to put her back against.
Jill got to her first. Then Petey. Then Romina, who said something short into her ear that made her laugh and put a hand over her mouth.
Simon stayed where he was by the door with his arms folded, watching me, and when I looked over he raised his glass about an inch and drank out of it without smiling.
Romina left before the coffee came out. She stopped by my chair on her way past and said, “Whatever your wife decides to do next, I’d take that call.” Then she went out and drove back to Denver in the dark rather than stay and say any more about it.
My grandmother took my hand under the table when I sat back down and squeezed it once and let go, which from her is a parade.
Dan left early. He said goodbye to everybody except me and I let him, because he’s owed one, I guess.
We drove down late with the heater going.
“Do it again at Christmas,” she said, somewhere past the reservoir.
“Do what again?”
“You know what.”
“It was a terrible speech, Lyd. I told a room full of people to eat something.”
“You did,” she agreed, and put her feet up on my dash, which she has never once done in her life, and went to sleep before the interstate.
Somebody put a glass of wine in my wife’s hand when we arrived and she was still carrying the same one when we left. I took it off her at the door and finished it on the way out, because there is no sense wasting my grandmother’s good wine.
She’d been on her feet since the morning. That is all I thought about it.