Chapter 7 #2
The light came up behind the back windows while we were still there. Not sunrise — the hour before it, when the plains go from black to a flat colorless grey and you can see the wire fence posts arriving one at a time out of nothing.
"Hey," he said, at some point. "Look."
I looked.
There was a semi going south on the far side of the median, way out, and its lights came across the grass and swept the inside of the van and were gone, and for about a second and a half we were both lit up like a photograph.
"Somebody just saw us," I said.
"Somebody just saw a hearse with candles in it on the shoulder of I-25 at five in the morning."
"Oh, God."
"That man's telling that story for the rest of his life," Trick said, with enormous satisfaction. "He's going to be eighty. He's going to be telling his grandchildren about the candle hearse."
"He's going to call the police."
"He is not going to call the police, because what would he say?" He propped himself up. "Hello, yes, I'd like to report a romantic funeral?"
"Stop."
"Nine-one-one, what's your emergency, sir — there's a vibe on the interstate—"
"Silas, I will put you out on the shoulder."
He laughed and pulled me back down, and then a while later he said "hey" again, and nodded at the window, and this time he meant the light.
"That's just Wyoming," I said.
"I know."
"It's beige."
"I know," he said, "I'm having a moment, let me have it," and I laughed and put my face in his neck and had the moment with him.
After, we lay in the ruined blanket with the last four candles going and my feet on his shins, and neither of us said anything for a while.
"I need you to know something," I said.
"Okay."
"I'm not promising I'll refuse it."
He went still.
"I know that's what you want to hear, and you'd believe me, and that's exactly why I'm not going to say it." I lifted my head. "I don't know what I'll do in the room. I've never known what I'll do in the room. That's my actual skill, Silas — I don't plan, I arrive."
"So what am I getting."
"You're getting this." I found his hand. "I promise that whatever I do in that room, you'll be standing in it. You'll see it happen. I will never, ever do the thing to you that I did to Pepper, which is decide about you in four seconds and leave through a corridor."
He didn't say anything for a long moment.
"That's smaller than what I asked for," he said.
"Yes."
"It's better," he said.
We lay there a while with the candles going down.
"Can I have one," I said.
"One what?"
"One question you have to answer honestly and you don't get to be funny about it."
"That's a lot of conditions."
"Silas."
"Go ahead."
"If it were the other way around," I said. "If it were yours to take and mine to lose. What would you do?"
He didn't answer for a long time. Long enough that I thought he'd gone to sleep.
"I'd take it," he said.
"You'd—"
"I'd take it and I'd tell you I hadn't," he said, "and I'd run the rest of my life as one very long job, and I'd be good at it, and you'd never know, and I'd tell myself every single day that I did it for you.
" He said it looking straight up at the roof of the van.
"That's who I am. That's the actual answer. That's what fifteen years does."
"That's not—"
"You asked."
"Then why are you telling me to take it," I said, "if that's what you'd do?"
He turned his head, and there was one candle left by then, and his face was mostly dark.
"Because I want to see what you do," he said. "That's it. That's the whole reason. I've never once in my life been in a room where I didn't know the ending, and I've got exactly one left, and I want to be in it."
"You sound like him," I said.
"Yeah," said my husband. "I've been noticing that."
We fell asleep for maybe forty minutes, which in a hearse is an achievement, and I woke up to a sound.
Air brakes.
I sat up and pulled the blanket around me and looked out the back windows at a tow truck sitting on the shoulder with its amber lights turning, and my whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with Wyoming.
"Trick."
"Mm."
"Trick, we didn't call anybody."
The driver's door opened.
He came around the front of the truck at an easy pace, and the light bar washed amber over him, over the charcoal three-piece, over the perfectly knotted tie, over a pair of work gloves he had absolutely no use for and was wearing anyway because he thought it was funny.
He knocked twice on the back window. Politely.
"Morning," he called, through the glass, cheerful as a Sunday. "Somebody call for a tow?"
Beside me Trick sat up with the blanket around his waist and looked out at the amber lights turning over the plains.
"That's him," he said.
"That's him."
"He's wearing work gloves."
"I noticed."
"He doesn't need work gloves."
"Silas, I'm aware."
Trick reached past me for his shirt, and his hand was steady, which after everything I found more upsetting than if it hadn't been.
"Okay," he said. "Get dressed. And when we get out of this van, whatever he says, whatever he offers — you don't answer him alone. Not on a dock, not on a shoulder, not anywhere. You want to say a yes or a no to that man, you say it in a room with my people in it."
"That's a rule."
"That's rule four," he said, and opened the door.