Chapter 17 #2
The wind moved through the bare branches overhead, and nothing answered, because nothing was ever going to, and I sat there a while longer anyway, letting the silence keep me company the way it had for most of the last six weeks.
I stopped for gas on the way back, at the same station I always use at the edge of town, and was halfway through filling the tank when a familiar car pulled in at the next pump: Eleanor, in her good church coat, apparently running some Sunday errand of her own.
“Della.” She looked, for a moment, uncertain how to proceed, the way she hadn’t looked uncertain in front of me in eighteen years. “I didn’t expect to see you out this way.”
“I was visiting my father.”
Her face softened, unexpectedly, some old grief of her own surfacing. “I think about him sometimes. He was kind to me, your father, the few times I met him. Not everyone was, back then, when Grant and I were still finding our feet with the family, before the company mattered to anyone.”
I hadn’t known that, hadn’t ever thought to ask, and the smallness of the admission, delivered at a gas pump on an ordinary Sunday, caught me off guard.
“He’d have liked you more than you probably think,” I said, which was true, and which I hadn’t planned to say, and which seemed to land somewhere real in her, her eyes going bright for just a second before she blinked it back.
“He asks about your father, sometimes. Grant does.” She said it like she was testing whether it was allowed. “He asked me once whether I thought your father would have liked him. I didn’t know what to tell him.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I didn’t know. That I thought you were the only person whose answer to that actually mattered.” She looked almost embarrassed by it. “I don’t think he’s stopped wondering.”
I didn’t answer that either, filing it away with the rest of the evidence I wasn’t ready to enter into the case file yet, the growing stack of things people kept telling me about a man I already knew better than any of them did.
“I’ve been thinking about our call,” she said, careful now, picking her way across ground she clearly hadn’t fully mapped yet.
“The one where you told me about the hospital. I’ve turned it over more than I’ve let on.
I don’t think I handled it well, in the moment.
I think I was more worried about managing how it would look than about how it actually was for you, and I’ve been sitting with that, and I don’t love what I find when I sit with it. ”
“That’s a real thing to say, Eleanor.”
“I’m trying.” She almost smiled, uncertain, testing the shape of a version of herself she clearly hadn’t worn very often. “I don’t know if I’m any good at it yet.”
“Nobody’s good at it the first few times,” I said, thinking of Grant, of myself, of the whole slow unglamorous six weeks. “You just keep doing it until it stops being new.”
“Can I ask you something?” Eleanor said, glancing toward her own car, then back at me, some old formality still there but thinner than usual. “Do you think he’s actually going to keep this up? Once it stops being new, the way you just said?”
I started to give her the answer I’d been handing out to everyone for six weeks, the careful one that committed me to nothing, and something about standing at a gas pump on the same morning I’d told a headstone the truth made the easy version stick in my throat.
“I think I’m more scared he will,” I said instead. “Than that he won’t.”
Eleanor went still in a way that told me she’d heard exactly what I’d said. “That’s an odd thing to be afraid of.”
“If he keeps it up, I run out of reasons to keep managing him at arm’s length. I have to actually let him back in, out loud, where it can be seen.” I shrugged, already trying to make it sound smaller than it was. “It’s probably not worth unpacking at a gas station.”
“I think it’s worth unpacking somewhere,” she said, not letting me wave it off. “You don’t have to do it with me. But I’d stop pretending it isn’t the actual problem, if I were you.”
“When did you get so direct?”
“Around the same time I stopped being able to afford being anything else.”
“I used to think not knowing was the same as failing to plan properly.” She almost laughed at herself. “I’m learning it might just be the actual condition of caring about someone. You don’t get to know in advance. You just get to keep showing up and find out.”
“That’s not a bad way to put it, Eleanor.”
“I’ve had some time to think, lately.” A small, real smile, unguarded in a way I’d rarely seen from her. “More than usual.”
We finished fueling our separate cars in a silence that felt, unexpectedly, more companionable than careful, and she waved before pulling out, an ordinary small gesture that nonetheless felt like the first genuinely unmanaged moment the two of us had shared in years.
Even Eleanor, I thought, pulling back onto the highway, was doing some version of the same slow work: a woman in her seventies learning to let a hard truth in one careful inch at a time instead of managing it away at the door.
If she could start that work this late, there wasn’t really a good excuse left for me not to.
I turned the radio on, having left it off the whole drive out without noticing, some station playing nothing in particular, and let the ordinary noise of it fill the truck’s cab instead of my own circling thoughts for a while.
By the time I reached the highway proper, some of the morning’s heaviness had lifted, replaced by a different, quieter kind of resolve.
I didn’t have an answer yet about what I wanted to do with any of it, the fear of asking, the fear of being seen wanting, the whole tangled inheritance of a childhood spent learning that needing things quietly was safer than needing them out loud.
But I had actually named it clearly now, out loud, at a grave, in a cemetery nobody knew I’d visited, and naming a thing clearly, I’ve always believed, professionally and otherwise, is most of the actual work of eventually treating it.
On the drive back, I found myself thinking not about Grant specifically but about Bramble, the mare who’d come in three days post-colic surgery too anxious to eat, who I’d sat with for an hour, still, quiet, offering feed without pressure, letting her decide in her own time that the hand holding it out wasn’t going to hurt her.
It had taken four days before she trusted the feed enough to actually eat in front of me instead of only after I’d left the stall.
I remembered thinking, at the time, that it was a good, slow, patient piece of work, exactly the kind I was proud of doing well.
I had never once applied the same patience to myself. I had never once considered that trusting something good, letting it in, might require exactly the same slow, unglamorous, repeated proof I demanded from every anxious animal that ever came through my clinic doors.
I pulled into the clinic lot an hour before Grant’s usual Tuesday morning arrival, and sat in the truck a long while, not going in yet, turning the whole thing over one more time.
I sat there a while longer, engine off, watching the gravel lot lighten toward dawn, then went inside to start the coffee before he came.