25. Beck
— ? —
Beck
Two weeks, and I still can’t walk up her stairs.
I’ve driven to Dallas six times and parked outside her building and sat there with the engine running, looking at those steps like they’re a grade I can’t pull.
The problem isn’t what I need to tell her. It’s what I did before I earned the right to tell it.
So I’ve been at the kitchen table every night instead, writing. Twenty-three pages. Every lie, every absence, every time I chose hundreds of miles west over the house I was standing in.
The decree came in the mail Tuesday. Stamped by a judge I’ve never met.
I’d signed the papers the week after the motel, not because I wanted it, but because she’d asked, and respecting what she asked for was the only thing I had left to give her.
I still call her my wife in my head because I can’t make myself stop.
Today I’m not driving to Dallas.
The papers are already on the table when I walk into the sunroom.
That’s the first thing I see, not my mother in her chair with her hands folded. A stack of documents squared up on the glass, and a pen laid across the top of it like she’s been waiting since breakfast.
“It’s done,” she says. “Salt Fork. I signed Thursday.”
I stop in the doorway. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“You did. You just hadn’t gotten around to the part where you demand it.” She gestures at the chair across from her. “Sit down.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“I’m sure you would. Sit anyway.”
It’s the voice she used when I was nine and had put a fence post through the wrong pasture. I hate that it still works on me.
I sit.
She pushes the stack across. Sale agreement, transfer of title. A trust instrument with JOSEPHINE ANNE COOPER printed at the top and a number under it that I don’t look at twice.
“Every dollar,” she says. “I kept nothing. My attorney thinks I’ve lost my mind, which I found gratifying.”
I turn a page and don’t read it. “Why?”
“Because it was mine to undo.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.” She smooths her skirt, once. “It isn’t.”
I set the papers down. The doors and the ridge beam are on the last page. A line item, architectural salvage, to be transported, and Tripp’s name in the contractor field.
“The beam has her mother’s name on it,” my mother says. “The end grain. I assume you knew that.”
“Tripp put it there. It’s staying.” I close the folder. “And he’s not hauling it. I am.”
She looks at me.
“I’ll take a crew out and pull that barn down myself. Board by board if I have to.” I hear how it sounds. I don’t care. “I built it in the wrong place. I’m going to be the one who takes it apart.”
My mother is quiet for a moment. Then she nods, once, like she’s filing it somewhere.
“That will take you a week.”
“Probably more.”
“Good,” she says, which is not what I expected.
I came here with something to say and she has taken the floor out from under it. So I say it anyway, because I drove out here to say it and because I’m not sure I’ll have the nerve twice.
“I can’t come here again until I can do it without lying.” My voice sounds strange in the bright room. “To you, or to her. Two weeks ago I sat in that chair and let you cry and I never said the thing I came to say, and then I couldn’t look at my own wife for fourteen days because of it.”
“I know.”
“The seating charts stop. The job offers stop. The phone calls to people who aren’t me, the arrangements, all of it-”
“Beck.”
“I’m not finished. If you want to be in Josie’s life-”
“Beck, listen.” She says it flatly, and I stop. “I know. You were right. All of it.”
I sit there with the rest of the speech still loaded and nowhere to put it.
“Don’t look so disappointed. You can deliver the remainder if it would make you feel better.” She almost smiles. “I’m not going to cry again. Once was undignified enough for one lifetime.”
“That’s it? Two weeks and you just-”
“I had two weeks to really think.” She lifts one shoulder. “I’ve had a great deal of practice being alone in this house with my own thinking. It’s an unpleasant hobby but I’ve gotten very good at it.”
The air conditioning hums. Somewhere out past the glass a truck is working the far pens, and the sound of it is so ordinary it feels obscene.
“I was wrong about her,” my mother says.
I look up.
She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the orchids like they’ve said something rude.
“I thought Scarlett was an opportunist.” Her mouth tightens. “I watched her for two years. Taking the barns, taking the program, taking the name. Taking, taking, taking.”
“She wasn’t-”
“She was better than me when I married your father.” My mother says it like the words offend her. “That is what I got wrong. I have spent my entire adult life around men who acquire things. I did not recognize the other kind of person when she was standing in front of me.”
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to add to it.
“She did something I have never in my life been able to do,” she says.
“What?”
“She left everything because she’s a strong, capable woman who can live without your money and power.”
The words sit there.
“You hurt her, and she packed a bag. Took your child and drove to Dallas in the dark.” My mother’s hands are perfectly still in her lap.
“She didn’t deal with your bullshit. She didn’t rearrange the calendar and smile at the right people to make the house run so beautifully.
She didn’t do one single thing I would have done.
” She finally looks at me. “She left. And it turns out that’s the strong thing. I had it backward for decades.”
“I want to give you something,” she says, “if you’ll take it.”
“If it’s money-”
“Don’t be stupid.” She folds her hands. “Advice. From a woman who has done all of this incorrectly.”
“I don’t want your advice. I already wrote twenty-three pages of everything I needed to fix.”
“Take it anyway or all my thinking is for nothing.” She waits until I look at her. “You’ve been performing.”
“I’ve been-”
“Performing. Every rule that woman sets, you follow.” Her eyes are sharp now, the way they get when she’s about to be right. “And in all of it, you have never once told her what you want.”
“I want her back. She knows that.”
“Does she? Say it to me. The way you’d say it to her.”
I open my mouth.
“I’m not asking her for anything,” I hear myself say. “I don’t get to ask. Not after what I-”
“There.” She points at me like I’ve just confessed to something. “That. You’ve said that to her, haven’t you. More than once.”
I don’t answer.
“I’m not asking for anything. I don’t deserve it.
I’m not expecting you to forgive me.” She recites them like a list she’s been keeping.
“Do you know what a woman hears when a man says that? She hears a man playing safe. If you never ask, she can never turn you down. It’s very safe, Beck. It costs you nothing at all.”
“It’s the truth.”
She looks back at the window. The truck out past the glass shuts off. The quiet after it is enormous.
“In thirty years,” my mother says, “I never once told your father I wanted him to stay.”
I go very still.
“Not once. I managed him instead. I arranged the house and the calendar and the seating and every dinner party in this county, and I made it all run so beautifully that leaving would have been absurd. And he left anyway, in every way that counted, and I never said the sentence.” Her hands don’t move.
“I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. I’m telling you what it costs.”
She turns. “So stop apologizing. You have said sorry to that woman so many times she cannot hear anything else coming out of your mouth.”
“Then what do I say?”
“Ask her for something.”
I wait for the rest of it. “That’s the advice?”
“Yes.” She leans forward. “Something small. Something you actually need, not something you’re offering her, not another gesture with your name on it. Ask, and then let her answer however she answers.”
“Scarlett spent years never asking me for anything,” I say slowly.
“Yes.” My mother says it like I’ve finally arrived somewhere she’s been standing for a while. “And where do you suppose she learned it?”
That goes in under the ribs.
“You never needed her,” she says. “Not for one thing. You had a ranch to run to and a friend to talk at and enough money to make any problem disappear before it reached your desk. That woman was useful to you for two years, Beck, because you never once allowed her to be necessary.”
She stands. The conversation is ending because she has decided it is.
“Say you need her. Out loud. Where she can hear it.”
I gather up the papers. At the door I stop, because there’s one more thing and she hasn’t asked for it.
“Josie,” I say.
“On whatever terms her mother sets.” My mother says it without a flicker. “I’d like to know her. I’m aware that isn’t mine to arrange.”
That might be the most surprising sentence she’s said all afternoon.
She’s at the window with her back to me, and the light makes her look like something carved.
“The twenty-three pages you’ve been writing.” She doesn’t turn around. “Give them to her. All of it, the parts that make you look worst especially.” A pause. “And then ask her for something.”
In the truck I sit for a long while with my hands on the wheel and the folder on the seat beside me.
I pull out my phone.
I need to see you. Tomorrow. I have something to tell you.
Three dots.
I’ll be home.
I put the truck in drive.
Twenty-three pages and two letters. And one thing I have to figure out how to ask for. Tomorrow, I climb those stairs.