4. Chapter 4
Imogen
Hart's Run smells like hay, old wood, leather, and work, and after ten years of Sorrel Gate's polished aisles I had forgotten what a barn smells like when nobody in it cares what your last name is.
Nine days, and the place has me sorted into its mornings.
Feed at six thirty, stalls, turnout, then whatever the barn needs: a surrendered gelding who won't load, a pony due at the forge, an off-track filly learning that a raised hand can mean nothing at all.
The fencing is patched where it needed patching.
The stall doors run worn in their tracks.
Every repair on this property is visible, and nobody apologizes for one of them.
My hands have blisters going to callus in places Sorrel Gate never asked of them, and I am tired the way work makes you tired, which a night's sleep fixes.
The other kind took ten years to put on.
It is coming off slower. But some mornings I catch my own voice in the aisle, the low working one, and recognize the woman it belongs to.
Gravel announces every arrival here a quarter mile out. I know this engine before the truck clears the trees.
Della sets down the wheelbarrow and listens for exactly one second.
"That pony's feet won't wait on us, Immy," she says, wiping her hands on her apron, and walks off toward the forge without one glance at the lane. The pony's feet have waited two days and could wait two more. That is how help arrives from Della: already done, before you can refuse it.
Reed parks in the turnaround and gets out. He is in barn clothes. He will not have planned that, which is exactly why it lands. This time there are no flowers. He crosses the gravel carrying one paper cup and hands it to me as if we do this every morning.
It's the plain stuff, black and strong, the coffee I actually drink.
No syrup, no foam, nothing that has to be explained to anybody.
The drinking slot is turned a quarter away from the seam of the lid, because I said once, years ago, that the seam drips, and he has never handed me a cup without turning it since.
I take a sip. It's right. All of it.
He watches me notice. For a second, something naked crosses his face before he gets hold of it again.
He remembers how I take my coffee. He remembers a complaint I made once about a plastic lid.
He did not know I was miserable.
"Imogen." He doesn't reach for me. His free hand stays near his jacket pocket, and I already know what is riding in that pocket.
"I'm sorry. Not in general. Specifically.
My mother should never have credited Whitney with Tru's rehabilitation.
The work was yours, and everyone at that table knew whose it was.
And what she said about the ring should never have been said.
Both of those will be corrected. You have my word. "
There are no excuses in it. No suggestion that I misunderstood. If the dinner were all that happened between us, this would be the apology I wanted.
The way he waits tells me he still thinks the dinner might be all of it.
"Three years ago," I say, "a magazine ran four pages on a Sorrel Gate comeback that was my work from the first day to the last. The only name they put on me was yours.
Reed Calloway's wife, they wrote, who often assists at the barn.
I asked for a correction. You told me drawing attention to the error would only make it worse. "
He goes very still.
He remembers.
"Five years ago, at our anniversary dinner, your mother stood up with a glass in her hand and toasted Whitney as the daughter she always wanted. You found my hand under the table then, too. Later that night you told me it was the wine."
I don't need to give him ten years' worth. He only has to remember enough of them.
"I have one question. In ten years, can you name one time, once, when somebody made me smaller in front of a room, and you corrected them in that room, out loud, where the same people who heard it could hear you?"
He searches. I let him.
The forge rings twice down the yard and goes quiet. A horse along the fence line calls at nothing. Reed stands in the morning sun, looking back through ten years.
He is a man who remembers things.
If there were an answer, he would have found it.
"Imogen," he says at last.
Which is not a time, and not a place.
"You have always loved me in private," I tell him, and my voice stays level because if I let it shake, I am not sure where it will stop.
"I have never doubted it. It is why I stayed ten years.
Inside our own rooms, that marriage is the best thing I have.
But I can't keep living on affection passed under tables while the disrespect is allowed to stand on top of them. "
He takes the box from his pocket then, because it is the last thing he brought, and opens his hand with it sitting small on his palm. Grandmother Calloway's ring, four generations of it, offered back to me on a gravel turnaround.
I step in close. I take his hand in both of mine and fold his fingers shut over the box, and I hold them closed a moment.
His hands are warm. They always have been.
He looks down at our hands for a long time. Then he nods, once. He doesn't argue, and he doesn't put the box back in his pocket. He carries it to the truck in his open hand.
"Thank you for the coffee," I say. "It was right."
He backs the turnaround the way he does everything, unhurried, certain, and goes down the drive with the box still in his hand against the wheel. The gravel gives him away for a quarter mile. Then the lane is only the creek and the birds in the sycamores again.
I carry my coffee to the fence and set it on the post, where coffee at this barn has always gone cold.
He never meant any of it. I have always known that. The magazine, the toasts, the hand beneath the table. I spent years explaining that he did not have to mean to hurt me for me to be hurt.
Standing at this fence, tired in the good way, I don't want to explain it anymore.
It hurt. I was there. I know what happened.