Chapter 8 Mara — Day 18 #2
Upstairs, the daybed scrapes across the floor. Beau and Rafe are moving it. I hear Beau say something low, Rafe answer, then Rafe laugh — small but real. Beau does not make jokes so much as give people room to come back to themselves.
Opal sits down opposite me. She wraps both hands around her own mug. She looks at me over the rim.
“Well,” she says.
“Well what.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You didn't have to. Your eyebrow did.”
“My eyebrow has its own opinions. I can't help what it does at three in the morning.”
“Opal.”
“Mara.”
She waits. I don't fill it.
“That's the smallest guest room in the house,” she says finally, mild as milk.
“It's the one that's free.”
“It surely is.”
“He's got a duffel. He needed a bed. I gave him the bed off the mudroom because the boys need two.”
“That's the reason.”
“That's the reason.”
“Alright, then.”
“Opal —”
“I said alright.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “The bread's good tonight.”
“You always say that.”
“I say it when it's true.”
I drink my coffee. It's too hot and I burn the roof of my mouth and I don't say anything about it because the sting is a good thing to focus on.
Opal watches me the way she used to watch me at eleven when I'd come in from the barn with a scrape and lie about it.
She doesn't push. She never had to. She'd wait, and I'd tell her by dinner.
I'm not going to tell her by dinner about this.
Beau comes down the stairs. The loose board. His boots on the tile in the hall. He stops in the kitchen doorway.
“Boys are settled,” he says. “Rafe is snoring already. Orin's pretending not to be scared.”
“That'll pass.”
“It will.”
“Thank you.”
“For what.”
“For going in the bunkhouse.”
He does the thing with his mouth again. The almost-smile. Then he looks down at his coat and starts on the buttons.
“Downstairs guest room is off the mudroom,” I say. “Sheets are clean. Blanket's the blue wool one, in the chest at the foot of the bed. Bathroom's the one you already know. Coffee's on at five-thirty. You don't have to be at it before six.”
“Understood.”
“If you need anything —”
I stop. He waits. The unfinished sentence opens into a door I am not ready to name, so I leave it unfinished.
“I'll knock,” he says, giving me the out. “I won't. But I'll know how.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
He nods once at Opal — “Opal” — and Opal nods back — “Beau” — and he takes his duffel and goes down the hall toward the mudroom. I hear the guest room door open. I hear it close. Not hard. Just closed.
Opal finishes her coffee. She stands. She takes my mug too, though I'm not done.
“Bed,” she says. “You've been up two hours already and you'll be up in three.”
“I know.”
“I mean it, Mara.”
“I know.”
She kisses the top of my head. She hasn't done that since I was sixteen. I hold still for it. Then she goes out through the back to her cottage across the yard, and I hear her boots on the porch, and then nothing.
I put the kettle on the cold burner, turn off the kitchen light, and climb the stairs. The third one creaks under me the same as it creaks under everyone. I noticed it under him because some part of me had already begun measuring the house around his weight.
My bedroom is at the end of the hall. I close the door. I don't lock it. I never lock it. My father never locked a door in this house and I don't either, and that's not a rule, it's a habit, and it's the kind of habit you don't examine because you don't want to know what it means.
I sit on the edge of the bed. I pull the boots off. I pull the coat off. I put the coat over the chair.
I take my father's watch off the nightstand where I set it every night, and I put it on.
The leather is soft where the strap folds.
I put my thumb on the face. The glass is smooth.
The second hand ticks the way it has ticked since I was five and my dad let me hold it and I asked him what it said and he said it said late for supper, so run.
I hold my thumb there for one full loop. Sixty seconds. The reason does not matter. I do it anyway.
Then I lie down.
The house is quiet. Rafe and Orin, upstairs on the other side of the wall, are already breathing the way tired boys breathe — Rafe loud, Orin thin and light. It sounds like the barn does at midnight, when the animals are down. It sounds safe.
Downstairs, below my room and across the mudroom hall, I can almost hear him.
Not really. The house is too big for that. But I can hear him anyway. I know he's there the way I know Roman is in the third stall without looking. That kind of knowing. It isn't romantic. It's true.
He'll turn the lamp off with his left hand because I've watched him do everything with his left hand for two weeks now.
He'll press his palm flat to the wall on the way to the switch — I've seen him do it in the barn, the way a man checks a stall for warmth without knowing he's doing it.
He'll lie on his back. He'll breathe slow because he breathes slow. He'll be in my house.
He'll be in my house.
I turn onto my side. I face the wall. I close my eyes.
When was the last time, I think, that I wanted anyone to stay?
I can't remember.
I really can't remember.
I try to name a night when I wanted the man in the next room to still be there when the sun came up, and I can't do it.
Not with the ex. Not with anyone. I wanted them to go, always, in the polite way of a woman who has been the last one awake her whole life.
I wanted the house back. I wanted the quiet back.
I don't want the room back.
I don't want the room back and I don't know what to do with that.
There's still a foreclosure clock ticking in the coffee tin and a bunkhouse wall to open, a cracked stove to replace.
And there's a man two rooms below who came out of the burning dark with a red canister under his arm and asked, at the end of it, where I wanted him.
Where I wanted him.
I close my eyes again.
I don't sleep for a long time.