Chapter 10 Mara — Day 25 #2
I refill both cups. The kettle is empty. I put more water on.
“How bad,” she says, quiet.
“Bad.”
“How bad, Mara.”
“One-eighty-seven and change. I've got until the first week of December.”
She whistles low. She doesn't say anything for a minute. She turns her cup a quarter turn on the table.
“You'll get it.”
“Maybe.”
“You'll get it.”
“Renata.”
“I'll cover you if it comes to it. Not all of it. But what I can.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I mean it. No.”
“I mean it. Yes.” She looks at me level. “I don't have one-eighty-seven and change. I have maybe thirty. It's yours if the day comes. You don't get to say no on a day that isn't the day.”
She waits. Then, quieter: “Selene know?”
“Selene knows the number. I told her the day the notice came.”
“She's a friend.”
“She's the bank.”
“She's both, Mara.”
“She's the bank when it comes down to it. That's her job.”
“She's still a friend.”
“She is.”
I don't say anything else. My throat is doing an ugly thing.
“Say okay, Mara.”
“Okay.”
“Say we'll see if it comes to that.”
“We'll see if it comes to that.”
“Good.”
She takes another sip of coffee and doesn't look at me, because she knows I need a second and she's giving it to me.
We talk about Cassia. About Veda Rowan wanting to teach us both to play poker and neither of us being willing, because Veda Rowan cheats.
About how Alpine has changed and how it hasn't.
About how the coffee at the Big Bend Café is somehow worse than it was three years ago, which is an achievement.
She tells me about a customer who tried to return a bag of feed that had a mouse in it and swore up and down she'd sold it to him with the mouse included, and I laugh so hard I have to set the cup down.
At some point the light on the kitchen wall goes long and gold and I look up and it's five o'clock.
“Two hours,” she says, checking her watch. “You said one minute.”
“I'm generous like that.”
She stands. I stand.
At the door she stops.
“I'm not going to come out here every week,” she says. “You have to want me to.”
“I know.”
“But I'll come when you call.”
“I know.”
“Call, Mara.”
“I will.”
I hold the screen door for her on the way out. It's a small thing. It feels enormous. We walk out together. Beau isn't in the yard anymore. The barn door is open a hand's width and I can hear the soft steady scrape of a broom on packed dirt.
At the truck she stops with the door open, and I stand at her elbow.
“I hated you,” she says, conversational. “For a while. For letting him do it. I want you to know that so you know I'm not lying about anything else.”
“I know.”
“I don't now.”
“I know.”
She looks at me, and her jaw's doing the ten-year-old thing again. I step into her and put my arms around her before I can talk myself out of it.
She hugs like she used to. One hand at my shoulder blade, one at the small of my back, holding on with her whole self. Renata never learned the polite hug. She was always all in.
She's smaller than I remember. Or I'm bigger. Or three years is a long time to not have your arms around a person you used to hold every day.
“Okay,” she says into my shoulder. “Okay.”
“Drive careful.”
“I always do.”
“You do not.”
She laughs, wet, and pulls back and swipes her wrist under one eye.
“Call me.”
“I will.”
She climbs up into the truck and starts it. The engine catches on the second try like it always has. She lifts one hand off the wheel in a little wave I've seen a thousand times and haven't seen since October, and pulls the truck around in a slow arc, and goes.
I stand in the yard and watch the dust settle back down. My chest is doing something I don't have a word for.
Something loose. Something newly full. Like a window has opened in a room I'd been holding shut for a while, and the air's doing what air does, and I can't put it back where it was.
I turn toward the house.
Then I turn toward the barn instead.
I stand at the mouth of the barn for a second before I go in. My boots are quiet on the dirt. The light in there is a different light than the yard light — dimmer, older, moving with the dust.
The aisle smells like hay and horse and the good clean smell of a broom on packed dirt. Beau's at the far end, working a line of chaff toward the door. When he hears me on the boards he looks up.
He doesn't ask.
I like that about him. He doesn't ask.
I walk down the aisle. Dancer puts her head out over her stall door and lips at my sleeve. I set my hand on her nose without looking. She settles.
“Thank you for staying out,” I say.
He rests the broom against the stall wall. Breathes out, slow.
“Always,” he says.
That's the whole word. Two syllables. Nothing before it. Nothing after.
I've heard the word before. Everybody's heard the word. It's a word people say when they don't mean much by it. Always I'll be there. Always I'll love you. It's a wedding-vow word, worn smooth by use.
He doesn't say it like that. He says it like he's setting something down on a table between us and stepping back so I can look at it.
Whatever my face does, I know what my chest does. I know what the top of my scalp does, that light prickle you get when weather's coming or a truth is.
“Okay,” I say, because I have to say something, and okay is what I have.
He doesn't smile, exactly. His mouth moves a fraction. His eyes stay on mine.
“Go on,” he says, quiet. “I'll close up.”
I walk back down the aisle with that word in my hand.
Always.
I go up the porch steps and through the door and past the coffee cups still on the table, and I climb the stairs to my room with it, careful, like a lit candle, careful not to spill.
I set it down beside my bed.
I have nowhere to put it yet.
I know I don't want to give it back.