Chapter 18 Bastien — Day 46 #2
Orin glowed. His ears had gone almost purple. Thayer put a hand over his mouth like he was trying not to smile. Opal was smiling openly.
“She just runs the bookstore,” Orin said, with dignity.
“Uh-huh,” Rafe said.
“She's a nice person, is all I said.”
“Uh-huh.”
“She recommended me a book.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Rafe.”
“Yes.”
“Please stop.”
“Sir, no, sir.”
Everyone laughed. Even Bastien, who wasn't a man who laughed loud. Orin laughed too, once the color started leaving his face, and he elbowed Rafe hard, and Rafe made a great show of his slung arm.
“Assault,” Rafe said. “Assault on an injured man. Opal, you saw.”
“I saw you deserve it,” Opal said.
“That's cold.”
“That's dinner.”
She got up. She started collecting the empty bowls. Mara stood too and Bastien stood a beat after, and they cleared the table the way they'd been clearing tables together for a month — Mara passing him bowls, him stacking them, Opal directing traffic with the wooden spoon still in her hand.
Rafe tried to help one-handed and got waved off.
He and Orin went out the porch door still going at each other, Orin saying “she's just nice” and Rafe saying “uh-huh” every ten seconds.
Thayer stood up slow, thanked Opal with a hand on her shoulder, tipped his hat to Mara and Bastien in that order, and followed the boys out into the blue evening.
The kitchen was suddenly quieter.
“I'll get the porch light,” Mara said.
“I got it,” Opal said.
“You cooked.”
“Mara Louise.”
“Fine.”
Mara touched Bastien's wrist as she passed him, one finger, quick, and went upstairs. He heard her boots on the second step and the fourth step and the top of the stairs, and then the water in her bathroom.
Opal handed him a stack of clean bowls. “Cupboard.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
He put the bowls away. He wiped down the counter she pointed at with her chin. He carried the stew pot to the sink, rinsed it, set it upside down on the drying rack.
Opal dried her hands on the dish towel and watched him work with the same steady, unreadable look she'd had the first morning he'd shown up.
“Beau.”
“Ma'am.”
“Come here a minute.”
He followed her into the mudroom. The mudroom at Vale was narrow and low-ceilinged and always smelled like leather and rain and hay.
His coat hung on a peg where he'd hung it.
Her apron hung on the peg next to it. She lifted her apron off, folded it slow, set it on the shelf.
Then she reached under the shelf and brought out a small linen napkin folded into a square around something the size of her palm.
“Here,” she said.
He took it. It was still warm.
“What is it.”
“Bread,” she said. “For later.”
He looked down at his hand. He could feel the weight of it through the linen. Rosemary and butter. The good crust.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I made extra on purpose.”
“Opal —”
“Don't.”
He waited.
Opal looked up at him. Fifty-eight years old, silver at her temples, the kind of face that had watched a lot of things. Her eyes were shrewd and kind, and she looked at him without flinching.
“I don't ask questions I don't want answers to,” she said. “You want to be Beau, you be Beau. That's not my business.”
“Opal —”
“Hush. I'm talking.”
He hushed.
“That girl in there,” Opal said, and she nodded at the ceiling.
“That girl lost her father in her arms in that barn out there.
She lost her mother before she was old enough to remember what she looked like.
She lost her fool of a husband, and thank the good Lord for that.
She's got a foreclosure notice in a coffee tin and a mortgage payment she can't make and a ranch she'd die under before she'd sell.
She's had one soft thing in a long, hard year, and that soft thing is you.”
He couldn't look away from her.
“So,” Opal said. “Whoever you are. Be gentle with her.”
He held very still.
He thought — and he could feel the thought move — I could tell her.
I could put the whole story down on the mudroom floor between us and let her sort it.
She'd sort it. Opal would sort anything.
She'd take the truth and turn it over in her hands the way Thayer had turned that piece of bread, and she'd decide what it was, and then she'd tell him what to do next, and he'd do it.
He didn't say it.
He wanted to. He wanted, for one clean second, to be a man who told the truth to a woman in a mudroom and let the rest of his life fall where it fell. But the truth belonged to Mara first. He knew that the way he knew his own hands.
“I hear you,” he said, quiet.
“That's not what I asked.”
“I know it's not.” He looked down at the linen bundle in his hand. He looked back up, and he kept his eyes on hers. “I will. I have been. I will.”
Opal nodded once, as if she'd heard exactly what she needed and no more. She reached up and patted his cheek the way a woman pats a child, quick and rough and warm, and stepped past him back into the kitchen.
“Turn the porch light off when you come down for water,” she called. “And don't leave the pot on the drying rack. Put it away.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
He didn't move for a second.
Then he took his coat off the peg. He slid the linen bundle into the inside pocket, careful with it, warm against his ribs.
He pulled the coat on. He stood in the mudroom with his hand on the peg and looked at the row of hooks — his coat, her apron, her old canvas jacket, Thayer's spare hat, a small denim jacket that was probably Orin's — and he had the sudden, unfamiliar feeling of being one of a row of things that belonged in a place.
He turned off the mudroom light.
He walked back through the dark kitchen. The porch light was off. Opal had gone out the back to her cottage across the yard. The stove ticked. The house breathed.
He put his hand on the banister and he went up.
The upstairs of the main house was narrow, three doors along a short hall — the upstairs guest room where his few things lived, the bathroom, and Mara's room at the end. Her door stood open a hand's width. A soft yellow light lay across the boards of the hallway.
He stopped at his own door. He didn't need to; he wasn't going in.
He put his palm flat against the frame of his door for a second, the way a man touches a boundary he's choosing to cross.
Then he walked down the hall.
He stopped outside Mara's room. He could hear her moving inside — the soft slide of a drawer, the click of the lamp on her bedside table being tilted. For a second the whole house held its breath with him. Then a pine board under his boot creaked, and he heard her still.
“Beau?” she said.
His hand was already in his coat pocket, on the warm bundle Opal had put there. He curled his fingers around it.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Come in.”
He pushed the door open, and he went in.