Chapter 22 Mara — Day 57 #2
I know without turning. Beau in from the barn. Boots on the boards. He crosses to the kitchen doorway, three steps, and stops. He can see the table from there. He can see the magazine from there. I hear him — the small hitch of a breath drawing in.
I hear him step out onto the porch behind me.
“Mara,” he says.
“Not one word,” I say. I don't turn around. “Not one.”
He opens his mouth. I don't need to see it. I can feel it.
“Beau. Bastien. Whichever it is.” My hands are still on the rail. I let go. “Pack. Go tonight. I will call you when I can hear your voice again. I don't know when that will be.”
He doesn't say anything. That's the part I don't expect. He doesn't argue. He doesn't try. He stands there behind me a beat and I can feel him wanting to, and I hold my back very straight, and he doesn't.
I hear him turn.
I hear his boots on the boards, back to the door. I hear the screen creak open. I hear it close.
I hear him on the stairs.
Inside, in the kitchen, nobody moves.
He isn't down for long. He never had much. A duffel he came with, the two work shirts Opal washed for him, a pair of boots, and the slim Rilke he bought his first week. Cassia's copy of Blood Meridian went back last week. That's all he has of us. He goes upstairs and he packs it and he comes down.
I know the sound of the duffel against the doorframe.
He stops in the doorway. From the porch I can see the reflection of the kitchen in the black window of the mudroom, and I can see the shape of him at the door, and I can see the shape of me at the rail with my back to him. Two shapes in a black window.
“Mara.”
I don't turn.
“I will wait however long you need,” he says. Quiet. That French-Canadian softness he never quite gets rid of.
I don't turn.
He goes.
I hear the screen door. I hear his boots on the drive.
I hear the door of the F-150 open and close.
I hear the engine, that low blue truck engine I know now like a voice.
He doesn't gun it. He doesn't tear off. He backs it around slow the way he always backs it around, out toward the county road, and then the sound of it's going, and then the sound of it's small, and then the sound of it's gone.
I stand at the rail with my back to where he was.
I don't turn around after. I think about that later too.
I don't turn to watch the taillights on the drive.
If I'd turned I'd have seen them all the way down to the cattle guard, because the drive runs straight for a quarter mile and nothing on it grows tall enough to hide a truck. I know that. I don't turn.
The screen door opens again behind me.
Opal steps out. Thayer steps out behind her. They stand at the top of the steps. Nobody says anything. Not one word.
Renata comes out last. She's got my father's whiskey bottle in one hand and a short glass in the other. She pours two fingers into the glass without saying anything. She puts the glass in my hand.
I take it. I don't drink. I hold it.
I don't cry.
The porch is very quiet.
I put my other hand back on the rail. My palm's wet.
I didn't notice I was sweating. The scar on my left palm is white against the pink of the rest of my hand.
Barbed wire scar. I was eleven and I was showing off and my father caught me by the wrist and pulled the wire out with his teeth and said, “You'll have this the rest of your life, Mara.
Remember it every time you think you're smarter than the fence.”
I remember it now.
Above the scar sits my father's leather watch. It ticks against the bone, small and steady. I feel it there like a second pulse.
“Thayer,” I say, without turning.
“Ma'am.”
“Get Roman back in the barn. He's going to yell all night.”
“On it.” He touches his hat and goes down the steps and off across the drive.
“Opal.”
“Yeah, honey.”
“Sit with me a minute.”
“Yeah.”
Opal sits in the porch chair behind me. She doesn't reach for me. Opal knows better than that today.
“Did you know,” I say. I don't turn around.
Opal takes a breath. “I wondered.”
“When.”
“A while.”
“How long is a while.”
“Since about the third week.”
“You didn't say.”
“No, honey.”
“Why.”
Opal folds her hands in her lap. “Because I wasn't sure, and it wasn't mine to say. And because he was good to you, Mara. He was good to you and to the horses and he never lied about the horses and I thought — I thought whatever else it was, that part was the truth.”
“That part was the truth.”
“I still think so.”
“Opal.”
“Yeah.”
“If you'd told me a month ago.”
“I know, honey.”
“I'd have thrown him off the porch.”
“I know.”
“And now.”
Opal doesn't answer that. She's smart enough not to. She sits with her hands folded and lets the question sit between us like a plate nobody's going to pick up tonight.
I nod once. I look down at the whiskey. I take one small sip. It burns clean the way my father's whiskey always burns clean. I set the glass on the rail.
“Two point four billion,” I say.
Renata makes a small sound behind me — not a laugh, more a breath.
“Yeah,” Renata says.
“For real.”
“For real.”
“Huh.”
I look up at the ceiling boards of the porch. Same boards. My father hung them in 1996 with tongue-and-groove pine and stained them a color he called “leave it alone.” I look at them and I think, my porch. My boards. My ranch.
I look at Opal.
“The foreclosure notice is still in the coffee tin,” I say. “That's still mine. That number didn't change.”
“No, honey.”
“He didn't fix it. He didn't fix it while I wasn't looking.”
“No. I don't think he did.”
“He better not have.”
Renata sets the bottle on the porch rail. “You want me to stay tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright.”
“Guest room downstairs. Sheets are clean. He was in the one upstairs.”
“Downstairs is fine.”
Opal stands up out of the chair. She goes back inside without saying so, and I hear her moving in the kitchen, cabinets, a plate coming down. Opal cooks when Opal doesn't know what else to do. I let her.
Down at the barn Roman quits calling. Thayer has him in. The evening goes soft around the edges of the drive. The yard light comes on above the pump on its own timer at seven-fifteen, and the moths find it inside of a minute. Same as any other night.
Only it isn't any other night.
I go back inside.
The magazine's still on the table where I left it, face-up, Bastien's face and the black stupid headline. Renata follows me in. She stops in the kitchen doorway and gives me the room.
I pick the magazine up.
I turn it over so the back is up. There's an ad on the back. I don't read it. I fold it once. I fold it again.
I walk into the living room.
The living room's dim and cool and smells like the woodsmoke that's lived in the stones of the fireplace since 1889.
There's my father's chair. There's the rug my mother wove before she left, that I've never gotten rid of because it was there before she was gone.
There's the mantel — dark cedar, worn smooth on the front edge by two generations of hands.
I lay the magazine, face down, on the cedar. I flatten it once with the heel of my hand.
I stand a moment. I look at the fireplace. I don't light it. I don't burn the magazine. I don't cry.
Renata's in the doorway. She's watching me the way she used to watch me when we were fifteen and I was about to do something my father would've skinned me for.
“Mantel,” she says.
“Mantel.”
“Not the fire.”
“Not tonight.”
“Alright.”
I put my hand on the cedar next to the magazine and I leave it there a second. The wood's warm from the afternoon sun on the roof. The magazine's cool and slick under my palm.
I take my hand back.
“You want the light on?” Renata says from the doorway.
“No.”
“Alright.”
She doesn't move. She stays in the doorway. That's Renata. She'll stand in a doorway an hour if she thinks it's the right doorway to stand in.
I look at the magazine, face down on the cedar. I look at the fireplace, cold. I look at my father's chair.
That's where I leave it. Face down on the cedar. Where I can find it when I need it, and not before.