Chapter 24 Bastien — Day 70 #2
She opened the door herself. She stepped down onto the wooden step.
She didn't look back. He watched her cross the alley to her truck.
Her braid swung once against her back. She got in.
She sat a second with both hands on the wheel and her head bowed — not praying, not crying, only holding still — and then she lifted her head and drove.
He shut the door.
He picked up the watch.
He held it against his chest for a long moment because there was nobody to see him do it.
He didn't wait until the afternoon proper.
He sat at the small table with his phone, laptop, and the slim manila envelope.
He read every clause of Veda's note. Mara's signature was already on the last page.
He signed beneath it, scanned the executed pages to Veda, and waited for her acknowledgment before opening his real account.
The bank's payoff statement, after the two gifts and before the pending hay contract, showed seventy-seven thousand four hundred dollars, and change.
He wired exactly that amount to Sul Ross Bank.
In the memo line he wrote: VALE RANCH PAYOFF — PRIVATE LOAN — BASTIEN R. LORNE.
He sat looking at the screen after it went through. The confirmation number blinked. He copied it down on a scrap of paper because paper felt like the honest way to hold a number that had cost him almost nothing and cost her almost everything.
He didn't feel proud or light. He felt like a man who had finally stopped disguising a debt and paid the exact amount he had been invited to pay.
He'd built the moment in his head into something grand. It was a screen, a memo line, a send button, and a chair that remained a chair. The money wasn't the big thing. The big thing had happened at the table, when Mara named the terms and he accepted them.
He picked up the watch again. It ticked against his palm. The old scar on his left thumb crossed the leather once as he turned it.
He went out to the front of the store, because he needed to hear another human voice.
Cassia was at the counter with a mug and a stack of new-arrival paperbacks. She looked up. She didn't ask.
“You told her I was back here,” he said.
“I pointed at the door,” Cassia said. “Same thing.”
“Same thing.”
“You told her.”
“I told her.”
“And?”
“And I'm still allowed to breathe her air. Not up her stairs. Not yet. But her air.”
“That'll do for today,” Cassia said.
“That'll do for today.”
His phone buzzed on the front counter at fourteen minutes past three. It wasn't Mara. It was a Marfa area number he half-recognized. He picked up.
“Mr. Lorne. This is Selene Hart at Sul Ross Bank of Alpine.”
“Ms. Hart.”
“I'm calling as a courtesy. Ms. Vale's bank loan is closed as of two hours ago. Your payoff wire cleared. The foreclosure notice is withdrawn. Veda Rowan has the executed private note.”
“Thank you.”
“I called her first. I wanted her to hear it in a voice she knew. Now I'm calling you to hear yours.”
“What did she say?”
There was a pause down the line. He'd never met Selene Hart in person. He'd heard about her from Mara at the beginning of everything and he'd trusted the report.
“She said good,” Selene said. “That was all. Then she thanked me. She didn't cry until after she hung up. But I heard her start to. That was for her, not for you.”
“I understand.”
“Mr. Lorne.”
“Yes.”
“You did a useful thing paying the remainder,” Selene said. “You'll do a better thing letting her call every shot after it. I've known that woman since she was in braids. She doesn't take a rescue. She writes terms.”
“So I've been told,” he said. Selene Hart, on the other end of the line, laughed once — a small dry laugh — and hung up.
He put the phone face down on the counter. He put his hand on the watch on the counter beside it.
“You need something to eat,” Cassia said.
“I need to sit.”
“Same thing.”
The afternoon went by in a slow slide of light along the wall.
Cassia came into the back apartment around six with a bowl of chili and a slice of rosemary bread wrapped in wax paper.
He didn't ask how it had gotten to her. Opal had her ways of mothering people who didn't live at the ranch anymore.
He ate at the small table under the window.
The bread was still warm at the edges. He hadn't known bread could feel like a message. He knew it now.
At seven-forty his phone buzzed once.
It was a picture. It came from Renata's number, which he'd been given exactly once, months ago, at a feed store checkout counter where she'd looked at him like a woman deciding whether or not to be his friend.
The picture was of the Vale ranch fireplace — the stone one, the one he'd sat in front of on more nights than he could count.
There was a fire in it, low and orange, and on the coals a curl of pale paper going to ash.
The corner of a heavier envelope. The bank's letterhead a smudge of blue at the edge before the flame took it.
A little smoke lifting into the flue. Behind the fire, at the far edge of the photograph, he could see the silhouettes of three people standing in the kitchen doorway — Opal square-shouldered, Thayer taller and still, Renata with one arm crossed over the other.
He couldn't see Mara in the picture. She was the one taking it.
There was no caption.
He looked at the picture until his eyes stung.
Then he looked at it again. He thumbed to enlarge the corner where the flame was taking the letterhead and he held his breath for a second like a man watching a fuse burn out.
There was a coffee tin on the mantel behind the fire — the one she'd kept the notice in — and he could see the rim of it in the frame.
Empty now. That was the language of it. She'd kept the paper in a tin because she needed to know where the ugly thing lived.
She'd taken it out to burn it because the ugly thing was over.
She hadn't put the tin away. She'd left it on the mantel so anybody standing at the doorway could see.
He sat there in Cassia's back apartment with the leather watch in his fist and a piece of bread on his tongue that had come from a woman who used to hand him butter with the tip of a knife and had never once asked him what his real name was, and he thought — the ranch is safe.
He thought — she is safe. He thought — I did that with my money, and she let me, and she owes me nothing that isn't written down.
He thought — she left me the watch.
The watch was on the table by his elbow. She'd told him to bring it back tomorrow, or the day after. She hadn't taken it with her.
She could have taken it with her. She'd chosen not to.
He picked it up. He set it down. He picked it up again. He fastened it around his wrist, on the inside — the way she wore it — and he felt her father's leather warm against his skin.
He'd drive out to the ranch tomorrow. He'd stand at her kitchen table. He'd return her executed copy of Veda's note. He'd give the watch back into her scarred palm and he'd leave when she told him to leave. He'd come again when she said come. He'd earn the door.
Outside, the alley behind Cassia's bookstore was going blue with dusk. A pickup passed. Somewhere in the distance somebody was calling a dog. The neon in the front window of the shop hummed on with a small tick and threw a strip of red across the floor.
Bastien Lorne — who was also, still, Beau — sat with his hand around the watch and watched the light go, and for the first time since his brother had died in a country he hadn't visited in ten years, he was less angry at himself for still being alive.
He was, he understood, hurting less.
He suspected Mara was hurting less too.
He suspected she wouldn't tell him so for a while. That was all right. He would wait for her to tell him. He was, it turned out, a man who could wait, and the waiting was a different animal now that the door on the other end of it had a woman behind it who might, in her own time, open it.
Tomorrow he'd drive out. Tomorrow he'd start.