12. Andrew
Andrew
The dress made a small sound against the bench leather when she shifted. He heard it.
He kept both hands on the wheel. The truck took the switchbacks out of Marlow, and he watched the road opening into dusk instead of the green silk beside him.
He knew the men they were driving toward. Some he had known for thirty years. They would notice tonight. He had let that happen.
He thought he would be all right if she did not speak.
She did not.
Three days earlier, he had asked her to come. She had said yes. He had carried the answer ever since.
The east boundary fence came up on her side of the road three quarters of a mile short of the gate, and he saw her see it.
He did not turn his head. He kept driving.
He watched her at the corner of his vision.
She did not move. She did not catch a breath.
The light coming off the western shoulder of the pass had gone the color of a peach holding its bruise, and in that light the patched section showed cleanly to anyone who knew where to look.
Walt’s splice on the second and third posts, the wire pulled true.
The shallow ditch beyond, scarred at the lip where her tires had dragged.
The grass under the fence had filled in. The metal showed.
He did not speak. There was no version of speaking that did not make it less than it was.
He took the small grade and the curve past the splice and watched her in the corner of his vision until she let out a breath he had not heard her draw.
She had finished doing a hard thing in a room with no one in it except him.
She had done it in the cab of his truck with him beside her, and the only acknowledgment either of them made was that he kept driving and she let the breath out.
He took the curve. He let three breaths come and go. They passed the gate at Stillwater where he had passed in the truck twice a day, morning and night, and tonight he did not turn in. He drove past his own road. He drove up the pass.
The lodge sat half a mile up the spur road from the highway, low and long under a stand of black firs, the stone of it laid by a man dead a hundred years and the timber dressed by his grandsons.
Andrew had been coming to this room three or four times a winter since he was young.
The faces had changed and most of them had not.
He knew where to park. He parked in the second row at the south end, where a working man’s truck would not be boxed in by a Range Rover at midnight.
He came around the front of the truck and opened her door.
He did not put a hand under her elbow. The gravel under his boots gave a small soft sound, and he watched her gather the dress in one hand and step down.
The brown suede heel found the gravel and held.
She came down without his help and looked up at him, something she had not done since the front door at Mary Jo’s.
She did not say anything. He did not say anything.
She had a small piece of her own hair come loose at her temple from the ride over, and the cold mountain air had put a high color into her face under the makeup, and she was looking at him as steadily as a person could look at another person at six feet in dusk. He shut the door.
They walked across the gravel together. He held the heavy wood lodge door for her. She went through. He went after.
He had been inside this room a hundred times, and tonight he did not see it.
He saw her seeing it. He saw the small turn of her head as she clocked the rafters, the fire at the long end of the room, the bar at the short end, the four big chandeliers wired with what looked like real candles and were not.
She took the crowd in with one professional glance.
She had worked a hundred rooms in another life.
She did it small. Nobody but Andrew saw her do it.
The bar was at the short end of the room. He walked her there. He did not ask. He said Bourbon, neat, to the bartender, a young man in a black vest who was already pouring. He looked at Amanda.
“Champagne,” she said. “Whatever you have open. Thank you.”
The young man poured. Andrew watched him pour. The flute caught the light and held it for a second longer than the bourbon did. Andrew paid in cash from his coat pocket. He always paid in cash. The bartender thanked him by name and did not call him by his last name.
He handed her the flute and took his own glass. He stepped a quarter step back from the bar so the man behind them could order. He still had not said anything to her since the truck.
She turned the flute one quarter turn in her hand. She brought it up and did not drink.
“Andrew,” she said very low.
“Amanda.”
“I want to tell you something before we walk further into this room.”
He waited.
“I am all right.” She did not look at him.
She looked at the room. “If somebody puts a hand out, I will take it. If somebody asks me what I do, I will tell them I work at Stillwater. If somebody recognizes me, Mary Jo is going to handle it, and I am going to drink my champagne. I just wanted you to know.”
Several answers came and went. He used none of them.
He shifted his bourbon to his left hand and let the right one come up to her wrist—not the elbow—the wrist where the long sleeve ended, and he pressed once with two fingers, a thing only the two of them could see, and let go.
It was not much. It was the most he had done to her without a horse or a chore between them.
She took the smallest possible breath and let it out.
“All right,” she said.
She drank her champagne. He drank his bourbon. They turned together and went into the room.
Three people met them before they got to the fire. The first was Hugh Beaumont, who had been a friend of Andrew’s father and was, at eighty-one, the oldest living cattleman in the room and could be relied upon to want to know everything about everyone. Hugh took Andrew’s hand and held it.
“Stevens. You came.”
“I came, Hugh.”
“You sent your sister last year. And the four years before that. I had taken to telling people you were dead.”
“You were premature.”
“Yes.” Hugh’s eyes moved without any effort at all to Amanda and stayed there a beat that Andrew had been ready for. “And you brought one.”
“Hugh, this is Amanda. Amanda, Hugh Beaumont. He owned the country across the highway from my dad before there was a highway.”
“Mr. Beaumont.” Amanda put her hand out at the height a hand goes out at on a working ranch and looked the old man in the face. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
“Are you?” Hugh took the hand and turned it over in his own and it was clear he had been looking at other people’s hands for a very long time and considered them more honest than faces. He saw what he saw and let the hand go.
“Honey,” he said. “What are you doing at Stillwater?”
“Right now, I’m running a bottle calf and learning to muck about half as well as Walt thinks I ought to.”
“Bottle calf.”
““His mama’s alive. She was too tore up after the pull to keep him on her. So he’s mine. His name is Lucky.” So he’s mine. He’s a few weeks old. His name is Lucky.”
“You name ’em?”
“I named that one.”
“You’ll cry.”
“I might.”
“Hm.” Hugh looked at Andrew. Hugh looked back at Amanda. Hugh, who had not been impressed by a woman in a dress in any room in any year that anyone present could remember, said, “Stevens. You sit at our table. I will fix it.”
He walked off to arrange the seating.
The second was a younger man in a suit, Greg Halloran, who chaired the conservation board and ran a fund out of Denver and had been trying to get Andrew on his board for six years.
Greg was thirty-eight and intelligent and patient.
He shook Andrew’s hand with the carefulness of a man who had learned by now not to grip.
“Mr. Stevens.”
“Greg.”
“You came down. We are honored. Stillwater Land and Cattle’s contribution this year was, well. We are honored.”
Andrew did not move his face. He felt, beside him, Amanda go a fraction more still. He felt her not look at him. He felt the name land in her.
“It is a good cause.”
“It is. Yes. It is.” Greg cleared his throat. He had not meant to use the full name. He had used it because the full name was what they wrote on the wire transfer, which had been more than he had asked for, twice. He recovered. He turned to Amanda. “And you must be…”
“Amanda.”
“Amanda. Welcome. Please enjoy the evening. Mr. Stevens, if you have a moment later, I would love to introduce you to…”
“Later, Greg.”
“Later. Yes. Of course.” Greg moved off.
Andrew did not look at her. She did not look at him. She lifted her flute and drank one small sip.
“Stillwater Land and Cattle,” she said, very quiet, into the rim of the glass.
“Yes.”
“I see.”
That was all. She did not press. She did not need to press. He felt his jaw set. The room moved on. He moved her into it.
The third happened by the long table at the back, where the silent auction items lay in a row under little tented cards and a woman at the center spread was leaning over a Charlie Russell print and writing a number on the bid sheet.
She straightened up when she saw Andrew, and her face went through three things in rapid order.
“Andrew Stevens.”
“Eleanor.”
“It has been three years.”
“Four.”
“Four. Yes.” She had been Eleanor Pemberton when Andrew had first met her at one of these galas in another decade, and she was Eleanor Pemberton still, by either keeping the name or burying two husbands, he had never asked which.
She lived eight months a year in Telluride and four in Houston and one in a place in Italy he had heard about exactly once.
She was sixty-five years old and had grown beautiful only after sixty, when she had finally stopped trying.
She had a glass of something white in one hand and a bidding pencil in the other, and she had not yet looked at Amanda.
“Who is this?” she said, looking now.
“This is Amanda.”
“Amanda.”