Chapter 8 The reward for saying it
He got up off the stool at ten past ten and put his bottle on the bar still three-quarters full, and Maeve was on her feet before she had decided to be.
“I’m going with you.”
It came out flat and too loud, and Ma heard it, and Torch heard it, and one of the old men at the cribbage board heard it, and Maeve stood there in the middle of it and did not take a word of it back.
Hitch looked at her for about as long as it takes to check a load strap.
“Nine miles up the pass road,” he said. “Other direction to the shop. It’s cold on the bike after dark.”
“I’ve got a coat.”
“You’ve got Danny’s coat.”
“Then it’s a coat,” Maeve said.
Out in the lot the sodium lamp had the gravel a thin sick orange and the bikes stood nose-in along the wall with the dew already coming up grey on the tanks.
He did not hand her the helmet. He put it on her, both hands, and got the strap under her jaw and ran his thumb along the webbing to see it sat right, and he did all of it looking at the strap and not at her, and when it was done he stood back half a step and turned his head a little, left ear up.
“Hold on at the hips,” he said. “Not the shoulders. Lean where I lean.”
She had done it once before, in a wedding dress, in front of a yard full of men who all understood what it meant. This time nobody was watching. That turned out to be different in a way she had not expected and did not have a name for by the time they were past the water tank.
The pass road went up out of town in long slow switches with the bank cut raw on the left and nothing at all on the right, and the air came down off the snowline in a cold sheet that got in at her collar and stayed.
She put her face against the back of his cut and shut her eyes.
Under the leather he was warm the whole way through, and his back moved when the road moved, and the engine came up through the frame into the bones of her.
She held on at the hips. She held on harder than she needed to, and he did not say anything about it, and somewhere around the second mile she stopped pretending that was about the corners.
The house sat nine miles up on a bench of flat ground his grandfather had cut out of the slope in 1961, and it was not a house so much as a working yard with a house standing in the corner of it.
The flatbed. A winch drum on a stand. Two engine blocks on pallets and a stack of tires gone grey with weather and a trailer with its tongue on a block of wood. A porch light on a bracket, burning.
He had left it on. He had left it on at eight o’clock on a Tuesday evening when he went down to a bar he was not drinking in, which meant he left it on every night, which meant nobody came up that road who was not him.
Inside was one room and a stove and a kitchen along the back wall with a single chair pushed under the table.
It smelled of cold ash and gear oil and coffee grounds.
Everything in it was put away. Not tidy — put away, the way a man puts his tools away when there is no one coming and no reason to except that it is how he was taught.
“Sit down,” Hitch said. “Let me see your hands.”
And there it was.
He got the good light on over the table and pulled the chair around and sat her in it and crouched down in front of her, six foot three of him folded up, and took her right hand and turned it over in both of his.
His hands were enormous and warm and hard as a fence post, grease worked into the creases past scrubbing, and he went over her split knuckles with his thumb, one by one, with the same slow attention he would have given a frayed strand coming up out of a cable.
“Fryer basket,” he said.
“Grey water. Twice a night.”
“Mm.” He turned the hand again. “You want a glove. Ask Marla, she’s got a box of them somewhere and she’ll say she hasn’t.”
“My aunt used to do hands with vinegar,” Maeve said, out of nowhere, because he was a man who waited and it turned out she talked into the waiting.
“Ruby. Out at Trosper, over the state line. Dara and I got parked out there every time it went loud at home, and she had us shelling peas by the second morning and never asked us one question about any of it.” She looked at her own knuckles.
“I haven’t been out there since I was seventeen. ”
Hitch turned the hand a degree to get at the next split and said nothing, which was how he listened.
He got up and ran the tap and came back with a cloth and started cleaning the worst one out, and Maeve sat in his one chair in his one room with her hand in his and felt the whole night start to slide sideways under her.
Because this was what he did.
This was exactly, precisely what he did — he was the man they called at four in the morning when something had gone off the highway, and he came out, and he got his hands under it, and he brought it up out of the ditch and set it back on the road and went home.
He had done it to her on Saturday in the dress.
He was doing it now. He would do it for forty more years for anybody in the county who rang him, and he would never say a word about what it took out of him, and he had absolutely no idea that he was doing it to her in this room right now.
She had stood up in a bar tonight. She had put a period on the end of her own sentence in front of fifteen people, and the one thing she had wanted on the whole nine miles up the pass in the cold was for somebody to look at her like she had done something.
Not to be tidied up. Not to be handled gently on account of it.
“Stop,” Maeve said.
He stopped. He went completely still with the cloth in his hand, and looked up at her from the floor, and waited — and this was the thing about him, this was the whole terrible thing about him, he would have knelt there and waited all night.
Her mouth had gone dry.
“You didn’t move,” she said. “In the bar. He stood there and told them I was sick and you sat at the end of that bar with a beer you weren’t drinking and you didn’t move an inch.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because it was yours,” Hitch said.
Maeve looked at him.
“If I get off that stool,” he said, “then it’s a patch throwing a man out of a bar, and by Thursday that’s the story over the pass.
A crazy girl and the club that’s got her.
You’d have been quiet for the rest of your life.
” He set the cloth down on the table without looking away from her.
“You said it. Fifteen people heard you say it. Nobody can take that off you now.”
“You could have told me that was what you were doing.”
“I could have,” he agreed.
“Say the rest of it.”
And he did not want to. She watched it cost him — the jaw going, the long slow breath in through the nose.
“I’ve been at that table twenty years,” Hitch said. “I’ve never once had to sit through anything harder than that.”
That was when Maeve stood up out of the chair.
She did it badly. Her knee caught the table leg and the light on its bracket jumped, and the cloth slid off onto the boards, and she came down onto the floor in front of him with her hands full of the front of his shirt, and she was a half-inch from his mouth before she knew where she was going.
“I don’t want my hands cleaned,” she said. “I want you to want me for the thing I did tonight. Not to be careful with me because of it. Say you want me. Out loud, in words, so I’ve got it.”
Hitch did not move. Behind him the stove ticked as it cooled.
“You know what that is,” he said, very low. “You’ve had four days of a man being careful with you. I’m not going to be one more of them and then tell myself you picked it.”
“I am picking it.”
“Then say the whole thing,” Hitch said. “Same as you did in the bar. I want the end of the sentence.”
It should have been impossible. She found instead — the way she had found earlier that evening with the room gone still around her — that once you have gotten to the end of one, the next one is simply a thing you do.
“I want you to take me to bed,” Maeve said. “Tonight. I’m not drunk and nobody’s frightened me into it and I’m not paying anybody for anything. I want it because I want it. Yes.”
Something went through him then, all the way down, and it was the first time in four days she had seen the whole of him at once.
“One more time,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at her a second longer than he needed to.
“Silas,” he said. “That’s the name on me. Hardly anybody up here’s used it in twenty years. You can, if you want it.”
He came up off the floor and brought her with him, and his mouth came down on hers, and that was the end of careful.
His hands came up and framed her jaw exactly the way they had framed the helmet strap an hour ago, both of them, careful — and then not careful at all.
The table edge caught her at the back of the thighs.
She got the cut off his shoulders and down his arms and he let her do it, let her put it over the chair back, and made a sound against her mouth when she came back to him.
Then he stopped. He pulled back an inch with his palms still on her face and held her there.
“Listen.” His voice had gone down into gravel. “You can put the brakes on this any minute tonight, or any night, and I’m still at the bottom of those stairs tomorrow, and nothing about it changes. Say you heard that.”
“I heard it.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
And her mouth simply stopped. Four days of standing up in rooms and it stopped anyway — because yes she could do, she had done it twice tonight, and this was not yes. This was a specific thing in specific words, and she had never in her life said one out loud to anybody.
Hitch waited. He would have waited all night. He turned his head a little, left ear up, and got nothing, and then he took the decision off her the only way he was ever going to take anything off her, which was slowly and out loud.
“All right,” he said. “Then I’ll go slow and you tell me when I’ve got it wrong.”