Chapter 27
EDEN
June brought the request to my kitchen at seven in the morning, one folded page on Mia’s letterhead, four lines of Ryder’s handwriting under her typed cover line — square letters with a backhand lean, the way he writes a turn on the back of a fuel receipt with both hands cold.
He was asking her permission to ask me a personal question.
He hadn’t sent the question with it, so I could refuse it and never learn what it was. I knew what it was anyway.
He had spent the first two weeks of December doing everything assigned to him and nothing that wasn’t.
He rebuilt the porch rail after the work order went through Mia, waited until June was in the house, and was gone before I got back from the bakery.
He carried forty bags of fundraiser flour from the delivery truck to the clubhouse kitchen and did not come through my door or assume I would bake any of it.
When the first snow of the year came in on the sixth and drifted across the compound lane deep enough to bury the cattle guard, he plowed the lane with the club’s blade and left my Civic buried until Tessa walked over with a written request that had my name at the bottom of it.
Then he cleared it, put the brush back in my trunk where it lives, and went away.
He wanted to know whether five months had bought him enough room to hope.
I could have told Mia no and let him wonder for the rest of the winter what answer he would have gotten.
That would have hurt him. It also would have let him keep the question alive in a drawer somewhere, unopened and therefore still possible.
I wanted him to say it out loud to my face and then carry the answer back across the yard himself.
I took the folded request to the Copper Kettle and left it under the office ledger for most of the morning.
Brenda was walking me through payroll corrections while two employees argued in the hall about who had taken a holiday order without collecting a deposit.
The work should have kept him out of my head.
Instead every interruption reminded me of the way Ryder used to answer the phone before I had finished describing the problem.
He would have come. He would have rewritten the invoice template, put the broken machine in his truck, and made everybody in the building believe that loving me meant nothing stayed difficult once I said his name out loud.
That marriage felt generous for as long as his answers and mine pointed the same way.
I never counted how often his help ended with my day rearranged into whatever he had decided was safest. When I complained he kissed me against the counter, told me to quit worrying, and finished the job, and I called him impossible with my hands in his shirt.
He heard affection. So did I. Neither of us heard the warning underneath it.
Brenda found the request when she reached for the ledger. She read Mia’s cover line and pushed it back at me.
“Your husband wants something.”
“He wants permission to ask for something.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It has to be. The last time he skipped permission I nearly died.” I entered the correction and closed the program before the screen could blur. “If I hear it and say no, I’m afraid he’ll keep doing everything right. If I refuse to hear it, I can tell myself I don’t know what would have happened.”
Brenda set a stack of timecards beside my elbow. “Business advice or marriage advice?”
“Business. Your marriage advice probably involves a rolling pin.”
“Mine involved an ashtray, and I quit smoking twenty years before the divorce.” She checked the corrected total and tapped the folded page once. “Business answer is that not looking at a number doesn’t improve it. Read the offer. Refuse it if the price is wrong.”
“Everybody hands me choices now.”
“Hear what he asks and not what you miss.” She carried the timecards out before I could resent her for being useful.
I chose my own porch, because it is mine.
June sat inside the living room with the curtain open, near enough to see us and far enough that Ryder couldn’t turn her into an audience.
I took the chair by the front door. The other one stayed by the rail under two inches of old snow, and I did not clear it.
He crossed the yard at the minute Mia had written down and stopped at the bottom step in a black coat over work clothes. His beard was trimmed again. Nobody in that bunkhouse reminds him the blades go dull, so he had worked it out for himself, and I hated knowing that I had noticed.
“You approved one personal question,” he said. “Do you want me to ask it from here?”
“Come up. Stay by the rail.”
He took exactly the place I gave him and put his right side toward me, out of habit or on purpose.
For months I had made a point of speaking into his left, so he would have to ask me to repeat myself and live without the small private care I used to give him before he could ask for it.
Now he arranged himself so that I never had to choose a side at all.
“May I court you?” His hands stayed down.
He didn’t take hold of the post or the back of the empty chair.
“Scheduled time that you approve. You can refuse any request, or end the whole thing whenever you want. I don’t come in the house, I don’t touch you, I don’t use the club to arrange anything, and I don’t treat a yes as a statement about the marriage.
If you say no now, I don’t ask again unless you invite it. ”
The care in the terms made me angry before I could take one ounce of comfort from it.
Ryder learned how to ask only after showing me what he did when he didn’t.
He had the right words because I had bought them for him — my house in my name, my medical forms with his name struck off, his patch gone off his shoulder, Jess across a lawyer’s table in Indianapolis, four flat tires in the yard, and months of work under men he used to give orders to.
He had become good at this at the exact moment I could no longer hear him without hearing how good he had been at lying.
“No,” I said.
His eyes stayed on my face. “All right.”
It wasn’t enough. I had built myself for an argument, a plea, or the first thin sign that his patience ran on progress, and his acceptance left me holding every sentence I had wanted him to sit through.
“You don’t get to leave after one word.”
“I’ll stand here until you send me.”
“Months in a bunkhouse don’t equal what you did. Losing the patch doesn’t equal it. Signing over the house doesn’t equal it. You don’t get to add up your consequences and decide the total buys you dinner with me.”
“I don’t think I’ve paid enough.”
“You asked anyway.”
“I needed to know whether you’d let me take you somewhere. I knew it might be no.”
“You knew I could say no. That isn’t the same as expecting it.
” I put my hands flat on the arms of the chair so I wouldn’t fold them over my chest and hide from my own anger.
“What did you think would happen if I said yes? Were you going to take me somewhere nobody knows you made me watch you start another family? Sit across a table and ask me about the bakery while I remembered Jess getting into your truck for a prenatal appointment that didn’t exist? ”
“I’d have gone wherever you picked and answered whatever you asked.”
“You’d have enjoyed it.”
He looked out at the yard, not to get away from me but to keep whatever he had brought with him off his face. “Yes. I’d have enjoyed being with you.”
The honesty made me want to hurt him more. “I don’t want you to enjoy me yet.”
He turned back. Snow had started again and was settling on his shoulders. “I understand.”
“You understand the sentence. You don’t know what it was like to wake up in that hospital and ask Leah whether you had gone back to Jess.
I couldn’t get enough air to finish the question, and I was ashamed, because needing help might prove you were right to pick her.
Then I came home and watched you put your jacket on her again.
” The chair creaked under me as I leaned in.
“You knew I’d asked about her. You knew I thought I might have died while my husband worried about another woman’s baby.
And you did the same thing again where I could see it. ”
He didn’t interrupt with the apology I had already refused, and he didn’t remind me he had answered all of this on record in front of Jax. He stood at the rail and let December get at the skin above his collar while I took him back through July.
“I spent that week waking up not knowing what you’d take next,” I said.
“First you. Then the money. Then the house. Then the gate shut, and I didn’t know whether I’d have to watch her move into my bedroom while I slept in the clubhouse.
After the hospital I didn’t know whether you’d let me keep Leah next to me if I stopped breathing again.
You knew the plan. You knew the money was safe, the house was mine, and there was no baby.
I knew nothing except what you had decided to put in front of me. ”
“I knew what every part of it meant and I kept going.”
“You knew your ending. I didn’t know whether I had one.”
Something went out of his face, and for a second I saw the man who stood outside the ambulance doors holding my failed inhaler. I have crossed rooms for that face. I stayed in the chair.
“I want you to wake up in that bunkhouse and wonder whether I’ll ever let you come home,” I said.
“I want you to hear me cross the yard and wonder whether I’m coming for you or going somewhere you’ll never be invited.
I want every good thing you do to end without you knowing whether it mattered to me.
That uncertainty is the smallest piece of what you gave me, and I am not finished giving it back. ”
He took it and did not once call it cruelty. “My answer’s the same. I won’t ask again unless you invite it.”
“You aren’t angry?”