Chapter 27 #2
“I’m angry at the man who made you need this from me.”
The line came too close to sounding polished, and I had my mouth open to throw it back at him for that alone. Then he kept going, and the next part was plainer.
“I hate waking up without you. I hate that the porch light goes off and I know you’re in our bed and I’m across the yard. I wanted one evening. You said no. I’m not going to punish you for giving me the answer I asked for.”
I had prepared for a withdrawal, even a well-hidden one.
Ryder always made care feel permanent right up until I pushed back, and then it turned into a method — he fixed, arranged, blocked, followed, or went cold enough that I had to come to him.
I had spent the whole afternoon getting ready to watch his December work stop at sundown.
“Go,” I said. “Colin has the storage room on Monday. Ask him what he’s putting you on.”
“I will.”
“You don’t get to work harder so I regret this.”
“I’ll do whatever Colin gives me.” He went down one step and stopped. “Thank you for answering me.”
He crossed the yard and didn’t look up at my bedroom window or at the men in the bunkhouse who had certainly worked out what he had gone to ask. I stayed out there until June opened the door and laid a blanket over the back of my chair rather than over me.
“I wanted him to argue,” I said.
June cleared the snow off the other seat with one glove and sat down in it. “Would it have made the answer easier?”
“It would have made him the same man.”
“And he isn’t?”
“He asked to court me like a man who knows I might never let him touch me again. Then he thanked me for saying no.” I pulled the blanket over my knees and was angry at the warmth and at June for putting it where I could reach it without asking.
“I don’t want his behavior to hold. I want him miserable, and I want him to fail, so I don’t have to wonder whether I could love what he turns into. ”
June looked at the bunkhouse. “Then don’t wonder tonight. You said no. He works tomorrow. That’s all either of you knows.”
I had asked Colin for the storage room three weeks earlier, in the kitchen, on paper, the way I ask him for anything.
Colin runs the work list. He decided that Ryder took the drain shelves under the leak because it was the worst section and Ryder was the biggest man on the roster, which is how Colin decides most things.
When I asked whether Ryder could stay on the grease trap through February as well, Colin capped his pen.
“No.”
“It’s one line on a board.”
“It’s my board.” He wasn’t unkind about it. “You want him worked, he’s worked. You want him ruined, find another list. I won’t run a punishment schedule out of a clubhouse kitchen and neither should you.”
I went home angrier at Colin than I had been at Ryder on the porch, and by Wednesday I knew he was right, which is worse.
December went on being December. The ventilation assessment came back on the twelfth: flour dust concentrations at the bin station above what the hygienist wanted to see, no collection at the mixer bay, and make-up air at the ovens undersized since the second oven went in.
The scope of work ran to a hooded bin station with a cartridge collector, lidded bins, and ducted make-up air.
Six thousand two hundred and forty dollars, under my walk-away number by seventeen hundred.
I signed it in the office with my coat on.
Nobody in my life had ever put a price on my lungs and handed the invoice to me, and I found that I preferred it, even at six thousand.
The lender took the application on the fifteenth and came back with eleven questions in four days.
The appraiser wanted access to the equipment on a Tuesday.
Brenda dug two years of repair receipts out of a recipe binder where they had been living folded inside a page for cinnamon rolls.
I made four hundred rolls for Christmas Eve, thirty pie shells, and one Yule log for a woman who called three times to ask whether the bark was real chocolate.
My hands cracked at the knuckles the way they do every winter.
I stood at that bench at four in the morning with the ovens ticking up to temperature and the whole town asleep and thought: this is the year I buy it.
That is the sentence I had been waiting my whole adult life to have.
And every evening I drove sixteen miles back to a compound where my husband was living in a bunkhouse, and I checked.
That is the part I did not plan. I had told June I wanted him to fail.
What I actually did, all December, was audit him.
I read Colin’s work board. I noticed which men he ate with and that he sat at the end.
I noticed that he had stopped drinking anything at all, and that when Bear’s brother-in-law came through and made a joke about my bakery, Ryder didn’t defend me, because defending me in that room would have been about him.
I knew the exact number of days since the porch.
I knew he was still turning in the movement notes.
I was spending my own December watching a man not fail.
The mixing bowls came out of the storage room on the day of the inventory.
Tessa carried them to my kitchen because I would not let a prospect do it and I would not let Ryder do it.
He had found them in a club box, crossed them off the club list, and written them under my name without being asked, and when I stood in the storage-room doorway afterward he thought I had already gone and his hands stopped on the wet shelf for a moment and then started again.
It wasn’t a performance. That was why it stayed with me.
A man can arrange almost everything about himself and he cannot arrange the thing he does when he believes the room is empty.
He bought the big bowl for our third anniversary, after I complained that the cheap one walked across the counter whenever Gladys ran.
It is heavier than it needs to be, which is the whole point.
It has been on my counter since the eleventh.
I have used it eleven or twelve times. It has stopped being an argument and turned back into a bowl, and I noticed the day that happened, and I did not like what it suggested.
Then, on the twenty-eighth, I got up at ten past three to start the New Year’s orders, came down in the dark, and looked out the kitchen window at the bunkhouse to see whether his light was on.
It wasn’t a slip. I did it the same way I check the walk-in temperature.
Automatic. Routine. Which meant it was not the first time, only the first time I caught it, and I stood at that window with the kettle going behind me and made myself count backward through the week. Every morning. Possibly longer.
Here is what I had been telling myself since July: that refusing him was a decision, and that I made it fresh each time, and that it therefore meant something.
That was true on the porch in December. It was true the first month, when the word cost me something to say.
Somewhere in the middle of all this it turned into a habit, and habits do not require a person.
I had been standing at a door with my shoulder against it, holding it shut, for five months, against a man who had not once tried the handle.
He asked once, through a lawyer, on a written appointment, and took no for an answer and thanked me.
I am not going to call that forgiveness.
He manufactured a pregnancy and a woman and a burner phone to run me off my own porch, and he watched me pack, and no accounting clears it.
I don’t want him in my bed. I don’t want his name on my business or his money in my reserve or his hand on my keys.
I have written all of that down and paid lawyers to make it stick, and I would sign every page of it again in the morning.
But I have been spending my one life guarding a door nobody is trying, and calling that strength.
Refusing him no longer tells me anything about him.
It only tells me what I was five months ago.
And the truth I got at in that dark kitchen, with the kettle screaming and my hands going into the flour bin out of habit, is that I would rather know.
I would rather find out what he is when I let him ask than spend another year defending a position against a man who has already conceded it.
Not because I want him back. Because I want the answer, and it is mine to take.
I set the anniversary bowl on the counter for the morning dough. The kitchen didn’t smell like anything yet. I stood in it working out how to say one sentence — how to give him a single question, on a date I picked, with nothing attached to it, and no promise of any kind on the other side.