Chapter 30
RYDER
At seven on the first Thursday in February, Eden opened the rear door of The Copper Kettle with the paid work order under her arm.
Six men, one shift, Colin supervising. My name sat below his as an ordinary worker at the same rate as the prospect hauling boxes.
We were to move Brenda’s records, anchor two shelves, replace the loading markers, and carry out the old mixer.
Nobody opened a wall, relocated equipment, contacted the landlord, or added a repair without Eden’s approval.
She looked at me when she added, “The shelf diagram is final. You don’t improve it.
” I wrote the limit on the back of my copy.
The studs sat off her marks. Moving the shelf would have made my job easier and narrowed the aisle she had left for two women carrying deposit boxes.
I photographed the conflict, brought her two options, and used the rated anchors she chose; when the plaster failed, I stopped again and asked before adding a plate inside the approved footprint.
The old-mixer buyer tried another route into her authority.
He asked me to approve removing the motor, then looked to me after Eden refused.
“The agreement names Eden’s company,” I told him.
“She answered you.” He used the required straps and loaded it intact.
At the end of the shift Eden inspected every job, made the prospect redo a loading marker, and assigned me the dust behind the record boxes.
Colin kept the photographs; I deleted mine.
She signed my line and thanked me for the work.
I wanted her pride in the building and the right to remain after everyone else left.
She had bought a completed work order. The crew loaded up, the payment cleared at the posted rate, and she opened the next morning without needing me there.
A week after the bakery job she carried a boxed chess set into the clubhouse on an afternoon too cold for yard work.
The original board was still in our house with a game abandoned on it from the night before Jess arrived.
This one was cheap and new and small enough for a side table.
Eden opened it under the window while Leah sorted fundraiser invoices six feet away, set the pieces without asking for help, and looked across the common room.
“One game,” she said. “This isn’t the board from the house, and we aren’t continuing the old game.”
I put down the repair ledger. “Do you want me across from you?”
“Unless you’ve learned to play from the bunkhouse.”
The line had the old bite and no invitation to enjoy it. She chose black and gave me the first move; in our marriage she had always claimed white because she hated waiting for me to start a fight.
I moved a pawn. Eden answered from the side of the board where my left ear faced her, then shifted her chair after two moves. The legs scraped across the floor until she sat nearer my right side. I knew better than to thank her or turn my head toward it.
“Did you put Jess on your right the first time before she knew why?” she asked, moving her knight.
“Yes. I told her that side would make the performance look practiced if anybody noticed me hearing her the first time.”
“Did she know it was mine?”
“She knew you used that side. She didn’t know when it began or what it meant to us until the lockdown.”
“When did she understand?”
“After you spoke from my left in the common room and made me ask twice. Jess said you were taking something back. I told her to remain where I’d placed her.”
Eden captured my pawn and set it beside the board. “You watched me take it away and ordered her to keep it.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to answer that again.”
“I watched you refuse my right side. I knew you were showing me I had given our private habit to Jess. I ordered her to stay there anyway.”
Eden moved her chair another inch toward my right. She wasn’t restoring the habit. She was proving she controlled when I got it.
We played and she didn’t let the subject go.
Whether I had ever let Jess touch the hearing-aid case — no.
Whether Jess had entered our bedroom — never past the porch.
Whether I had meant to move her into the house — the property lie existed only to force Eden out.
Eden had spent months repeating my lies to herself with nobody there to correct them.
“Did you ever call her by my name?” she asked, moving a bishop.
“No.”
“Did you think it?”
“I thought about you every time I spoke to her. I never confused you.”
“That’s worse.”
“It’s worse. I knew that while I was doing it.”
“Stop agreeing as if that ends the question.” She lifted the bishop back, reconsidered, and set it beside my king. “Tell me what you thought when you looked at her after I came home from the hospital.”
I remembered her coming into the clubhouse with hospital tape on her arm and Leah close enough to catch her.
“I thought you looked exhausted. I saw the mark from the IV. I wanted to carry you to our room, lock the door, tell you everything, and sleep on the floor while Leah stayed in the bed with you. Then I turned to Jess and asked whether she was bleeding, because I had decided the watcher mattered more than what you needed from me.”
Eden left the bishop beside my king. “You’re answering the same questions.”
“You can ask them again.”
“And if I ask in ten years?”
She might mean ten years married to me or ten years after a divorce, and the number was too dangerous to touch. “I’ll answer if you ask.”
She trapped my queen while I was watching her knee come within an inch of mine under the table. “You used to see that coming.”
“You used to steal my attention by taking off your shirt.”
Her gaze dropped to my mouth, then went back to the board. “If you turn one chess game into flirting, I’ll put the queen through your hearing aid.”
“I answered why I missed the move.”
“You could’ve blamed the window.”
“You’d have known I lied.”
Eden took my queen. She knows how my attention fails around her. I know she threatens expensive parts when wanting me frightens her.
She won twelve moves later and closed the board without offering another game. “You may ask for a second date tomorrow. Through Mia.”
“I’ll have it with her by noon.”
“Don’t look pleased.”
“Where should I look?”
“At your missing queen.”
I obeyed until she left.
Eden approved the second date for the following Friday: the county history museum, an evening exhibit on the closed factories, then a drive out the river road, the route given to Mia in her own writing.
Eleven miles of two-lane, water on the left, nothing lit after the second mile.
She let me open the passenger door without waiting to be asked, and I kept my hands off her coat.
The museum gave us machinery diagrams, strike photographs, and enough evidence that every wealthy family in the county had once poisoned either a river or an employee.
I complained that the restored conveyor was mounted backward, and she said I said that about anything I hadn’t been allowed to install.
The humor lasted until a photograph of women leaving a factory under a sign for a wartime nursery.
One of them had a man’s jacket over her dress. Eden stopped walking.
“You gave Jess your jacket after I came home from the hospital,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Was she cold?”
“No. I put it on the chair beside her before you came in so you’d see it there and think she’d worn it.”
“Did she ask you not to?”
“She asked me not to. She’d already taken it off her shoulders once that week.”
“Did you think I’d recognize it?”
“I counted on it.”
Eden stayed with the photographed woman until another couple came up behind us, then moved aside. “Sometimes I remember the jacket before I remember the fake baby. Isn’t that pathetic?”
“You knew that jacket. You bought it after I tore the old one on a guardrail. You’d slept in it.”
“I wanted to rip it off her.”
“You should’ve.”
“Don’t tell me what I should’ve done. I was trying not to attack a pregnant woman.”
I left her room to get back to the exhibit. “You protected a child you believed existed. I used that against you.”
The river road took the last forty minutes. Eden pulled my phone off the mount, rejected everything that had played in this truck in June and July, settled on something from before we met, and laid the phone facedown on her knee.
“The photograph,” she said. “Describe it to me.”
“Color. North side of the Kroger lot, sixty yards out, through a windshield. You’re between the cart return and the Civic.
Black shirt. One paper bag against your hip and your keys in your teeth, your head turned like somebody had called your name.
The dot sits about four inches below your collarbone, at the center, here.
” I put two fingers on my own sternum and got my hand back on the wheel.
“Whoever took it waited until the dot was on you.”
“How long did you look at it before you decided?”
“Two hours. In the lot at the closed feed store, on the private device, until the screen shut itself off, then again.”
“Two hours and you never got as far as telling me.”
“I got as far as the porch step. Then I went in and ate the dinner you’d made.”
The water ran black past her window. She didn’t look at it.
“The Sunday,” she said. “The prenatal route. All of it.”
“Out the main gate at nine ten. Lead SUV, my truck second with Jess and her lawyer, Jax trailing. Twenty-two miles southwest to a transfer property, thirty-five minutes on county roads. Jess got into a van with no glass in the back and came home after dark on the east route. I ran another eighteen miles to an empty farm-implement dealership short of Terre Haute and sat in the lot until the source confirmed the watcher had logged my vehicle.”
“No clinic.”
“No practice, no clinician, no record anywhere. That’s the only reason it survived the day.”
“You built fifty-eight miles of road for a thing that didn’t exist,” Eden said. “You couldn’t build me one sentence.”
The road bent left along the water and I took it at forty.
She let three mile markers go past. “Last one. You believed I thought you’d fathered a child with another woman and that I was watching you drive her to see it. Tell me what part of that made you expect me back.”
She had already taught me what happens when I hand her the least ugly answer first. “Five years of you coming back. After the Louisville run, after your aunt’s money, after the night I put a man through the clubhouse door in front of you.
I stopped counting those as things you chose.
I made your love into weather. Weather doesn’t leave the county because you insult it. ”
“Say the rest.”
“I treated your love as permanent enough to outlast anything I did to it. I was planning the conversation where I explained myself while you were still in the driveway. I had the order of it. I never once planned for you not to come home.”
The dark went past on her side for a mile and a half.
“That’s worse than anything you gave the lawyers,” she said. “It’s the one I wanted.”
She turned the phone over on her knee and put the music back on, and we drove the last six miles with the heater too loud.
At the house I walked her up and stopped an arm’s length short of the porch. Eden had her keys out and didn’t use them.
“May I kiss you?” I asked.
She looked at my mouth, and five years of wanting her crowded the space between us. “Yes. I want you to kiss me. That’s the only thing I’m saying yes to.”
I touched her face only after she leaned into my hand. Her skin was cold from the walk and her mouth was warm when I bent to it, and the taste of her brought back mornings in our kitchen, nights in our bed, and the last time I had kissed her before I stepped onto that porch to meet Jess.
Eden caught the front of my coat and pulled me closer.
I kissed her the way I had wanted to since July, with no apology in it and no pretense that what I wanted was clean.
She bit my lower lip hard enough to hurt, then opened for me when I made a sound against her mouth.
My hand went from her face to her waist after she pressed into me.
I wanted the door open behind her, our bed, her bare ring finger against my back, one night where the bunkhouse didn’t exist.
Her hand struck my chest.
I let go and stepped back before she had to push again.
Eden wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, breathing hard for a reason that had nothing to do with asthma, her eyes on the front of my coat. “The jacket.”
I took my hands off her body. “I know.”
“No, you don’t. I had your coat in my fists and all I could see was Jess beside you after the hospital.” Her keys pressed white into her fingers. “I wanted your mouth, and then I hated myself for holding something you used to make her look like a wife.”
“You don’t have to hate yourself. I did that.”
“Wanting you doesn’t make you my husband.”
I backed toward the steps. My mouth burned where she had bitten it and I wanted the mark to last until morning. “It doesn’t give me the house, the bedroom, another kiss, or the next date.”
Eden unlocked the door with her face still turned to me. “Go back to the bunkhouse.”
I wanted to turn around for every foot of compound road between her porch and the bunkhouse. Behind me the deadbolt went over in her door.