Chapter 35
RYDER
Wade was at the far end of the clubhouse lot when the review broke up, standing by his bike with a cigarette he doesn’t smoke in front of his wife.
“Six to two,” he said.
“Still two.”
“Still two.” He got it lit on the second try. “That boy followed a woman home in the dark and you took him off routes for a month. Twelve years ago Bear would’ve had him doing it right by Friday and she’d have got home either way.”
“She’d have got home not knowing who was behind her.”
“That’s the part you people can’t stop saying.
” He looked out past the fence toward the county road.
“There’s going to be a night the form doesn’t fit the road.
Wrong hour, no signal, nobody to sign anything.
And you’ll do what you did in July or you’ll do what the paper says, and I don’t know which, and I don’t believe you do either. ”
“I don’t.”
Wade grunted like that was the first useful thing he’d heard all evening, and stayed exactly where he was, and was still there in his own lot when I pulled out. The club never needed him to agree. It needed him to keep coming.
Colin caught me at the door with the work book under his arm. “Storage racks Thursday. You set the wall this time.” He didn’t look up from the page. “I’ll come by and tell you if it’s crooked.”
Eden was on the porch when I got home. I had driven that road alone every night for a year without winning back a minute of it. She had the inspector’s card in one hand and the storm photographs on her phone.
“Get the sashes out before the first freeze,” I said, before my boots were off. “Once the openings go, you’re paying for framing on top of glass. I’ve seen it happen to a man in Hadley Creek who waited a season.”
“Three bids first.”
“Three bids is four weeks. Four weeks puts you in October.”
“Three bids and the roof looked at.” She turned the phone around.
The water mark on the office wall ran down from the head of the window and then away from it, out sideways across the plaster toward the interior corner.
“That’s not coming through the sash. That’s coming in above it and running the framing. ”
I took the phone off her and looked at it for longer than I wanted to. Water goes down and it goes where the wood lets it, and the stain fanned toward the parapet wall.
“Four new windows would have been beautiful,” Eden said. “I’d have paid nine thousand dollars for beautiful windows and had the same wet wall in November, and you’d have stood in that office and told me the flashing was open the whole time.”
“Then I go up at six with a ladder and a torch before your crew gets in, and I look at the parapet joint over that office.”
“You look. You don’t buy anything, you don’t call anybody, and you don’t put a man on a roof I own without a written scope.
” She took the phone back off me. “And I still want three bids on the sashes, because the roof doesn’t make the wood any less rotten.
It only means I’m not spending nine thousand dollars in September to solve a problem that lives eight feet higher up. ”
“Four weeks of bids puts you in October.”
“October is when I’ll have the roofer’s number and the insurer’s answer and three pieces of paper to argue with. September is when I’d have your opinion and a hole in the wall.” She said it without any heat in it at all, which is worse.
I stood in her kitchen wanting to call two men I trust and have the flashing stripped and reset by Thursday. It would take one call. I have made that call about her building four times in my head since the storm.
“Three bids,” I said. “I’ll be on the ladder at six.”
The washing machine went while we were still standing there. Second time in two months, and this one put two feet of water across the laundry-room tile with the towels going under the door.
“Drum bearing,” I said, on my knees with the flashlight.
“Hose.”
“It walked into the wall in June.”
“Because it isn’t level and you’ve been washing grease rags in it since March.” Eden was already hauling towels out with her bare feet planted the way she stands at a bench. “New hose, new washers, front feet leveled, and you take the rags to the clubhouse sink.”
“The household account covers a replacement.”
“I know what it covers. I wrote the number.” She stood up with an armful of wet cotton. “You want to buy a machine so you don’t have to spend a Saturday afternoon on a floor with me. Order the hose.”
The old answer was in my mouth and I could hear the shape of it — that I’d handle it, that she shouldn’t have to, that a man ought to be allowed to solve one thing without a conversation about it.
I ordered the hose. We mopped the room out together on our knees with every towel in the house and one from the linen cupboard she said I could pay for.
“Our laundry room,” she said, when I called it hers on the way out.
“Our laundry room. Your house.”
The chessboard by the window has had the same game on it since March.
We started it the night she reset the pieces, and we don’t play the way people play chess.
Two moves in a week is a busy week. She’ll come in from the bakery with flour still in her knuckles, move a knight, and go take a shower without saying one word about it, and I’ll find it at eleven at night and stand there working out what she has done to my left side.
There are pieces on that board that haven’t moved since April.
Her rook has been sitting on an open file since the week the roofers did the clubhouse and I have spent four months pretending not to see it.
She had me in the middle of it that night and knew it. I sat on the end of the bed with the lamp on and didn’t move anything.
“You can concede,” she said from the doorway.
“I can take three days.”
“You’ve had five.”
“Then I’ll take a sixth and you can put it in writing.”
“Don’t tempt me. Mia charges for that.”
I took the hearing aid out and put it in the case on the right nightstand and the room went the way it goes — half of it dropping back a step, the fan noise leaving, her voice arriving only from the side she chooses to stand on.
She came around to my right without making anything of it and sat down beside me and put her feet on my thigh.
The route channel went off on the nightstand late that night.
I read it and turned the screen so she could see it.
The laundry van had cleared. A task-force analyst wanted tomorrow’s Copper Kettle deposit moved to eleven in the morning while they ran the partial plate against copied registrations linked to Silas, and Jax had asked me for a route recommendation and had not contacted her staff.
“Eleven puts it inside your supplier meeting,” I said.
“I can recommend keeping the deposit where it is, June with you, existing bank protocol. Or move it to eleven and put your manager on the supplier. Or move the supplier. Those are the three. The analyst has a preference and no evidence attached to it.”
Eden read it twice. She turned the phone over on her knee the way she does at the museum, at the dinner table, on a river road in February, whenever she’s building the answer before she opens her mouth.
“Deposit stays at two,” she said. “June goes with me. Tell Jax the supplier meeting doesn’t move unless the task force finds something connected to this van, and if they do find something, they tell me before they tell you.”
I typed it in her words. Deposit remains at fourteen hundred.
June accompanies. Supplier meeting unchanged absent evidence connected to this vehicle.
Notification to Eden precedes notification to me.
I read it back to her before I sent it. She listened to the whole thing with her feet still on my thigh and said one word, and I sent it, and Jax came back inside a minute with a single letter.
Then I put the phone facedown on the nightstand and turned off the lamp on my side. Hers stayed on a while longer. Across the room, on the table by the window, it was still her move.