Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Wendy was the last one out the door, and she stopped with her boots in her hand.
“Lobby,” she said. “Big leather chair by the fireplace. Been there since we came up.”
Cecelia looked at her.
“I told him I’d give it an hour. He said he’d wait the whole night.” Wendy moved the boots to her other hand. “He’d have done it, too. Go on.”
She stood in the doorway after Wendy’s boots had gone around the corner. The room behind her had five dents in the bedspread and a sugar packet under the coffee table and a bowl with nothing left in it but the chalky hearts. It had been full an hour ago. It was the fullest that room had ever been.
The elevator was too slow, so she took the stairs, and she came out into the lobby with her hair coming down and her pulse in her ears.
He was there sitting in the chair across from the stone fireplace, the one Tate had sat in for a whole morning last summer waiting on her father.
Hat on his knee. Coat still on. He’d been looking at the fire and he looked up before she’d taken two steps, the same as he had at the rodeo rail.
She sat on the arm of the chair across from him. Her knees suggested it.
“Tell me.”
He told her.
He didn’t dress it up and he didn’t leave anything out.
“He had a man asking about you,” she said.
“He said as much.”
The lobby, twice. The face she’d known and hadn’t placed. Her father had used the same man on a deal back east, and he hadn’t looked at her then either.
“He asked about the horses,” Jason said. “Two starts in one town, and what happens when one of us fails. I told him I’d wait on mine.”
“You what?”
“Wait. Not quit. Horses keep.” He said it without any push behind it, a fact about feed. “It got his attention.”
“Jason.” She had both hands on the arm of the chair now. “You are not putting your business on a shelf for me. I didn’t walk out of my father’s suite to move into somebody else’s sacrifice.”
“I know it.”
“Do you?”
“I said it to him. I didn’t say it to you.” He held her eyes. “There’s a difference. He needed to hear that I would. You need to hear that I won’t have to.”
She turned that over. She didn’t like it and she couldn’t find the crack in it, which was the most Jason thing she’d ever heard.
“Then the envelope,” she said.
“Capital,” Jason said. “Enough to start right. And all I had to do was walk away from you and tell you my feelings had changed.”
The fire popped. Somebody at the desk laughed at a phone call.
“What did you do?”
“Left it on the table.” He turned the hat over on his knee. “Then I came here.”
She’d known. She’d known in the stairwell and on the trail and before that, at a round pen rail with a silver truck pulling out of the drive. That didn’t stop what went through her when he said it. It wasn’t relief. Relief was for when you weren’t sure.
“Did you want it?”
He could have said no. He looked at her instead, and took his time, and she loved him for the time more than for the answer.
“For about a minute,” he said. “I thought about the rooms over the Bloom Shop. What it’d be to hand you a key.” His jaw moved. “Then I thought about the day you’d ask me where the money came from. And I’d have to say his name.”
Her eyes stung, and she let them. She’d spent eight years being the one who didn’t.
“He told you about my mother.”
“A little.”
“He’s never told me. Not once. I know she left. I know the date. I’ve never heard him say it out loud.” She looked at the fire.
“I happened to be sitting there while he got something off his chest.”
That got a laugh out of her, wet and unlovely, and Jason’s hat stopped turning.
“I’m going up,” she said.
“I’ll come.”
“No.” She stood. She put a hand on his face, and he turned into it, and she left it there long enough for one breath of his under her palm. “This one’s mine. You had yours at dinner.”
“I’ll be here.”
“I know.” She bent and kissed him, in the lobby, with the girl at the desk pretending very hard to read. “That’s the part I keep counting on.”
Her father answered the door in his shirtsleeves with the tie gone and the top button open, which she’d seen perhaps four times. Behind him the suite was exactly as he kept every suite, a laptop squared to the desk edge, a glass on a coaster, nothing out of place.
The envelope was on the desk. Folded once down the middle, sitting on top of a stack of bills. So the Aviary had found him.
“Cecelia.”
“He told me.”
“I expected as much. He said he would.” He stepped back to let her in, and he didn’t sit, and neither did she. “He’s an honest man, your cowboy. I’ll give him that. Honest men are expensive to be around.”
“Is that what tonight was? Finding out his price?”
“Tonight was finding out whether he had one.” Her father went to the window.
The parking lot ended at the tree line and past that the mountains were a darker dark.
“Everyone does, Cecelia. I’ve bought councils.
I’ve bought governors’ aides. I have never once, in thirty years, had a man put my own money back on my side of a table and pay for his own dinner. ”
“Good.”
“It doesn’t change anything.”
“It changes everything, and you know it, or you’d be on the phone to Billings instead of standing at a window.”
He didn’t turn around. He didn’t answer. She waited it out, and the waiting was the new part, and she was getting better at it.
“You’ve held that money over me since I was nineteen,” she said.
“The trust. My salary. Every apartment I’ve lived in and every suit in my closet.
I never once asked what it cost me. I thought that was loyalty.
” She took a breath. “Tonight you tried to spend it on the one person in my life you don’t own.
That’s not looking after me, Dad. That’s making sure nobody else can. ”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. It’s accurate. You taught me the difference.”
His hand went to the back of the desk chair and stayed there. The envelope sat beside it, six inches from his fingers.
“Take it, then.”
She’d been braced for a lot of things. Not that.
“It’s yours. He said as much and he was right.” Her father picked it up and held it out, still creased. “Your trust. Released. Do what you want with it. Rent an office over a flower shop, if that’s what this has all been for.”
She looked at the envelope. She looked at his hand, which wasn’t as sure as it had been at nineteen, or at the council, or across a tablecloth at the Aviary.
“No.”
“Cecelia.”
“Not like this. Not as an apology you can’t say and a leash you can’t put down.
” She stepped back from it, one step, so there’d be no mistake.
“I told you in that suite across the hall that we were both about to find out what I’m worth without you.
I meant it. You don’t get to end the experiment because you didn’t like tonight’s results. ”
Her father’s arm came down by degrees. He set the envelope on the desk again, on the same stack, and squared it to the edge the same as the laptop, and it came to her that he didn’t know what else to do with his hands.
“The hearing,” she said. “Are you going to present?”
“I don’t withdraw, Cecelia. You know that. I’ll stand up in that gymnasium and make the case, and they’ll vote, and I’ll live with it.” He said it to the window. “I’ve lost before. I don’t make a habit of it.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’d assumed.”
“Front row. Their side.” She let him have that. “Not against you. I want to be where you can see me. I’ve spent my whole life standing behind you. I’d like you to know what I look like from the front.”
He turned from the window then.
He looked older than he had in the hallway, and he’d looked old then. His eyes went over her face as if he were reading it for a change, and he must have found whatever he was looking for. His shoulders came down and stayed down.
“You’ll wear the gray suit,” he said.
“I’ll wear what I want.”
“It’s what you wore to the council.” He almost smiled. “It’s a good suit. I bought it.”
“I know. I’m keeping it.”
She went to the door. She had her hand on it when he spoke, and it was the hallway again, the man who’d lost his footing once and found it.
“Did he tell you I ordered the trout?”
She stood there with her hand on the knob and the whole ugly beautiful day behind her, and she didn’t turn around either, because she’d learned it from him.
“I told you to,” she said, and went out.