10. Marcus
MARCUS
The cold came down off the peaks that night hard enough to feel personal, and the house, half-sealed and full of holes, gave it every way in.
I'd meant to leave at dark, same as always.
Then the thermometer on the porch dropped past anything that little east room and its two heaters could hold against, and I stood by my truck with the door open and the dome light burning and could not make myself get in.
A man doesn't drive off a mountain and leave a person in a building that won't hold heat, not when the person is the only warm thing in it, not when he's the one who didn't finish the walls.
So I didn't. I told myself it was the cold.
The cold was true. It just wasn't the whole truth, and three in the morning is where the truth lives, and I'd been steering clear of that hour for three years.
I dragged the good heater into the parlor, the one room with most of its plaster back, and we sat on the drop cloths with our backs against Sully's mantel and the orange bar of the element between us throwing the only light.
Dozer made a furred semicircle around the warmth and went boneless.
Outside, the wind worked the loose corner of the turret tarp, a slow patient flap, the house breathing through its bad tooth.
She had a bottle. Of course she had a bottle.
"Dale gave it to me," she said, holding it up to the heater so the glass went amber. "Homemade. He was very solemn about it. He said it's cider and I should respect it."
"It's not cider."
"What is it?"
"It's a decision Dale made in a shed in October that the rest of us have to live with." I took the bottle, worked the cork, smelled it, and my eyes watered. "He's been aging this since the Carter administration. It'll either fix what's wrong with you or finish the job."
"Bold of you to assume I want it fixed." She held out a chipped enamel mug. "Pour."
I poured two fingers, then, at her flat unimpressed look, a third.
She'd shed the bright daytime version of herself somewhere around the second cup, the one that performs even when the camera's off.
What was left was quieter and harder to look away from, a woman sitting cross-legged on a drop cloth in a dead man's house, cold-nosed and tired and not selling me anything.
I had spent my whole life being immune to people.
It is a strange thing to feel the immunity wear thin in real time, like frost going off a windshield.
So I poured. It tasted the way a barn smells, with an aftertaste of regret, and it set a small fire going behind the breastbone that the heater couldn't reach, and after the second cup the room got that soft loose feeling rooms get when nobody's keeping score and nobody's filming.
Her phone stayed dark on the floorboards the whole time.
I noticed that. I notice everything she doesn't do with that camera now, the way you notice a dog that's stopped barking.
We talked about nothing for a while, the safe nothing, the salvage and the schedule and which of Dale's opinions on marriage were felonies in most states.
"Tell me a true thing about Dale," she said. "One I can't get from the man himself, because he'd just turn it into a metaphor and charge me for the screws."
"He proposed to Donna three times before she said yes. First two times he did it with words and made a mess of it. Third time he rebuilt her front steps without being asked and left the ring sitting on the new rail."
She pressed a hand flat to her chest. "That is the most romantic thing I have ever heard, and he can never know I know it."
"He'd deny it. He'd call it carpentry."
Then the talk thinned out the way it does past midnight, down to the load-bearing things, and a silence opened up that wasn't uncomfortable, which is the most dangerous kind.
She broke it. But gently, for her.
"Can I ask you something you won't answer?"
"You can ask."
"Were you ever married?"
The wind flapped the tarp. The element ticked.
I have a whole system for this question, built over three years, and most of it is leaving the room.
But the room was warm and the cider was doing what Dale brews it to do, and she'd turned the camera off without my asking, and so for once I didn't leave.
"Yeah," I said.
She didn't pounce on it. That was the thing.
Anybody else would have leaned in with the follow-up, the how-long, the what-happened, the soft predatory interest people get when they smell a wound.
She just nodded, like I'd told her the weather, and looked at the heater, and waited to see if there was more, without needing there to be.
"It ended bad," I said, to the orange bar and not to her. "I'm not good at people. I work alone for a reason. That's about the size of it." I turned the mug in my hands. "Consider it a warning label. The kind they put on things that have already hurt somebody."
"Most people, when they say that, want you to argue them out of it." She wasn't looking at me either. We were two people having a conversation with a heater. "They say they're broken, and they're hoping you'll rush in and swear they're not."
"I'm not hoping that."
"I know. That's the part that makes me believe you." She pulled her knees up and set her chin on them. "Okay. Warning noted and respected. I'm not going to try to fix a thing that didn't ask to be fixed." A beat. "I just also reserve the right to keep sitting next to it."
It undid me a little, that. She filed the warning where she files load and weather, and went on sitting beside me, knee almost to mine.
Then, because she was fair, she paid me back in the only currency worth anything at that hour.
"Mine wasn't a marriage. It was the closest thing, and it was also a business, which is its own special way to get gutted, because you lose the person and the paperwork in the same week.
He ended up with my name on the door and my money in the account, and I ended up with a fresh start I couldn't afford.
There's a worse part than that. I don't tell it at three in the morning, not even to a man who just handed me a warning label of his own. But that's the shape of it."
I'd known there was something behind all the noise. You don't get that loud unless you're covering something. But I hadn't known it had teeth like that, and I felt the old useless anger come up in me on behalf of a woman I had no right to be angry for.
"What was his name?" I said. Not because I'd do anything. Because some part of me wanted to know the shape of the thing that had hurt her, the way I'd want to know the species of a snake.
"Doesn't matter." She almost smiled. "That's the part I'm proudest of. It used to matter so much. Now it's just a name I send to voicemail."
"You don't have to do the thing you're not doing," she added.
"The going-and-finding-him thing. I can see you not doing it.
It's nice." She tipped her head back against the mantel.
"But I already did the finding. I drove four hundred miles and bought the ugliest house in Colorado. That was the finding."
"Did it work?"
"Ask me in six months." She looked around the half-built parlor, the heater, the dog, the man. "Some days it's already working better than I planned."
We sat with that. The heater hummed. Dozer ran in his sleep, paws twitching at some better, simpler life. I envied him the simplicity of it. A dog wants warmth and meat and the people he's decided on, and he never once talks himself out of a single one of them.
"We're a pair," she said finally. "Two people who got cleaned out and ran uphill."
"You ran uphill. I never left." I looked at her then, full on, which I'd been rationing all night. "This is uphill for me. This is the mountain."
"Then I'm honored," she said, and didn't turn it into a joke, which from her is nearly a vow. "You climbed your own mountain just to fight me about crown molding."
"Somebody had to."
"No," she said. "Nobody had to. That's the part you keep missing."
It was more than I meant to give her, and she knew it, and she had the grace not to make it into anything out loud.
But something shifted in the warm air between us, the way the temperature changes a half second before weather, and I watched her hold very still inside it, and I knew she felt it too.
Neither of us reached for the safe noise.
That was the new thing. A month ago she'd have filled a silence like that on reflex, talked us both back to dry land.
Now she just let it stand, and I let it stand, and the two of us sat there at the bottom of the night with the heater ticking and the dog twitching and a quiet between us that had stopped being empty and started being full, which is a different country entirely, and a harder one to leave.
She finished her cider. She held the empty mug out for me to set on the floor, because the floor on her side was a minefield of tools and she trusted me to know where the clear spot was.
I reached for the mug. My hand closed over hers around it.
That was the mistake, or the truth, or both.
I'd done it a hundred times with a hundred tools, handed off and taken back, never once leaving my hand where it landed.
This time I left it. Her fingers were cold from the cup and warm underneath, and neither of us moved, and the whole house seemed to hold its breath with us, the wind dropping, the element going quiet between ticks.
Her chin came up. I leaned in, a fraction, the smallest distance a man has ever talked himself into crossing, close enough to feel the cider-warm air of her breath, close enough that her eyes had already begun to close.
Dozer hit the stack of paint cans like a furry artillery shell.
I have no idea what he was after. A mouse, a dream, the simple animal need to ruin a moment.
The cans went over in a rolling clattering avalanche, a gallon of primer doing a full somersault, and the dog scrambled up barking at his own catastrophe, and the spell didn't so much break as detonate.
We came apart laughing, the helpless kind, the kind that's mostly nerves let out the only door they could find, her hand sliding out from under mine, both of us suddenly very interested in the dog, the cans, anything that wasn't the half inch I'd almost closed.
"Bad dog," she said, wiping her eyes. "Worst dog. Hero dog."
"He's got better instincts than I do." I'd said it before, about her, the day she moved in. I meant it differently now, and worse.
I got up before the laughing could settle into something I'd have to look at.
Stacked the cans I could reach. Told her the heater would hold till morning now that the wind was laying down.
Told her to lock nothing, since there was nothing to lock, and to call the diner if the power went, because the diner had a generator and Hazel had a soft spot and I would not be answering my phone, which was a lie I needed her to believe.
Then I went out to my truck in a cold that had stopped being the reason for anything.
I sat with my hands on the wheel and did not start it for a while.
Inside, the one lit window. Out here, my own heart going like a man half my age and twice as stupid.
I had handed that woman a warning label not three hours ago, in good faith, and then I had leaned across a bottle of Dale's poison and very nearly proved every word of it wrong.
I did not know which version of me had been lying.
I suspected it was the careful one. The careful one usually is.
That's the trouble with being careful. You spend so long studying the drop that you forget the only reason you're standing this close to the edge of it is that some part of you decided to jump a long time ago, and has just been waiting for the rest of you to quit arguing.
I drove down eventually. Behind me, I knew without seeing it, she was lying on the camp bed in the dark with the dog and the cold and the quiet, doing the same arithmetic I was, coming out, I'd have bet the truck, at the same wrong and impossible number.
A smarter man would have called it off in the morning, found her another carpenter, the way I threatened to once already.
I had the name. I had the number. I did not make the call.
I have never in my life been any good at protecting myself from the one thing I want, which is the whole reason I work so hard at wanting nothing at all.