Chapter 10
Winslow
There was no getting out of the water tour.
Six counties in four days, announced in November, printed on a card with her name on it, a bus, eleven reporters, and a bill going to markup in a week.
Dara called her about it twice and was so careful on the phone that Winslow finally said, "Dara, stop, I'll be at the bus," and Dara exhaled for about nine seconds.
So she packed for four days and drove to Wytheville and got on a bus with her husband.
She had done nine of these. She could pack for one in twenty minutes, and she did, and she stood in the kitchen at the lake house afterward looking at the bag on the floor.
Tessa called about the rooms.
"Mrs. Fairbanks, I've got you and the senator in one room at each stop, and I wanted to check that."
"Two rooms."
"Two rooms, adjoining?"
"Two rooms, not adjoining, and Tessa, if anybody in that building asks you why, you tell them I've been sleeping badly."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And I'd take it as a kindness if nobody asked you."
"Nobody's going to ask me," Tessa said, in a voice that meant four people already had.
Day one was Grayson and Carroll, and it was fine.
That was the horror of it. They were excellent.
She fed him names in a school gymnasium and he took them without looking at her.
She stood at three-quarters with her chin up.
At a fish hatchery outside Galax a photographer asked them to walk toward the truck together and they did it perfectly on the first take.
The bus was a rented coach with a wrap on it and eleven reporters in the back half.
It had a bathroom nobody used and a driver named Percy, who had run this route two cycles and knew where every rough shoulder was.
The family had offered the plane in November.
Dara had killed it in about nine seconds, on the grounds that a man who talks about six hundred and forty households does not arrive by air.
Callum agreed instantly. Winslow watched the whole exchange from a doorway and said nothing.
Ninety minutes into day one a woman at a school gymnasium in Hillsville took Winslow's hand in both of hers.
"I've been praying on y'all," the woman said.
"That's kind."
"My husband and I went through a hard patch in '09. Fourteen months." She squeezed. "You just hold on."
"Thank you."
"You just hold on, honey."
Winslow held on to a stranger's hands in a school gymnasium and thanked her twice and got out to the hallway before her face did anything.
At the motel that night she had room 114 and he had room 116. She lay on top of the covers with her shoes on while a television went through the wall.
Day two was Smyth and Washington, plus a two-hour drive with the press bus behind them. By the second evening she'd said maybe forty words to him, all of them useful.
At a treatment plant outside Chilhowie they were put on a catwalk over a settling basin for photographs, side by side, with a man from the county explaining the aeration to nobody.
"Little closer," the photographer said.
They got a little closer.
"Ma'am, can you turn in toward him?"
She turned in toward him. His sleeve was against her arm. The coffee off the bus was still on his breath. Neither of them looked at the other for the whole of it. It took ninety seconds, and the picture ran on the front of two papers with the word unified in the caption.
Afterward Callum said, "I'm sorry about the catwalk."
"It's the job."
"It's not your job."
"Callum, it's been my job for ten years," Winslow said, and walked down the stairs ahead of him.
The reporters were the worst of it. Eleven of them had read the Sentinel piece, and eleven of them wanted her, and Dara ran a wall in front of her at every stop for two days without being asked.
The wall failed once. Outside a diner in Abingdon a young man from the Bristol paper got between her and the bus with a recorder already up.
"Mrs. Fairbanks, have you read the profile?"
"I have."
"Any reaction to what the senator said about your marriage?"
Winslow looked at him. He was about twenty-five. He had a cowlick and a coat that was too thin for the weather, and he'd waited an hour in a parking lot to ask a woman about the worst year of her life.
"You should ask him," she said. "He's better at it than I am."
It got a laugh out of the two reporters behind him, which was the point. It was on three sites by the afternoon as gracious, which was also the point. She sat on the bus afterward with her hands folded and hated every single thing about how good she was at that.
Callum came down the aisle twenty minutes later and stopped at her seat.
"You didn't have to do that," he said.
"I know."
"Win—"
"Don't thank me. If you thank me it becomes a favor, and then it's something between us, and I've got nothing to put anything on right now."
He went back up the aisle.
On the third morning she came out of 114 at twenty of seven and he was in the parking lot with two coffees, standing by the bus door in the cold. He handed her one without a word. He did not follow her onto the bus.
She drank it. It was correct. Two sugars, no milk, which she had not told anybody in that office and had not told him in about four years.
On the third morning the road to the Bland County treatment plant washed out.
Dara rerouted the bus the long way around, ninety minutes. There was one truck going up the direct road and one seat left in it.
"Take it," Callum said. "I'll ride the bus."
"Don't be ridiculous."
She got in.
Then the driver got a call and got out to deal with a gate. They were alone in a parked truck on a gravel pull-off, heater running, forty minutes to burn.
Neither of them said anything for eleven of them.
A hawk sat on a fence post out in the field and did not move for eleven minutes.
"I'm going to try something," Callum said.
"Callum—"
"It's not a speech. I promise you it's not a speech, and if it turns into one you can tell me and I'll stop talking for the rest of the day."
She didn't answer. He took that as what it was.
"I liked who I was in that room," he said.
The heater blew. The hawk stayed on the post.
"That's it," he said. "That's the whole thing. I liked who I was in the war room. I did not like who I was in ours. So I picked the room."
Winslow did not move.
"I keep trying to make that sound better," Callum said.
"I've had four months. Every version I build has a reason in it, and the reasons are all real, the pressure, the schedule, your quiet, my quiet, all of it, and none of it is the actual thing.
The actual thing is I liked myself over there. I'm not going to dress it."
He wasn't looking at her. He was looking out the windshield with his hands on his knees, and his voice had gone plain in a way she had not heard out of him in twelve years, flat and slightly rough, no build in it anywhere, no landing at the end.
He didn't add anything. That was what got her. He said the ugliest available sentence about himself and then he sat there and let it be the last thing in the truck.
Her eyes were burning and she kept them on the fence post.
"That's the first true thing you've said to me since October," she said.
"I know."
"Don't say 'I know' like that's a win."
"It's not a win." He rubbed his thumb across his knuckle. "It took me four months and a washed-out road."
The hawk went off the post and out over the field, and neither of them watched it go.
"Can I ask you one," she said.
"Yes."
"Did you tell her about the pantry before or after you told me the tour went fine?"
Callum's hands stayed on his knees.
"Before," he said. "By about six weeks."
"Okay."
"Do you want the date?"
"No." Her eyes stayed on the empty post. "I wanted to see whether you'd shape it."
"I'm not going to shape anything at you again as long as I live," he said. "I know that's a sentence. I know sentences are the problem. I'd rather say it and be wrong than not say it."
"That's the closest you've come to a build in an hour."
"I'm aware."
"You caught it, though."
"I caught it about four words in."
"That's new," she said.
"I can't do the Wednesday phone calls anymore," Winslow said.
He went very still.
"Nine minutes about a pool house," she said. "I stand at the sink afterward with my hand over my mouth. I'd rather have nothing than nine polite minutes."
"Okay."
"So here's what I'll do, and I want you to hear the size of it, because it is not very big.
" She made herself turn her head. "One conversation a week.
A real one, in a room, no phone, no schedule, no assembly.
You get an hour. You don't get to prepare it.
If I hear a build in it, I leave, and I mean that literally, I will get up and put my coat on. "
"Winslow—"
"That's not forgiveness. That's not a door open. That's me agreeing to be in a room with you for an hour a week, and if you tell one person in your family that it's more than that, I'll stop."
"I won't tell anybody."
"You'll tell your mother."
"...I'll tell my mother."
It came out of her before she could stop it. One short laugh, ugly, involuntary. She put her hand up over her face, because of how badly she did not want to have made that sound.
Callum looked at the windshield. He had the sense, for once in his life, not to touch it.
"Say the last part again," she said.
"Which part."
"The part where you picked the room."
Callum kept his eyes on the windshield.
"I liked who I was over there," he said. "I didn't like who I was in ours. So I picked the room."
"Every day."
"Every day for four years. I'd get in the car in the morning glad to be leaving my own house, and I never once said that to myself in words until August, and I've said it to myself in words every day since."
The heater blew. Out in the field the grass had that dead February color that goes silver when the wind turns it over.
"You're not going to like what I do with that," Winslow said.
"I know."
"You don't get to know. You don't get to be one step ahead of me on this. That's the whole—" She stopped and got her voice down. "That's the thing."
"Then I don't know," he said, "and I'd rather not know."
The driver came back, got in, and said the gate was somebody else's problem now.
They went up the mountain to a water treatment plant, and there was a woman there with a clipboard who had been running the intake for twenty-six years and wanted the senator to look at a valve.
"That valve is older than my marriage," she said.
"How long's the marriage?"
"Thirty-one years."
"Then I'd like to meet the man who talked you into that."
"He's in the truck," the woman said. "He won't come in. He says he's been in here enough." Callum shook eleven hands and gave a four-minute talk with the joke about the interstate in it, and Winslow stood at three-quarters with her chin up.
On the drive out she looked at the back of his head and thought, with no warmth in it whatsoever, Thursday.