Chapter 12
Winslow
The trouble started with a rooster.
Not a real one. In their second year, driving back from a wedding in Ohio with a hangover apiece, they had gone through a town with a fiberglass rooster on a pole outside a feed store, twenty feet of it, red and gold, visible from the interstate and completely useless for anything.
Callum had pulled over. He had made her get out of the car.
He had stood in a gravel lot at nine in the morning and made a four-minute speech about the rooster's civic contributions until she'd had to sit down on the bumper.
For eight years after that, a rooster was anything too big and too proud to be any use. A donor's boat. A colleague's staircase. A press release.
The house in Roanoke was a rooster and they both knew it.
Nine thousand square feet, bought in 2017 off a man who'd built it for a wife who left before the flooring went in, and Callum had walked the empty front room with his hands in his pockets and said, "Well, this is absurd," and Winslow had said, "It's a rooster," and they had bought it that afternoon anyway.
The family had expected them to buy it. It was, everybody agreed, an appropriate house.
She hadn't used the word in three years.
Tessa called on a Monday about the calendar.
"Mrs. Fairbanks, I've got the summer draft. Should I keep holding you on the June events?"
"Hold them."
"All of them?"
"All of them. And Tessa, when you print that draft, print one copy. Put it in an envelope and don't leave it on a desk."
"I always put yours in an envelope," Tessa said, with a small note of injury in it.
Winslow apologized, got off the phone, and sat down on the step with her hand over her eyes. There was a twenty-six-year-old in Richmond who had been protecting her privacy for two years without ever being asked to.
The sixth Thursday he was telling her about the new committee chair's plan for the fall session, patiently, plainly, eleven minutes of it without one flourish in it. It involved a listening tour, a bus, a wrap, and a slogan.
"That's a rooster," Winslow said.
It came out of her mouth on its own. She heard it leave.
Callum stopped mid-sentence. He looked at the table.
"It's a hell of a rooster," he said.
Neither of them laughed. That was the strange part. They sat in a cold kitchen at a table covered in index cards and did not laugh. The word sat there between the coffee cups. Winslow's throat had gone so tight she had to put her cup down.
"I should get on," he said, at forty-one minutes.
"You've got fourteen left."
"Yeah."
He got on.
She stood at the window and watched the headlights swing up through the trees. Then she did a thing she had not done in four months, which was cry standing up in her own kitchen without any idea what she was crying about.
Nadine came out that Saturday with a box of things nobody had asked for. Two towels, a lamp, a bag of the coffee Winslow liked and could not find in town, and a Pyrex dish with a rubber lid.
"That's a lamp."
"It's a lamp from the guest room. You've got one bulb going in that whole front room, and it's yellow."
"Nadine."
"I'm going to say one thing about the senator and then I'm going to look at your porch. That rail's coming loose."
"You don't have to say a thing about the senator."
"He asked me on Tuesday whether you'd want the good pillows out here." Nadine set the box on the counter. "I told him I'd ask you. He said don't ask her, and then he stood in that hallway another minute, and then he went to work."
Winslow put both hands on the counter.
"Did you bring the pillows?"
"They're in the truck," Nadine said, and went out to look at the porch.
The seventh Thursday he brought nothing and said almost nothing, and at minute forty she asked him a question she had not planned.
"What's the thing you're most afraid of about the fall session?"
Callum looked at the table for a while.
"That I'll get the bill and it won't feel like anything," he said. "That's the honest one. Every big thing I've ever gotten has felt like about nine minutes of weather and then nothing, and I keep telling myself the next one's the real one."
"That's a hell of a way to spend a life."
"Yes, it is."
He didn't build on it. He didn't turn it. He drank his coffee and asked her about the Grayson County woman's shoebox, and left at fifty-five minutes.
The problem was that she was softening.
It was happening in her the way weather changes in a bad knee, and she despised it. It was not gratitude. It was not pity, and she had checked. It was worse than that. It was that he had stopped being interesting.
Blaire called on a Wednesday and talked for forty minutes about a dog with a torn ligament. She never once said her brother's name, which was so plainly deliberate that Winslow nearly said thank you and didn't.
That was the thing nobody warned you about a real grovel.
He came out every Thursday and he was dull.
He had no build in him anymore. He talked about culvert language, a woman with a jar, the chair's bus.
He asked her one question, then shut up and let her answer the whole of it.
When he was done he left, and there was nothing in any of it to push against.
She had spent four months braced for eloquence. She had a wall built for eloquence. It was a fine wall. He had stopped throwing anything at it.
***
The New York money question came up that week too, in a way she did not enjoy.
Adair called about a foundation matter and then, at the end of it, in the friendliest possible voice, asked whether Winslow had considered simply funding the film herself.
"With what?"
"With the discretionary. You've had a discretionary line since 2016, Winslow. Nobody's ever told you the number?"
Winslow stood very still in a cold kitchen.
"No," she said.
"Well." A pause on the New York end that went on slightly too long. "I've said the wrong thing."
"You've said an accurate thing."
"Winslow—"
"Adair, I'm not upset with you. I want to be clear about that, because you're about to spend a week thinking I am." She put her hand on the counter. "Send me the number. Don't send it to my husband."
Gideon called on the first of April at nine in the morning, which was decent of him, since they both knew he'd been awake since five.
"So," he said.
"Gideon."
"I'm going to be very professional and then I'm going to be very unprofessional, and I'd appreciate it if you'd let me do them in that order."
"Go."
"Kestrel needs a director's commitment for episodes two and five by end of week. Shoot starts the ninth of June. Nine months, Philadelphia for the cut. I've protected your name and your final say on your two. I have to give them a name by Friday."
Winslow put her forehead against the window frame.
Out on the water it was doing the thing it did in the first week of April, gray and moving, with the dogwood coming out white along the far bank in patches.
"I need more time," she said.
"How much."
"I don't know. That's the honest answer. I don't know, and I know that's not a thing you can take to a network."
There was a silence on the line that went on a beat too long.
"Okay," Gideon said. "Here's the unprofessional part.
I can hold it to the first shoot day. I can't hold it past that, and holding it that long is going to cost me a fight with a woman named Priya who is going to be right and I'm going to lose.
So that's June the ninth. It's the last date I've got, and I want you to know I'm buying it for you and not for the show. "
"Don't do that."
"It's done. I did it before I called."
"Gideon—"
"Winslow." He said it evenly. "Can I say the thing?"
She sat down on the arm of the couch.
"Say it."
"He's out there every week."
"How do you—"
"Because you told me, three weeks ago, in a sentence about a dock cleat, and you didn't notice you'd told me.
" He let that sit. "I'm not going to compete with a man's grovel.
It's not a fair fight and I'd lose it and I'd deserve to.
I'm just going to say one thing and then I'll go back to being your friend, which I'd like to remain. "
"Okay."
"With me it would be easy."
She closed her eyes.
Out the window a heron came down the shoreline low over the water and put itself on a stump.
"I don't mean that as a boast, it's not a boast, easy is not a virtue," Gideon said.
"I mean it as information. You'd get up, you'd work, I'd be interested in the work, and you would never once in nine months have to stand in a kitchen wondering whether the man across from you meant it.
You'd have your name on a thing. You'd be forty-two and good at what you're for. "
"Gideon."
"That's on the table. It's a real thing on the table, and I'd be a coward not to say so."
"Can I say the ugly part?"
"I'd prefer it."
"Part of what you're offering me is that it would be mine," Winslow said. "Not the show. The whole arrangement. An apartment I paid for out of money I earned, and a job nobody in a family gave me, and nobody calling to ask whether I want two seats held."
"That's not ugly."
"It's ugly if the reason I want it is that badly."
She sat with her hand over her eyes for a while.
"You're right," she said. "That's the whole trouble with you, honestly. You're right about all of it."
"That doesn't sound like a yes."
"It isn't."
"No." He exhaled. "June the ninth."
She hung up and put the phone face down on the couch and sat there.
She got up after a while and went out and stood on the dock in her coat.
Adair's number arrived that night in an email with no message attached to it. Winslow looked at the subject line for eleven seconds and archived it without opening the thing.
Eight years ago Callum had stood on this dock in June with a beer in his hand, pointing at the far bank, inventing a whole family for the people in the yellow house.
A man named Duane with a grievance about a boundary line.
She had laughed until she had to sit down on the boards.
She could not remember what year that stopped either.
It seemed important that she couldn't, and she stood out there in the cold trying to place it and got nowhere.
Here was what she could not get around, and she'd been trying to get around it for six weeks. Gideon was a decent man offering her a decent life, and there was not one thing in it that made her afraid.
Twice that month she got in the truck after he'd gone, drove to the top of the gravel, and sat up there with the engine running for eleven or twelve minutes doing nothing at all. Then she drove back down and went inside.
She told nobody about that, including herself, in any sentence that would have counted.
Callum came out every Thursday, said dull true things about culverts for fifty-five minutes, and left.
She stood at that window afterward every single week with her whole chest hurting.
That was the one she'd have chosen if somebody had made her pick right then, and she hated it, and she was not remotely ready to say so out loud.