Chapter 13
Winslow
The ninth Thursday it stormed and he came anyway.
He came in with his coat soaked through the shoulders and had his shoes off before she said anything about the shoes. He'd stopped in town and brought nothing, which she noticed, and which she had by then understood to be on purpose.
They did forty minutes of the ordinary. The chair's bus. A witness list. A man on the committee staff who had started bringing a thermos of soup to markups and setting it on the table.
"Soup," Winslow said.
"Vegetable. He offers it around."
"Does anybody take it?"
"Hobson took a cup in November and I've never seen a man look so trapped."
She laughed, and it ran four seconds past where it should have, and she picked her cup up to have somewhere to put her face.
The power went out at ten past seven.
They were four minutes from the end of the hour. Callum was in the middle of a sentence about a witness list. The lights went, the refrigerator wound down, and the whole house dropped to the gray coming off the water through the west windows.
"You've got candles?" he said.
"Under the sink."
He got them out from under the sink with his phone in his teeth, which took a while. He knocked a bottle over doing it and set it upright again without comment.
He put four of them in the mouths of four mismatched jars, which was correct, and he did not make one joke about it. The kitchen came up yellow and small around the table.
He sat back down.
"Nine minutes," Winslow said. "You went over."
"I'll go."
"You'll go up that gravel in the dark in this."
He put his hands on the table.
They sat there.
The refrigerator had gone off with the power and the house had that particular deadness a house gets when the machinery quits. Out the west windows the water was the color of the sky and neither had anything on it.
"Ask me something," she said.
"Winslow—"
"You've asked me one question a week for nine weeks and every one of them has been about my footage. Ask me a different one."
The rain came across the roof in a long push and let off again.
"You've got nine weeks of questions saved up," she said. "Don't tell me you don't."
"I've got about four hundred."
"Then that's not the one I'd have bet on."
"It's the one I want."
"Why'd you stop having a hobby," Callum said.
She laughed once. It came out wrong. She pressed her thumb hard into the middle of her palm under the table.
"That's what you want?"
"You said a different one."
"All right." She let go of her palm. "In 2019 I turned down a film.
Six weeks in Kentucky, a woman I'd been trying to get for two years.
She finally said yes. I said no. It was six weeks, it was your first cycle, and Dara needed the house for the county chairs.
I didn't tell you about it. I didn't want you to talk me into it, which is what you'd have done, and then I'd have gone, and I'd have owed you for it forever. "
He didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "Two years," with nothing after it, and she understood that he was doing arithmetic on his own wife and coming up short.
The rain came again and let off. The candles moved and settled. She made herself keep going while the going was possible.
"And here's the piece I've never told anybody, so let me get it out in one run.
The money made it easy. If I'd needed the work I'd have gone to Kentucky, because the rent would have made me go, and instead I sat in a house where nothing was going to happen to me either way and I picked the easier week. "
"Winslow."
"That's not a complaint about your family."
"It sounds like—"
"It isn't. Poor women don't get to quit, that's all I'm saying. I got to quit. I called it a sacrifice. It was a sacrifice, and it was also the softest option in the room, and I took it."
"So I said no, and I put the camera in a closet, and here's the part I've never said to anybody.
" Her voice had gone unsteady and she let it.
"I was relieved. That's the thing I can't get past about myself.
I was relieved, Callum. If I never made another one, nobody ever got to find out that the first one was luck. "
"It wasn't luck."
"You don't know that. You've never watched it."
She said it to be cruel. She'd have admitted that under oath. It was the one thing she had left that could reach him and she picked it up and swung it.
He looked up.
"I've watched it eleven times," he said.
"You have not."
"I watched it in a hotel in Bristol in February and I had to stop it twice.
" He said it plainly, with no shape on it.
"I watched it the week the profile came out.
I've watched the last nine minutes more than eleven times.
I couldn't tell you a single thing about how you did it.
I just know that woman at the end puts her hand on the fence and I have to get up and walk around a room. "
The candles went sideways with a draft off the window and came back.
"Ask me one," he said.
"No."
"Winslow."
"If I ask you one I'm going to ask you the real one and I've been not asking it for eight years."
"Then ask it."
"Ask me one," he said.
"No."
"Winslow."
"If I ask you one I'm going to ask you the real one, and I've been not asking it for eight years."
"Then ask it."
She looked at the table for a long moment. Her own breath was the loudest thing in the room.
"Why did we never talk about children," she said.
He went so still that the candle flame was the only moving thing in the room.
"You walked through this house in 2018 pointing at doors," Winslow said.
"This one and this one. And I laughed at you.
We bought it. We came out here every June and never had one conversation about it.
Not one. Not once in eight years. I stopped hoping in the third year.
I never told you and you never asked me.
Every single June we came out here. I walked past those two rooms and went and got the sheets. "
Callum put his hand over his face and kept it there until she nearly said his name.
"Say something," she said.
"I'm trying to do it without—" He stopped.
He took the hand down. "I stopped asking.
I'd decided you'd stopped wanting it. That's the whole reason and it's a stupid one.
You went quiet in that year, I decided what the quiet meant in about four seconds, and I never checked.
It was easier to have decided than to sit in a room and find out. "
"Easier."
"Yes."
"That's it?"
"That's it. That's the truth and it doesn't get better with more words.
" His voice had gone rough at the bottom.
"I wanted them. I have wanted them since I was thirty-one years old and I have never said that sentence out loud in my life, including right now to my wife, at forty, in the dark, with the power out. "
Winslow's hand had come up over her mouth at some point.
"I didn't say it. I'd have had to hear you say no," he said. "And I couldn't run that. There's no version of that conversation I could have run."
"There was a night in 2020," she said. "You came home from the Ashland thing at midnight. I was awake. You sat on the end of the bed with your shoes on, and I thought, he's going to say it. I had a whole answer ready. I'd had it ready for about a year."
"What was the answer?"
"Yes." Her voice went on her. "That was the whole answer. It was one word and I'd been carrying it around like a stone."
Callum made a sound and put both hands down on the table.
"I took my shoes off and went to sleep," he said.
"You did."
"I remember that night. I remember sitting there."
"I know you do. That's why I brought it up."
"You don't run a conversation with me."
"I have run every conversation with you since 2019," Callum said. "That's what I'm telling you. That's the whole confession. There's nothing under it."
The rain let off. The house made a noise settling somewhere over their heads and neither of them looked up.
"Say something else," Winslow said. "Anything. I can't be the only one in this room right now."
"I've got a thing and it's small."
"Small is fine."
"I keep the door of that room in Roanoke shut." Callum turned his cup a quarter turn on the table. "The one at the end of the hall with the window on the side. I've kept it shut since about 2019 and never given anybody a reason. Nadine asked me about it in the spring and I told her it was drafty."
"Is it drafty?"
"It's the warmest room in the house."
The candles leaned and came back.
"I've been shutting a door for six years so I wouldn't have to walk past it," he said. "That's the whole thing. There's nothing under that either."
Winslow put her hand flat on the table and left it there.
She got up to give her hands work. There was no work. She stood at the counter with her back to him and her palms down on it.
The chair went. His weight came across the floor.
The floor took his weight twice on the way over and then not at all.
He stopped a foot behind her and did not touch her.
"I'm going to go," he said, from there.
"Callum."
"I'm going to go. If I stand here another thirty seconds I'm going to put my hand on your back, and then you'd have to decide a thing tonight that you shouldn't have to decide tonight."
Winslow's eyes were shut. Her whole body had come up onto the balls of her feet without one instruction from her.
"That's the first time in ten years you've told me what you were about to do instead of doing it," she said.
"I've been practicing."
"Don't be charming."
"That wasn't charming. I've actually been practicing. I say things out loud in the car before I get here. Then I don't say them when I get here. It's the stupidest thing I've ever done, and it works."
"Callum."
"Yeah."
"That's the most romantic sentence anybody's said to me in six years and I'd like you to leave."
"Yeah."
"I don't know what to do with that."
"You don't have to do anything with it."
He was close enough that the warmth off him came along her shoulder blade. Neither of them moved for a length of time she could not afterward account for.
Then he stepped back. The floor gave under his weight. His coat came off the chair with a sound.
"Thursday," he said.
"Thursday."
"I'll bring nothing."
"I know you will."
"I'll be here at six."
"You're always here at six."
"I know," he said, from the door, in the dark, "and I want you to know I've never once been late to this house since February, and that's the whole of what I've got to show for six months."
The door shut. The car started. She stood at that counter with her palms down on it and the candles going, heart slamming in her jaw. It was a long while before she trusted herself to turn around.