CHAPTER 16 #2
Loretta wrote for a while, and the pen was the only sound in the hall.
“Wyatt, do you want anything of your own on the record?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Do I write down that he declined, or that he sat there and thought about it? I’ll write that he declined. It reads better in March when nobody remembers.”
“It’s April,” Harlan said from the back.
“It is April, and I am the one who keeps the calendar, and you have been late to every meeting held under this roof, Harlan Cobb.”
She wrote that down too, and then she squared the folder and took her glasses off.
“So recorded,” Loretta said. “Coffee’s hot. It has been hot since nine and it is not getting better either.”
The urn end of the hall filled up first, the way it always did, forty people making a line for coffee nobody would have drunk at home.
Gemma Brooks came in through the side door sideways with a pan on each forearm and her sleeves shoved up past the flour.
“Two pans, because one pan is an insult and Loretta knows it. How are you sleeping?” she said.
“Fine.”
“That’s not an answer, that’s a fence you put up.
There’s cinnamon in the near one and there is nothing in the far one but apples and butter, because Nora Finch says sugar makes the second graders unfit for human company after lunch, and I have decided to believe a woman with thirty-one years in.
” She set both pans down and pushed the near one two inches toward Daisy without making a thing of it.
“Wyatt Miller, when did you last eat something you didn’t make standing up? ”
Clara laughed at that, one syllable, and took a paper plate off the stack.
“He ate at five,” she said. “Standing up.”
“Then I rest my case and I withdraw nothing.” Gemma cut the apple pan into squares with a plastic knife and did not look up. “Ruthie Dawson, hands. Both of them, and then you may have two.”
Loretta came down the room with her glasses back on their chain and her hands empty, which meant she was not working anymore, which was its own kind of warning. She stopped in front of Daisy.
“And what do you say, Daisy Miller?”
Daisy looked at the floor between Loretta’s shoes and the urn behind her, and said nothing at all. Ruthie, who had been talking without stopping for six minutes, kept right on talking to the side of Daisy’s head.
The old rule in a room like this was that a grown-up filled it in for the kid. She’s shy. Say hello to Mrs. Gable. A hand on the shoulder and a little push, and everybody went home comfortable.
“She doesn’t have to say anything,” Wyatt said.
Loretta’s eyebrows went up a quarter inch. Then she nodded once, the same nod she gave a motion that carried, and turned to the urn and started talking about the roof again.
Daisy’s shoulders came down off her ears. She took a square of the apple one and ate the corner of it.
Clara put her palm flat on Wyatt’s back, between his shoulders, and left it there for the length of one breath.
He did not step away. He stood with his weight even and his hat in his hand and the warm spot stayed warm through his shirt after she had taken her hand back, and he counted the room instead.
Gemma had seen it, over the pan, with her mouth doing something she was trying to stop.
Loretta had seen it in the window glass at the urn.
The two women filling cups behind her had both seen it, and one of them said something to the other one that took four words and a look.
Four. He was standing in a room of forty people and he had counted the four exactly, and he could not have said why that number was worth having.
“You’ve held that hat by the brim since we came in,” Clara said, low, next to his ear. “Do you want her out at the truck, or in here where you can count her?”
“In here.”
“Okay.” Clara did not ask the second question. She let it sit there where they could both see it, which was worse.
Six feet off, Daisy had her plate on her knees and was talking to Ruthie in whole sentences, one behind the other, the way she did with people she had already decided about.
“It’s a bum calf,” Daisy said. “His mother quit him. He gets fed twice a day for a month and my dad has to do it.”
“Can I see him?”
“You can see him when he’s bigger. He’s not much yet.”
Loretta had the sign-in sheet in her hand and was reading down it with her glasses up.
“Gables, C.,” she read out, and one of the women at the urn asked her the question the whole town had been asking for years.
“Gable, Gables. One letter and no relation, and I’ve quit apologizing for it,” Loretta said.
“Her people came in from the Bitterroot and mine came in on the railroad and neither set of them had the sense to change it. Clara Gables, your mother owed this council a fence variance and I never made her pay it.”
“She’d have paid it,” Clara said.
“I know she would have. That is why I never made her.”
Tate Callahan came in the front door in county uniform with his sunglasses pushed up in his hair and coffee already on his mind. He got a cup, drank an inch of it standing, and came over to the card table.
“Loretta. Engineer wants the hydrology page off the old flood file before the eighth,” he said.
“Which flood file?”
“Yours. The county one. Mill Creek, four years back. He wants the gauge readings for the model and he wants them by Friday, and I told him I’d ask you rather than put in a records request on a woman I have known since I was nine.”
“That was wise of you.”
Wyatt set his coffee down on the windowsill and started folding chairs.
He took the back row first, hinge and stack, hinge and stack, six to a rack before the rack got heavy enough to want a second man.
It was something to do with his hands and it was two rows away from where Clara was standing with a paper plate she had not eaten off of, and he did not go over there, and the count of the chairs was seven, then twelve, then twenty.
Loretta went behind the card table and came up with a folder off the top of her council box, brown, soft-cornered, thicker than it looked.
“Take the whole file, don’t stand here reading it in front of my pastry,” she said, and handed it across. “Bring it back before the eighth or I will call your mother.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Pull the whole thing while you’re at it, Tate—there’s a page in that folder nobody has read since the week it was written.”