CHAPTER 21 #2
“I want to say the next part plain, so I’ll say it once. The front of that truck was under before I came around the bend. Not while I was working. Before.” She kept her hands where they were. “I could put my palm on the roof above it. That is how close it was.”
“Clara.”
“I’m still going.” She waited to see if he would take it away from her.
He didn’t. “I got up the bank on the downstream side and my legs quit about halfway and I did the rest of it on my knees. She was cold and she wasn’t crying, which is worse.
I sat on the gravel with her inside my coat and I sang to her, because it was the only thing left that was mine. ”
Something happened in his shoulders and did not get anywhere.
“The window frame opened my hand on the way through. I didn’t know about it until somebody told me. Tate got there four minutes after I did. I asked him to keep my name out of it, and he did it because I asked.”
“The county wrote it up as a passerby who wouldn’t give a name,” she said. “That’s me. There isn’t a second person in that sentence.”
She stopped. The culvert was still going down at the road, and a magpie was working at something out by the shop, and the warm air came across the floor from the propped door and did not reach her.
“That’s all of it,” she said. “That’s the whole account.”
Wyatt turned around. He put his palms on the counter’s lip behind him and leaned against it, and when he spoke it was quiet. It had been quiet on Thursday too.
“Four years.”
“Yes.”
He moved his hands an inch apart on the wood and set them down again.
“You sat at that table. You braided her hair. You let me not know.”
“I did.”
“You went to Denver, and you came home in February, and you took a job in my house.” His voice did not go up anywhere, which was the part that took the floor out from under her.
“You hired on to keep my daughter, and you knew, and I asked you about that scar in the tack room and you said barbed wire.”
“I said barbed wire.”
“To me. In my own barn.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not angry about the water, ma’am. I need you to have that much straight.” He stopped and started again, lower. “Whatever you did down there you did alone, in cold water, in ninety seconds, and there is no place on this earth I could stand and say a word to you about it. That’s not the thing.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“Then say the thing that is,” Clara said.
“You were in my kitchen at five in the morning for eight weeks. You knew what happened to my wife and my boy in a way nobody alive knows it, and you passed me the salt.” He looked at the propped door and the firewood holding it.
“I have gone down to that water on the twelfth of April four times and stood on the slabs and tried to put the afternoon together out of a report, and you were in the house the whole while, making my daughter’s lunch. ”
“Yes.”
“It’s the four years.” His jaw worked once. “You made a decision about what I could carry and you made it in April and you have been making it every day since. That was mine to make. You handled me. Every soul in this county has handled me since that spring and I could take it off of them.”
Clara did not fill it. She had spent eight weeks filling every silence in this house on purpose, and she left this one alone, because he had earned the whole width of it.
“Harlan said a thing to me that spring,” Wyatt said. His right hand came up off the counter. It got about four inches out over the pine floor between them and stopped there, open, and then he closed it on the counter’s lip again. “I put it down. I never picked it up.”
She waited.
He did not go on. She counted floorboards because there was nothing else in the room to count, and the coffee sat there cooling, and whatever the second half of that was, it stayed where he had put it four years ago.
“I need a minute,” he said.
“Take it. I’m going out to the car and I’ll be right in.”
The sun had got up over the shop and the gravel was steaming in the ruts. She opened the glovebox and moved the manual and took the thing out from under it. It had lost the shape of a hand a long time ago. It was still blue.
He was where she had left him. Clara crossed the six feet of pine floor for the first time all day and stopped in front of him with her hand out flat.
“She had this on. I’ve had it since.”
Wyatt looked at her palm. He put his own out, and she turned hers over, and the small mitten went from her hand to his without either of them touching the other, which she would think about the whole drive down.
His fingers closed on it. He did not look at it.
He held it down at his side the way a man holds a hat he has taken off, and his face did not do anything at all.
“Do you want the part I haven’t said out loud, or do you want me to stop? I can stop.”
The clock over the door read one forty. Wyatt’s hand came up off the counter a second time, and it made about a foot, and it went down.
“The heifer’ll stand for him by tonight,” he said.
“Okay.”
There was a whole afternoon standing in the room and nobody picked it up. He was six feet away and she could have put her hand on his sleeve from where she stood, and the cost of not doing it was that she had to find something for her hands, and the only thing in reach was the sink.
Clara took the cup she had not poured coffee into and had not drunk from, and she rinsed it, and she set it upside down on the towel.
Then she picked it up and rinsed it again and put it where it had been.
She dried her hands on her jeans. She took her keys off the hook by the door where she had hung them the first week of March.
At the doorway the light was white and the warm air came in against her, and she stopped in it with one hand on the frame and the kitchen behind her.
“Ask me why I didn’t go for the front seat.”