CHAPTER 23 #2
“Nine, and two hundred and twenty-nine head at the fall market, and no summer feed bill on the high country.”
“Say the note.”
“Due the first of June.”
Harlan did the arithmetic with his mouth moving, the two smallest fingers of his right hand curled where they always were. “That covers it and leaves him a load of fuel.”
“It leaves a load of fuel,” Wyatt said.
“Barely.”
“Barely’s what it is.”
Loretta was already on the bake sale. Wyatt should have sat down.
There was an empty chair on the aisle two rows up with somebody’s jacket over it, and it was not her jacket, and he had known that since he walked in and had checked it twice anyway.
Larkspur Street was four turns and a stop sign from this door.
He had the route in his head with the gravel on it counted out, and having it did not put anybody in that chair, and his hands were flat on his knees to keep them off the arms of it.
He went up the front instead.
“Loretta. Can I have that microphone a minute.”
She stopped mid-sentence about pie tins. She looked at him over the glasses for about as long as it takes to decide something, and then she pulled the stand around and stepped off to the side.
The X of tape was under his boot. He put his hat on the table by the drawings because his hands wanted a job and there wasn’t one.
“Most of you know I don’t do this,” he said.
The tube ticked. Nobody moved a chair.
“There’s a line in the county file that says a passerby got my daughter out of that truck and declined to be named.”
Gemma had a knife over the pan of bars and she set it down.
“It was Clara Gables. She went into Mill Creek and opened the only door there was and carried my daughter up that bank, and she’s got a scar on her left hand off my truck window for it.”
He had to stop there and let the tick go by twice.
“She never asked for one thing. And I told her to leave. That part’s not in the file, so I’m putting it in the room.”
That was all of it. He stood there another second because he did not know how a man got down off a thing like that, and then he picked his hat up off the table.
From the back, in the doorway, Tate Callahan spoke without coming in.
“Confirmed at the scene. Minor child already out of the vehicle on arrival. The party declined to be named and declined transport.” Tate’s voice had gone flat and official, which was how it went when he was not all right. “That is in my report and it has been in my report for four years.”
Loretta took her glasses off. She held them by one arm and did not put them on the beaded chain.
“Then the minutes will show it,” she said. “The county file says a passerby. The minutes of this council will say the name, and they’ll say who gave it to us, and they will be read out at the June meeting in front of whoever is sitting here. Is there any objection to that?”
There was no objection to that.
Nobody clapped. Wyatt would not have known what to do if they had. A hundred and forty people sat in a hall with a fan turning and said nothing at all, and somewhere in the middle of it a chair leg scraped and got itself hushed.
Nora Finch put her hand on his sleeve as he came down the aisle. She did not say anything for a second, which was her way of saying the hard thing.
“She taught my Tuesday reading group for nothing in March,” Nora said. “I never asked her why she was so good with the quiet one. I should have.”
“Ma’am,” he said, which was not an answer.
Gemma was crying over the pan. Not making any noise about it, just cutting the bars into squares she had already cut, with her chin down and her forearms floured and the tears going into the pan, and when he stopped at the card table she waved him off with the knife.
“Don’t you say a word to me, Wyatt Miller.
Don’t you dare. I have known that woman since we were six years old and I fed her pie every Thursday for two months and asked her about the house and asked her about her mother and asked her about you, and she sat there and let me talk, and there is a thing I am going to have to say to her tomorrow and I do not know how I am going to say it. Do you want bars? Take the bars.”
“I’ve got Daisy in the truck.”
“Then take two.”
Daisy was not in the truck. Daisy was at the end of the front row where Loretta had parked her with a pencil and the sign-in sheet, and she had heard every word of it, because he had known she would and had let her stay.
She got down off the chair and squared the pencil to the corner of the sign-in sheet before she left it. Loretta was gathering the papers into the council box.
“That’s the same as what she told me,” Daisy said, “and she told me first.”
Loretta stopped with the box half shut.
“Well,” she said. “Yes. I expect it is, dear.”
Tate was holding the door with his shoulder. He had not come past the threshold all evening and he did not come past it now.
“Four minutes,” Tate said. “That’s what I put down. I got there four minutes after she went in the water and it took her less than that.”
“I know what you put down.”
“I’ve had that folder in a drawer for four years, Wyatt.”
“I’m not going to say anything to you about the folder.”
Tate’s jaw worked once. Then he stood off the door and held it, and Daisy went under his arm and out.
Behind them the fan was still turning and somebody had started stacking chairs before Loretta could stop them. Daisy took his hand in the doorway, which she had not done since February, and her fingers were cold from the folding chair.
The hardest thing he had ever done had landed on a hundred and forty people who were not her.
Four turns and a stop sign, and there was nobody in that hall who would drive them tonight to tell her.
He would have given the grass and the calf crop both to have had her standing at the coffee urn with her arms crossed and her chin down, hearing him get it said.
He came out into the dark with his hat in his hand. At the far end of the lot, under the parking-lot light, the green hatchback with the Colorado plates was sitting there with its exhaust going white, and then its headlights came on.