CHAPTER 4
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I unbagged the suit at five-thirty.
The garment bag had hung on the back of the wardrobe door for six years without a hand on it.
The zipper stuck at the top, gave under my thumb, and the charcoal wool came out smelling faintly of the plastic and faintly of the cedar sachet Owen Kesler had thrown in the day he closed the bag for me.
Wool. Plastic. Cedar. A closet in Sausalito, and a marina, and a boat I did not board.
The suit had gone into the bag on a Tuesday in April, and I had gone out of the marina under a different name on a Wednesday morning, and this was the first Wednesday since that the bag had come off the rod.
The last time you put this on, you did not put it on.
I shook the wrinkles out over the bedroom chair.
Laid a clean white cotton shirt beside it.
No tie. The brown Justin ropers I had polished last night on the porch with saddle soap sat by the boot rack.
The toe caps had come back to a good black shine.
The heel wear on the outside looked less like ranching and more like age.
I touched the signet at my pinky. L. C. W.
— my father's initials and his father's before him, the same silver line that had begun with my grandfather in 1928 and come to me at seventeen. I did not look at the safe under the plank in the hall.
By six I was in the utility hall anyway.
I lifted the corner of the rug. Loosened the removable plank.
Did not raise it. I laid my palm flat on the wood over the safe the way a man lays a palm on a dog whose sleep he does not want to disturb.
Presence-check. Combination still Ma's birthday.
Passport still there. Evidence still there.
The Kimber Custom II still there, unregistered, oiled last spring, five in the magazine.
The plank rested where it always rested.
I put the rug back with the frayed corner facing east, as it had faced east since the day I laid the boards.
The Ruger LC9 went into my right boot at the ankle strap.
Three-eighty subcompact. Four in the magazine, one in the chamber, safety on, cross-draw for a seated position because I would be seated in a truck for the next two hours and behind a courthouse desk after that.
I did not tell myself why a man drives to his own wedding with a boot gun. I have known why for eighteen months.
Coffee on the propane range. Two mugs of it.
The blue flame ring hissed the way it hisses every morning of my life up here.
On the porch by a quarter past six in yesterday's shirt and yesterday's jeans.
The suit and the shirt and the ropers and a duffel with my wallet and the F-350 keys stood by the door in a small stack that said, more clearly than a note would have, I was going somewhere.
Copper was in the near-dark barn with his ears already forward. He knew the day the moment I walked in.
“You and me,” I told him, quiet, and he stepped into the saddle the way he steps into everything, which is like he has been waiting.
We took the switchback trail to the main house at a walk.
Fifteen minutes down. Dust rose behind us through the mile-and-a-half descent, the chalky mineral lift of ground that had gone four days without rain.
Thunderheads sat to the east above the Sapphires.
The kind that will not cross the ridge. Not for us.
Not this week. I do not pray for weather anymore.
I did in the first year, and it did not work, and I stopped.
Marta was in the yard with a single sheet on the line.
Her signal, always: one sheet meant no visitors, everything ordinary, come down.
Three sheets meant someone had come asking.
Four meant the sheriff was inside and it was not routine.
Four sheets had gone up once in four years.
This morning was one sheet, and Marta was watching the trail before Copper had come around the last switchback, and she had a mug of coffee in her hand for me.
I stepped down.
“You look like a man going to be married,” she said.
I took the mug. Did not answer.
“Don't chew the inside of your cheek. She notices.”
I had not known I was doing it. I stopped doing it. Marta does not say what she does not mean, and she does not mean what she does not say either, and I have been trying for four years to hear both halves of that sentence at once. She held her hand out for the mug when I was done. I gave it back.
“The truck keys are on the peg,” she said. “She is upstairs. She has been up since five.”
“Since five.”
“Since five.” Marta weighed something for a second. Chose not to add it. Chose then to say the smallest thing. “The dress is green. Sage. She washed it in the sink last night.”
I nodded. Did not knock. Did not go up the porch steps to her door. Stood in the yard by the F-350 with my hat in my hand — a hat, because I had not yet changed into the suit — and waited.
She came down at seven-thirty in the sage-green cotton dress and her city ankle boots.
Marta had done her hair for her: low twist held with a wooden pencil, small at the back of her skull, the shape a woman makes when she wants to look plain and does not know she has just made a shape a man will remember.
Her hazel eyes went green in the yard light. Her face was set.
She had folded Warren's second letter into a back pocket of the dress, and the small fold rode against her hip as she came down the porch. I let the detail pass.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning,” she said.
I opened the passenger door of the F-350. She got in. I closed it. Walked around. Set the second refill Marta had pressed into my hand into the cup holder on Celia's side, hers untouched, and drove.
Sheriff Hollister pulled in behind us at the ranch gate in his own truck.
We drove the forty-five miles north to Hamilton and neither of us spoke for the first fifteen. That was fine. That was mine. My left hand at ten on the wheel, my right on my thigh. The road ran flat past the hay fields and then began to lift and then leveled at the valley floor.
The Bitterroot on the west, the Sapphires on the east, the hay yellowing at the top and thinning at the fence lines because the summer was already dry enough that the fall cut was going to be a talk none of us wanted to have. I did the drive in numbers.
Sixty-two on the speedometer. Nothing at the last two intersections. Half tank of diesel. Sheriff two hundred yards back in the rearview. Sat phone in the lockbox at the fuel-up in Hamilton. Nothing else behind us.
She sat with both hands flat on her thighs.
Warren's letter in her right back pocket.
Green cotton at her knee. Boots crossed at the ankle.
She did not look at me and she did not look at the road either.
She looked at the shape her hands made on her legs.
She was rehearsing, or refusing to rehearse. The question could wait.
She said, at the mile marker past Corvallis, “Did you sleep.”
“Enough.”
“Enough is what my father used to say. Enough is not a number.”
“Six hours.”
“That's a number.”
“That's the number.”
She was quiet a mile. Then: “I slept four.”
“Now that is a number.”
“The only one I have.”
I moved my right hand off my thigh and set the backs of my fingers against her wrist for two seconds. Grounding. Not romantic. I returned the hand to the wheel.
The valley opened. The mountains held the light steeper here than in Denver — she had said that yesterday and it was true — and the light on the road at eight in the morning came at us head-on the way the light comes on a day that intends to be hot.
I flicked the visor down. Her sage-green cotton took the sunlight and held it.
I do not pray for weather. I also do not pray for women.
Rebase the calculus, the buried voice said from the back of the head where I keep it.
You did not marry the woman. You brought her inside the perimeter.
It is defense, not devotion. She is safer married.
I did not answer the voice. I have been not-answering it for six years.
It is not usually wrong. It is not usually right, either.
The courthouse in Hamilton sits on a shaded block with river-stone at the base and brick above, an arcade at the ground floor with two vendors — a coffee cart and a small jewelry kiosk under the north arch.
I parked. Sheriff Hollister parked across the row.
I came around and opened her door. She stepped down.
The heat took her breath — it takes anyone's, at eighty-seven and not yet noon — and she did not comment.
“Rings first,” I said. “Then the office upstairs.”
“Rings first,” she said.
The jeweler kiosk was run by a woman about the age my mother would have been — fair, silver in the brown braid, a pair of half-moon reading glasses on a chain.
Two matched gold bands laid on velvet in the glass case.
She looked at us the way she must have looked at six other couples this week. She did not smile more than she had to.
“Two,” I said. “Unengraved. Left ring. Hers is a five, mine is a nine and a half.”
She looked at me. Looked at Celia. Made her assessment in half a second and did not ask a follow-up. Slid the case open and laid two bands on a strip of black velvet without opening the ring-tray on the diamond side of the case. She did not upsell.
“Two hundred forty,” she said.
I paid cash from the money clip in my inside jacket pocket.
The suit was on now. I had changed in the courthouse restroom in the arcade before we came to the case, the shirt collar new-crisp under the wool.
She wrapped the two bands in a square of tissue.
I put the tissue in my inside pocket next to the cash clip.
Celia had not spoken through the transaction. She had watched my hands.
“Congratulations,” the jeweler said, flat.
“Thank you,” Celia said.