CHAPTER 5
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The heat off the courthouse landing hit me like an oven door swinging open at hip height. Sage-green cotton, thin as it was, had already gone tacky against my ribs by the time we cleared the corridor and reached the top of the steps.
The clerk was still at her window one floor up. I could see the pale oval of her face inside the frame of blinds. She had watched us sign the license. She was watching us now.
Luke did not look up at her. He did not have to. His hand moved to the small of my back — deliberate, low, warm through the cotton — and stopped there like a page in a book he had marked.
He is going to kiss me on the courthouse steps.
And I have been waiting for it since we came out that door.
I turned toward him without deciding to. Warren's letter, folded three times and small as a matchbook, pressed against the flat of my hip through the pocket. I do not know why I noticed it just then. (I noticed everything just then. That was the problem.)
His mouth touched mine closed.
One beat.
Two.
Then he opened it — small, careful, no tongue — and my right hand came up against his throat without any orders from me at all.
Under my fingers his pulse was steady. Steady and faster than a man that quiet should have any right to be.
It ran in my palm three beats and mine answered inside my sternum in three thuds like the clerk's stamp had come down on the license — THUD, THUD, THUD — and then the small hitched inhale of an ink pad drawing the ink back in.
Oh no.
He stepped back. He stepped back like a man setting a fragile object on a shelf. His hand slid from my back and stayed at his side.
“You did that well,” he said.
The words were low and even and gave nothing away.
“So did you,” I said.
We both knew we had lied.
Down at the curb, Sheriff Hollister had his back to us, writing on a clipboard against the hood of his cruiser, giving the clerk her theater.
It occurred to me — with the planner-brain precision that was ridiculous just then — that the second-story window we had performed under was framed by two mullions and a transom and lay approximately fourteen feet above the top step.
Line of sight uninterrupted. Distance appropriate for a witness.
Nonconforming under any modern code that governed how a person was allowed to feel while being watched.
The thought stayed inside my mouth.
I said, “Truck,” and started down the steps.
The F-350 was black and old enough that the air conditioning took a full minute of engine time before anything cool came out of the vents. Luke turned the fan on low. He did not turn on the radio.
I sat with my hands flat on my thighs. The gold band on my left ring finger was already warm — my body, not the room. In Denver I had never worn a ring long enough to know whether the metal took the finger's temperature or the air's.
We turned out of the parking lot onto Main Street Hamilton.
The street was wide and shaded in patches by the storefront awnings.
Two women in sun hats were coming out of a diner.
Neither of them looked at us. I watched the road slide under the hood of the truck for the length of eight city blocks with my mouth closed and my shoulders held down the way a Denver conference room had trained them to be held.
Then I swallowed and there was a metal taste at the back of my tongue.
Shit.
It tasted like a mouthful of pennies — copper heat, iron underneath, sharp on the soft palate.
The taste I used to hold on a bet in second grade, a penny wedged between molar and cheek, tongue pressed against the little embossed face of the president.
I had not tasted that particular metal in twenty years.
Then it had returned once — five years ago at a first-hire pitch at my Denver firm, standing at the whiteboard about to answer a partner's question on ridge-protection setbacks, all six eyes on me, the penny back in my mouth from nowhere.
Now it was here again.
I swallowed a second time. The tang stayed.
Luke reached over without looking and put his hand on my wrist. Two seconds.
Not romantic. Grounding. His palm was dry and rough at the pad of the thumb where he held a rein or a rifle stock a hundred times a day; the roughness registered against my skin as texture, not warmth.
Then he took his hand back and put it on the wheel and did not speak.
The penny stayed at the back of my tongue through the last of Main Street.
It stayed as we hit US-93 and turned south.
It stayed at seventy on the open two-lane where the valley opened on our right into the green-gold plate of alfalfa fields I had noticed on the way up on Monday and would notice again every day now, apparently.
I unfolded Warren's letter in my head. I had it memorized — the four sentences about driving up, about the neighbor, about the honest one worth staying near.
Grandpa. Because I had never called him that when he was alive. I had called him Warren, once, at twelve, and he had smiled at me as if the word from my mouth had surprised him. That was the only time.
Because — and this was the argument I had not stopped having with myself since Marta had put the envelope in my hand two evenings ago — because a man does not use the word honest about a stranger. He uses it about a man he means.
I looked over at Luke. His right hand was on the wheel at four o'clock.
His left elbow rested on the sill. His face in profile was cut like a piece of country he had walked on his own feet — the thin scar along the left of his jaw, the eyes on the road, a small line at the corner of his mouth that suggested he was aware I was looking at him and had decided not to look back.
He's the honest one.
I swallowed. The penny stayed.
We slowed for Sula.
Sula was two blocks of one-story storefronts, a general store with a Coke sign in the window, a gas station, a saloon with its door propped open on a wedge, an unnamed building that appeared to be a post office by virtue of a flag out front.
On Monday I had driven through it in the rental Bronco going the other direction and had not thought about it as a town so much as a wide place in the road with a stop sign at the end.
Today three people on the sidewalk turned their heads at the same time.
An older man in a straw hat outside the general store.
A young woman with a baby on her hip crossing to a truck at the gas pump.
A boy of maybe ten pushing a bicycle by the handlebars.
Three heads swiveled in the same slow rotation — Luke's truck, then the passenger seat, then me, then a half-second delay while each face did its arithmetic behind the eyes.
The town knows, I thought. It has been three hours since we signed a piece of paper in a courthouse thirty-eight miles away and the town knows.
I reached back to the wooden No. 2 pencil holding my hair — Marta had done the twist for me at seven-thirty in the yard light — and pulled it out.
The twist came down. My hair fell along my back in one warm wave.
I put the pencil in the door pocket. I did not entirely know why I did it. Or — I did know.
Because in Denver I wore my hair up when I was compressing myself into a shape a meeting was going to want; and I had decided, without any deliberation I could point to, that I was done compressing for the day.
Luke's eyes flicked over. Once. Back to the road.
Neither of us said anything for another mile.
At the mile marker south of Sula he said, without taking his eyes off the road: “Take anything at the main house you want up at the cabin. There's not much room. Bring a book.”
“I have a book,” I said.
That was almost a joke. He almost smiled. What his mouth did was not a smile — the corner shifted a quarter-inch and settled — but I marked it and put it on the shelf with the other small things I had marked and put on the shelf about him since Tuesday afternoon.
The main house sat back off the ranch drive at the end of a long avenue of ponderosa. Marta was on the west porch with two blue enamel mugs of tea when we pulled up. She was in her apron and her braid was over her shoulder and her reading glasses hung on a chain against her sternum.
She took one look at my left hand.
She set both mugs on the porch rail carefully — not a sound between them — and she looked at me for a long moment.
“Congratulations,” she said.
She said it in the same tone she had said welcome on Sunday afternoon when I had first crossed her flagstones. Warm-formal. Nothing gushed.
“Sit for ten minutes,” she said. “I have packed a bag for you. It is on the porch bench. There is soap and towels and the jar of raspberry jam. The jam is for him. He knows why. Don't leave anything you'll want tomorrow — the trail is steep and short and it will feel long.”
I sat. I did not know if I had ten minutes in me, but I sat. Luke went past us into the house to change out of the suit.
Marta handed me one of the mugs. Peppermint. Cool, not hot, because she had known when to steep it.
“He is a good man,” she said quietly to the porch rail, not to me exactly. “I do not talk about the ones I have thoughts about. I am telling you now because you might want to know that I am not thinking a thing I have not said out loud.”
That was as close as Marta Suarez would come to a blessing. I took it.
She reached over the porch rail and cut a rose from the vine that climbed the west post — red, half-open, warm from the sun, thorns snapped off in her fingers with the practiced fingers she had learned at her mother's rail. She handed the rose to me stem-first.
“For the windowsill,” she said. “The cabin has one bedroom window. It faces west. You will want a thing at the sill.”
I put the rose in the canvas tote at my feet, on top of the paperback of Angle of Repose and the silver bookmark I had left inside chapter eleven since Sunday night. I said, “Thank you, Marta.”
“De nada,” she said. “You go now with your husband.”