CHAPTER 5 #2
I felt the word husband pass over me like a hand pressing a stamp onto a folded page. She had said it deliberately. She meant for me to hear how it sounded.
Luke came back out onto the porch in work jeans and a gray T-shirt cut short over his shoulders.
His forearms above the wrists were the color of walnut where the sun had done its work.
The suit and the ropers were folded over one arm.
He carried them to the truck lockbox in the bed and slid the sat phone on top of the folded charcoal wool and locked the lid with a small brass key on a ring at his belt.
The registered Kimber Warrior stayed at his hip in a leather holster he had put on with the work jeans. The truck stayed at the main house — we were walking up the trail tonight.
I stood by the porch bench with Marta's duffel and my canvas tote. I still had the sage-green dress on. I had not thought to bring a change with me to the courthouse. I would sleep in something out of the duffel.
He shouldered the duffel over one shoulder and picked up the tote in his other hand.
“Twenty minutes on foot,” he said. “Trail's switchback. Watch the tree roots at the first bend. If you turn an ankle I'll carry you and you'll hate it.”
“I'll walk,” I said.
I laughed one dry beat as I said it. It came out a half-tone lower than I expected. The penny was still there.
He did not so much lead me up the trail behind the house as move at the pace I set, half a step ahead of me so that if I stopped he stopped.
The switchback climbed through a lodgepole stand that opened onto ponderosa and then onto scree, and at the fifth bend the air went cool by a measurable degree — I put a number on it, planner-brain unable to help itself, four degrees, maybe five — and I understood without being told that we had gained more elevation than the map had suggested.
My hair was damp against my neck by the third bend. The dress was going to be a mistake by the fourth. The penny at the back of my tongue thinned, not by a lot, but by enough that I could taste evergreen resin under it again.
The trail broke at a small opening on the western slope of the ridge and the cabin was there.
Timber frame on a poured-concrete stem wall.
Tin roof, steep-pitched, catching the last of the west light in a hard silver line along the ridgepole.
A wraparound porch on the west side. Two rocking chairs, side by side.
A stack of split firewood against the porch rail.
A small woodshed adjacent, its padlock hanging open at the hasp.
The whole thing sat inside a clearing that had not been much of a clearing before someone had decided this was where the house would go — I could see the ax marks on the stumps at the treeline forty feet off — and it sat with the deliberate quiet of a building built to be missed by anyone not standing on this particular scrap of ground.
The air up here was cooler than it had been at the ranch gate on Sunday by more than a degree. Ten? Twelve? I would need a thermometer.
Luke set the duffel and the tote on the porch. He took a single key on a short brass chain from his front pocket and unlocked the porch door.
He did not push it open. He stepped back.
“You go in first,” he said. “It's your house now too.”
I had not expected him to say that sentence.
My whole body was still fifty yards down the trail rehearsing something else — a joke about carpet swatches, probably, because my mind picks the argument it is going to have with a strange room before it goes into the room — and here he was, holding the door open with his back not quite touching it, waiting.
I took a breath.
I crossed the threshold.
The front room opened flat. A leather couch, low and worn.
A leather chair set at right angles. A Navajo rug in red and cream on the plank floor between them, the pattern of a diamond inside a diamond, the wool a little flattened where a boot had rested at the corner of the couch a thousand times.
The cast-iron woodstove was cold in the summer, its black flue clean.
On the mantel — a plain slab of unfinished pine — a kerosene lamp with a cast-iron base and a glass chimney sat centered, unlit; a book of matches beside it; a battery-powered short-wave radio on the shelf underneath.
A bookshelf on the wall opposite the woodstove, three shelves, mostly paperbacks and ranch manuals, one hardback down at the second shelf with a spine that caught my eye for exactly one beat — a Loeb edition, Greek-facing, Meditations, Marcus Aurelius.
An unusual thing on a rancher's shelf. I did not comment on it. I put it on the shelf in my head with the other small things.
The bedroom door was open at the end of a short hall.
I looked in without going in yet. Queen bed.
Gray wool blanket edged in red. Hexagon quilt of blue and rust folded at the foot.
A dresser against the wall, six drawers.
A wardrobe. A framed photograph on the dresser — two boys in swim trunks at a fishing camp, the taller boy grinning, the smaller squinting at the camera — that I did not let my eyes rest on because it did not belong to me yet.
Luke set the duffel at the foot of the bed. He turned to face me in the hall.
“The bed's yours,” he said. “Tonight and every night until we figure out the other thing. I take the couch.”
I opened my mouth to protest.
I shut it again.
He was 6'2". The couch was maybe six feet, six-two on a stretch.
He was going to fold himself onto that leather and sleep with the pistol a hand's reach away, and he had already decided this without asking me, and he was telling me now because he wanted me to know it was not up for negotiation on the first night.
I nodded.
“There's a bathroom off the hall,” he said. “The tap's well water and it'll feel cold. Marta's jam goes in the kitchen. The rose goes wherever you want.”
“Windowsill,” I said.
“Windowsill,” he said.
The overhead in the front room went dark at ten past ten.
I had put the raspberry jam on the shelf above the propane range.
I had put the rose in a water glass on the bedroom windowsill; it faced west, and the last of the mountain light had died against the wall behind it a full hour ago.
I had unfolded Warren's second letter and the estate lawyer's letter and put them together in the top drawer of the dresser, which was mine now, and which was empty.
I had put Angle of Repose and the silver bookmark on the nightstand. I had pulled a T-shirt out of Marta's duffel — pale gray, one of my own from the main-house rotation — and put it on. I had left the sage-green dress folded over the back of the wardrobe door.
I lay in the queen bed under the gray wool blanket with my left hand flat against my sternum where the ring lay warm on my chest.
Down the hall a boot came off. One soft thump against the plank floor. Then a pause, and no second thump — the other boot stayed on, and I did not know why, and I decided not to ask myself the question tonight.
The leather couch took his weight with a small sigh.
Then metal touched the plank floor beside the couch — the small precise click of a pistol laid down within reach.
I stared at the plank ceiling. The plank ceiling stared back. My thumb tapped once against my palm — silent, small, a small rhythm I could not stop.
I am married, I thought, letting the sentence exist inside the room for the first time. In a cabin I have never been in. To a man whose pulse I felt on my fingers this morning.
The mountain was quiet in the way mountains are quiet — not silent, quiet, which is different.
A pine somewhere on the ridge settled a needle.
The tin roof gave one small tick as the last of the day's heat went out of it.
Down the hall a man I had known for four days was lying on a couch too short for him with the pistol at his hand because he had decided, in some interior chamber he had not shown me the door to, that this was what marriage was going to look like tonight.
Somewhere west of the ridge a coyote gave one high call.
Two yips answered.
Then the mountain closed, and between me and the man on the couch fifteen feet down the hall the ring on my finger altered the silence. I lay under the gray wool blanket for a long time without sleeping.