CHAPTER 10 #2
I put it on the counter. She went into the bathroom to splash her face.
I am moving through the afternoon like a man waiting for a phone to ring, I thought.
The phone rang at three in the afternoon, because I made it ring.
I had taken the Iridium 9575A out to the porch at two minutes before three in the afternoon and unwrapped the stiff antenna cable and keyed the unit. I did it every Thursday afternoon, whether Beau called me or I called Beau. Today it was his turn.
The dial tone was the note I had hated for six years.
Two synthetic chirps at the same pitch as the low-battery beep of a smoke detector — a note that lived nowhere else in the Bitterroot Valley, and that entered the porch quiet the way a machine cough enters a chapel.
I had set the antenna along the porch rail so it had the sky it needed. Both of my hands were on the antenna.
I thumbed the speaker on with the thumb of the hand that was already there, because I needed both hands for the antenna and it was faster.
A one-second decision. It would matter.
Beau's voice came on.
“Lucas. Got confirmation on the tread. It's who we thought. Second thing —”
Celia at the doorway.
Barefoot. Quiet. Half a step onto the porch.
She was drying her hands on the dish rag she had picked up in the kitchen on her way through.
She had heard the tone. She had heard the name.
She was standing exactly where a person stands when they have understood in one second more than they were supposed to.
I thumbed the speaker off with the thumb that had thumbed it on. I lifted the phone to my ear. I said, quiet, into the mouthpiece, “One second.”
I did not turn my head.
Celia did not move a muscle for the length of one full second. Then she turned around and walked back inside on her bare feet and pulled the door closed behind her — soft, all the way, so it seated in its frame.
I put the phone back to my ear. I said, “Go.”
Beau said, “You were on speaker.”
“I was. I'm not now.”
He was quiet. Then he said one word into the quiet. “Shit.”
“Go,” I said.
He went. He told me the two things he had for me — confirmation on the tread pattern from the ridge photographs I had sent through the cutout the week before, and a movement update from the New York end.
It was not new at the level of substance.
It was new at the level of certainty. Six years of maybe were narrowing to a name and a face and a boot size.
I made him read the confirmation twice. He did. We hung up at twenty past three in the afternoon.
I put the antenna down. I coiled the cable. I sat with the phone in my two hands for the length of time it took me to decide what I was going to say to my wife.
Then I went inside.
She was at the sink with a dish rag she did not need. The scorched skillet had been washed and dried and hung on the pot rack an hour ago. The mug had been washed and dried and put away. the counter was already the color the counter was on the days I did not sit at it. She was making work.
I stood about four feet behind her. I did not offer.
She did not turn.
“I did not hear anything I want to hear about,” she said.
I did not answer for the length of a breath. Then I said, “You didn't hear anything you needed to.”
She turned the tap off. She hung the dish rag on the oven handle. She did not turn around.
“Okay,” she said.
She left the kitchen. She went upstairs. Her boots hit the fifth stair and the eighth — those two boards had never quite settled into the floor joist and never would — and then the click of the latch that would not seat, an old friend by now.
She heard the name, I thought. She is not going to say it aloud. She is going to sit with it.
I put my two hands flat on the counter she had just wiped and let the weight of the afternoon settle into my palms.
At nine at night she came back out onto the porch with me.
The kerosene lamp was on the railing at the low setting, wick trimmed, the flame steady inside the chimney and a single moth working the outside of the glass without ever getting to the light.
The wind was still up. Sixty degrees on the porch and dropping.
Across the fence line the low brown twist of ranch dirt had come back once around half past six in the evening and spun in the same place for the same seven seconds and collapsed the same way. It had not come back after.
She sat in the second rocker. She did not have a book.
She did not have her paperback of Stegner or the folded letter or the silver bookmark.
She had brought a mug of the tin coffee we kept for backup — the good coffee had been rationed since Sunday because Marta's delivery ran on Wednesdays and it was Thursday and I had not yet driven down to Sula for the resupply and would not until Saturday.
She was drinking a coffee she did not like. She was drinking it slowly.
I let the silence hold.
We sat.
The moth kept at the glass. The lamp went on burning.
At twenty to ten at night she said, dry, into the porch quiet: “Marta likes me.”
“Marta likes you.”
“Marta does not like everyone.”
“No. She does not.”
She took another slow drink of the tin coffee. She looked out past the fence corner where the aspens were dark against dark now.
“Good,” she said.
She stood at ten to ten at night. She did not touch my shoulder as she passed. There was no need.
“Goodnight, Luke.”
“Goodnight.”
I stayed on the porch until ten at night.
The kerosene lamp low on the railing. The wick trimmed. The moth still at the chimney.
I turned the signet ring on my pinky one full revolution.
She heard.
I kept to the lower floor.