CHAPTER 16 #2
A little past eight. Dinner was bread, butter, cheese, and the last three eggs Marta had brought up on Thursday.
I fried them in the cast-iron and slid two onto her plate and one onto mine and she said thank you without looking at the plate.
We ate at the table by the west window. Neither of us said the words wedding dinner.
Neither of us said the word sheriff. Neither of us said Miriam's rose.
The rose was in the mason jar between us shedding a third petal into the water.
She was the one to break the last quiet, but she broke it the wrong way. She stood, gathered her plate and mine, and washed both. I dried. She stacked. The dish towel had been Marta's mother's. Neither of us needed to say that.
At a quarter past nine at night she turned in the kitchen and crossed to me and kissed the corner of my mouth once. Chaste. Deliberate. A receipt, not an invitation.
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
She went into the bedroom. The door hung open the customary two inches. I had not planed the latch in six years because the latch was a comfort in the abstract. She turned the wall lamp off five minutes later. I knew because the yellow line under the door disappeared.
I sat at the table with my hand around the tin mug of water I had drunk twice from and did not want any more of.
I looked at my watch.
A little past nine at night. Forty minutes.
That was the number I gave Celia after what she had done tonight.
Forty minutes for her breathing to settle, and then I would go do the thing I did every night at this end of the day and the thing I did every morning at the other end.
That was a number that had lived in my calendar for four years.
Some numbers did not change because the person on the far side of the wall was new.
At nine-fifty-five, I crossed into the utility hall.
The overhead bulb stayed off; I could feel for the plank with the toe of my boot.
I rolled the Navajo rug back, red and cream, my grandmother's grandmother's design from a trader she had trusted in Gallup in 1948, and lifted the plank in the corner where the nail I had left proud gave me purchase.
The plank came up quiet. It always did. I had planed it and beeswaxed the edge myself.
I knelt.
The dial was cold under my fingertip.
Ten right.
The first small click. Metallic. A tiny hammer on a tiny bell.
Thirteen left.
The second small click. On the far side of the bedroom wall, on the other side of two-by-six framing and half-inch board and the varnish I had painted onto that board the first summer I had lived here, a woman's breath caught.
I heard it. That was the only filter I would give myself in the whole of this day, and I do not apologize for it, because there was no other way to describe what happened at the second click.
I heard it, because I had spent every night for five weeks listening for the sound she made when she slept, and I knew what the pattern was and I knew what a break in the pattern was, and the break in the pattern happened at thirteen left with the crispness of a struck match.
Fifty-six right.
The third small click.
The bolt slid over. The safe opened onto its cold breath.
Manila accordion evidence file, the clear-cased USB clipped beneath its elastic and my dark-blue passport beneath both, dead flat and where I had put them.
Cash bundled and rubber-banded, forty-two thousand in fifties, dead flat and where I had put it.
The Kimber Custom II, serial filed, oiled to the shine of black glass.
My mother's silver crucifix on its leather cord, small, silver, the metal not warm and not cold and never either, whether I lifted it out or did not.
I did not lift it out tonight. I did not lift anything out.
I had come to look and I looked and I had come to count and I counted and the count was correct.
I closed the safe. The bolt slid over. The dial reset itself in my hand as I turned it back to zero the way I turned it back to zero every night at this end of the day, back to a face a stranger could read as nothing.
I laid the plank down. I rolled the rug back. I stood.
I stood in the utility hall with my hand flat on the door frame for a slow ten count.
The woman on the far side of the wall was not sleeping.
Her breath had caught on the second click and had not resumed at anything like her sleeping cadence until eight full seconds after the third.
I had counted the seconds without meaning to, the way a man counted things he had trained himself to count.
She was holding still. She was doing what a person did who had not meant to hear a thing and had heard it and had decided, in the third second of the eight, not to say a word about the hearing.
The count of what she might already have laid out on her side of the fence started to unroll itself in my chest and I did not have the discipline to refuse it.
Meditations on the shelf. The engraved oval flat against pinky bone.
Beau's voice on the sat phone at the main house weeks back saying my other name clear as a bell through the speaker, and Celia's face on the porch afterward, and me telling myself she had not been near enough to hear.
The refusal did not hold.
I put my forehead against the door frame. Cold pine.
I do not know how long I will be given, I thought.
That thought sat where it sat and I did not move it.
Almost twenty to eleven. I crossed the great room in socks.
The bedroom door was half open, the way it had been at a quarter past nine. I left it there. At the dresser I stripped off my jeans and T-shirt, turned the ring once out of habit, and got into bed on my side without speaking.
She was on her side facing away.
Blanket high. Dark-brown of her low twist against the pillow, the wooden pencil still through it because she had not undone it, which she never forgot to do before sleep. Which meant she had gone to bed with sleep as an ambition, not a plan.
I laid my hand flat between her shoulder blades over the flannel. Warm through the fabric. My hand covered the third button and the fourth. She had never taken the flannel off. It had been mine and now it was hers and the second button had never been sewn back on.
She did not move.
I let the quiet stand.
I left my hand there for a slow while and then I lifted it away.
I lay on my back. The plaster join in the tin roof was black where the last lamp had gone out, and the tin was silent above us, thirty-two days of tin that had not been struck by rain since a woman named me on a piece of paper in a courthouse in Hamilton, Montana.
The far generator ticked once in the shed.
Copper stamped in the barn three hundred forty yards south.
I said her name once inside my head. I did not say it out loud.
And then I lay there beside a woman whose back was turned and whose breathing was the wrong even, the tin roof black over both of us, thirty-two waterless days above our heads and my mother's birthday still spinning in the dark behind my eyes.