CHAPTER 18 #2
Beau had washed at the mudroom sink. He had left the canvas coat on the hook. He was in the plain white button-down that lived on a specific hanger in Bozeman.
Lamb-shank with the rosemary that grew in Marta's cottage garden. Roasted potatoes. Salad from Miriam's greenhouse trade last week. A glass of red for Beau. Water for Marta. Water for me. Iced tea in a mason jar for Celia because Celia had a habit of it now.
Beau put his hand out across the table when Celia sat down.
“I'm Beau,” he said. “A friend of Luke's from a long time ago. Up out of Bozeman on business.”
Celia's hand went into his. Firm shake. Firm let-go.
“Celia.”
“I've heard.”
“I bet.”
He half-smiled. She half-smiled back. He was doing the older-brother-charm the way he had done it on doorsteps in three states between 2003 and 2008, and she was letting him without letting him.
Marta refilled Beau's wine before he had drunk it down and Beau did not stop her.
“I promised your husband I would not embarrass him,” Beau said, “so I am going to tell exactly one story from before your husband got to be your husband, and then I am going to eat my lamb-shank.”
“Please.”
“When we were boys,” Beau said — and I did not look at Celia at as boys, because I did not have to. Her thumb started against her palm under the tablecloth without a look from me. Six small taps under the tablecloth, left hand, then stillness.
She did not press. That was the part I had known she would do, and she did.
She held the question inside her mouth the way she held a piece of ice she had decided not to spit out, and she chewed the lamb, and she laughed at the end of Beau's story about a Maine dock with a fishing rod in the water and a rowboat drifting away from us and our father's expression from the deck of the camp, and she said, “That is the exact face he does when I burn bacon,” and Beau laughed the way Beau laughed once a year for one person who was not his wife, and Marta let a look pass across the table that Marta had never not had.
Marta refilled Beau's wine again. Beau did not stop her.
I did not eat the last of my potatoes. I moved them to the side of the plate with the tine of the fork the way I moved everything to the side of the plate when I was thinking.
My wife saw it. She said nothing. She reached under the tablecloth without looking at me and she put her fingertips on the back of my hand for a slow four count and then took them away.
That was the moment I kept: her fingertips on the back of my hand, four counts, no witness. It joined the forge and Kira's silver band — proof my brother had built a life from things our father would never have chosen. I had room for more than I thought.
Marta cleared plates.
Beau said he wanted to walk the drive before he set out.
I stood.
Celia stood.
Marta stood.
Beau took Celia's hand between both of his and held it for the beat that people from a background like ours held a woman's hand between both of theirs on a first meeting, and he said, “It was a pleasure to meet you. Kira wants to know if you'll come to Christmas.”
Celia's chin came up half an inch. “I'll come to Christmas.”
Three in the afternoon on the main house drive. The gravel had baked white in four days of sun on top of Thursday's wet.
Beau walked slow. I walked slower. The switchback shoulder was to our right, dropping toward Sula.
He said it without turning his head.
“She knows you, brother.”
I gave him nothing.
“You gave that away the second I said your name up at the lookout, and she gave it away weeks ago at a kitchen table without knowing she was giving anything, and you know that too, because you were there for the giving.
If you don't tell her tonight, I will tell her at Christmas dinner. And she will hate that I got there before you did.” He stopped walking. “Kira wants her at Christmas.”
“Christmas is not the current problem.”
He looked at me the way he had looked at me at fifteen with a hunting-rifle wound bleeding into his own belt around my arm in the woods above Great Sacandaga Lake.
“Ma would have liked her.”
That earned him nothing either.
He put a hand flat against my shoulder for a beat. He took it away. He got in the rental. He backed it around. He raised two fingers off the wheel.
He disappeared down the switchback.
I stood in the drive.
The wind picked up. Six miles an hour out of the west. Marta's rosemary from the cottage garden came up to me on it, and the sun laid a hot band across the back of my neck under the shirt collar, and my mother's silver crucifix sat in a floor safe under a Navajo rug half a mile north as if it had been there a hundred years and would be there a hundred more.
I turned my father's ring on my pinky. Once.
Tell her tonight, Beau had said.
I got on Copper. I rode the switchback trail back up.
A quarter to eight in the evening, by my watch, when I came in the cabin door.
Celia was at the great-room table with Angle of Repose face-down at her elbow and the silver bookmark inside it and her second glass of tap water half-empty by her hand.
The lamp was on because the light had gone from the west window ten minutes back.
The Navajo rug was under my boots the way it had been under my boots for a thousand nights.
She looked up.
“Lookout okay?”
“Lookout was fine.”
“Beau got off all right.”
“He got off all right.”
“Ma would have liked her,” she said, quiet, and did not smile. “That was under the wind on the porch, but I heard the sentence.”
I offered no answer.
She waited.
I crossed into the utility hall. I did not turn on the light. I bent. I rolled the Navajo rug back a foot. I lifted the plank. I did not open the safe. I stood up. I settled the plank back into place. I did not roll the rug back yet.
I crossed to the great-room table.
I stood over her.
She kept her eyes on mine.
“Sweetheart.”
“Yes.”
“Ten. Right.”
Two beats.
“Thirteen. Left.”
Two beats.
“Fifty-six. Right.”
She wrote nothing down. She kept her hands flat on the table on either side of her paperback. Hazel eyes, the green shift in them a little brighter under the lamp.
“If I ever tell you to open it, that is how. If I never tell you — you decide.”
She said it once and level.
“Understood.”
I did not know until she said it what I had needed her to say. The weight came off in two stages — the one I had set down at the lookout and the one I had just placed in her hands at this table.
I said, “I'll be up at the ridge for an hour.”
She said, “Go.”
I went.
Half past nine at night, by my watch, when I came back to the porch.
The valley had gone blue and was going black.
Two propane lamps on in the main house window a mile and a half south.
Copper resettled in the barn. Fence corner five hundred yards southwest, dark.
Treeline a hundred forty yards north, dark.
Ridge quiet. Ridge would be quiet tomorrow.
Tuesday would be quiet. Tuesday was going to be by design.
My thumb crossed my father's initials slowly.
He had laid the signet on the walnut desk in the East Hampton house when I was thirteen and said, this is yours the year I decide you have earned it.
I had said yes, sir. I earned it at seventeen the way the men in our family earned everything, and I had worn it every day since — including the six years I spent in country he would not have recognized as ours.
She'll open it before I tell her, I thought.
I gave her that. I meant to.
Inside the cabin the lamp was on. Her silhouette on the far side of the great-room window was sharp against yellow lamplight.
Her back to me, the flannel on her shoulders, one hand up at the shelf where I kept the books.
She was reaching for the Loeb the way a person reached for something they had already once decided to reach for and had not made peace with the reaching.
Second time this week. First time was Thursday and she had put the book down without opening it after eight seconds.
Now she had it in her hands. She held it the way she had held it on the Sunday afternoon when she first saw the spine. The way you held a small animal you were not sure would bite.
The threshold held me outside.
Two beats.
She opened the front cover.
Two beats.
She shut the cover.
She put the book back on the shelf.
She did not turn her head toward the porch.
I turned the ring on my pinky. Once. My father's initials against pinky bone.
Tomorrow was not tonight.
The day after tomorrow was where the question was going to come, and I stood on the porch and I let it come toward me, and I did not go inside.