CHAPTER SEVEN
Shelby
The Sunday I finally raised it started, fittingly enough, with a phone call at breakfast. Delaney again, something about a hay delivery gone wrong, and Gibson took the call at the table, walking Maggie’s cereal bowl practically off the edge of the placemat as he gestured while talking, and by the time he hung up he’d agreed to drive over that same afternoon even though we’d had a standing plan to take Maggie to the county fair, a plan he’d apparently forgotten entirely in the span of a four-minute phone call.
“I thought we were going to the fair,” Maggie said, small and disappointed in the specific way she’d started sounding more often that season.
“We still are, bug. I’ll just swing by Delaney’s for twenty minutes first, I promise.
” He said it easily, already reaching for his keys, and I watched Maggie’s face do the careful math of an eight-year-old calculating how many of her father’s twenty-minute promises had turned into two-hour absences over the past several months.
The twenty minutes became ninety. We made it to the fair with barely enough daylight left for two rides before closing, and Maggie, gracious in the way children often are about disappointments they’ve already learned not to expect anything different from, said it was fine, she’d had fun anyway.
Gibson rode the rickety Ferris wheel with her twice, insisting on a third round even after the ride operator started shutting down the line behind them, determined, in his own way, to squeeze every last bit of the evening back into something worth remembering.
Watching them from the ground, Maggie’s delighted shriek carrying across the fairgrounds, I let myself soften a little toward him despite everything, because whatever else was true, he did love his daughter fiercely, and he was trying, in his clumsy way, to make up for the twenty minutes that had cost them most of the evening.
He found me afterward near the funnel cake stand, Maggie already dozing in his arms, worn out from the rides, and pulled me against his free side with an ease that still, after thirteen years, made my whole body remember exactly why I’d fallen for him in a parking lot not unlike this one.
“You’re not still mad about the twenty minutes,” he said, not quite a question, his mouth finding my temple.
“I’m working on it.”
“Let me help you work on it.” He tipped my chin up with one finger and kissed me, slow and warm, right there in the middle of the fairground crowd with our sleeping daughter between us, and for one unguarded moment every complicated thing sitting underneath our marriage that season dissolved into the simple, uncomplicated fact of wanting this man completely, twenty minutes and all.
I picked that Sunday evening, dishes done, Maggie asleep, the two of us on the back porch with the quiet that used to feel companionable and lately felt like a held breath.
“I want to talk about Delaney,” I said.
Gibson didn’t tense up, exactly, but something in his posture went careful. “Okay.”
“I’m not saying anything’s happening. I know it’s not.
” I kept my voice even, measured, the way I’d rehearsed it in my head three separate times that afternoon.
“I’m saying I’m uncomfortable with how much time you’re spending over there, and how much of your attention it’s taking up when you’re home. ”
“There’s nothing between me and Delaney.” He said it fast, immediate, like a door slamming shut on a conversation that hadn’t finished opening. “You know that. She’s a friend who’s in trouble, and I’m helping her the way I’d help anybody.”
“I believe you. I’m not accusing you of anything with her.”
“Then what are we talking about?” He wasn’t angry yet, just genuinely confused, and the confusion was almost worse than anger would have been, because it told me how far apart our two understandings of the problem actually were.
“I’m talking about time. About attention.
About the fact that you knew, off the top of your head, what she’s planning to do with her cattle rotation this fall, and you couldn’t tell me two weeks ago what I’d changed about our breeding program, even though I’ve been talking about it at dinner for a month. ”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It’s exactly the same thing.” I made myself keep going, even as I watched his jaw set. “Gibson, she needs me right now, you said that to me, about her, like it settled something. And I keep thinking, do you think I don’t?”
He didn’t answer right away, and in the silence I understood that the question had genuinely never occurred to him before I asked it out loud.
“Of course you need things,” he said finally, but it came out uncertain, a man improvising an answer he should have already had. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know you didn’t mean it. That’s the whole problem. You didn’t mean anything by any of it, which means you’re not even thinking about it, which means I’ve become something you don’t have to think about anymore.”
“That’s not fair.” Now there was an edge in his voice, defensive in a way that told me I’d landed somewhere real.
“I work my ass off for this family. I run an operation with more moving parts than you could imagine, and on top of that I’m trying to help a woman who just lost her father and is about to lose her ranch on top of it.
I don’t have an infinite amount of myself to hand out, Shelby. ”
“I’m not asking for infinite. I’m asking for some. I’m asking for the version of yourself you gave her at my kitchen table for eleven minutes while my daughter did homework three feet away and you didn’t look up once.”
“You timed it?”
The question landed exactly as unkindly as he meant it to, and I felt my own temper flare up to meet his. “I didn’t have to time it, Gibson. I felt it. There’s a difference.”
He raked a hand through his hair, and for a moment he looked less like a man defending himself and more like a man understanding, slowly, that the ground under the conversation wasn’t where he thought it was.
“I’m not weighing her over you,” he said, quieter now. “I need you to know that. There’s nothing happening.”
“I know there’s nothing happening between your bodies,” I said, and the words came out steadier than I felt saying them. “I’m telling you something’s happening to us. To this. And you keep answering a question I’m not asking.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and I thought, for just a second, that something had actually landed. Then his phone buzzed on the table between us, and though he didn’t reach for it, I watched his eyes flick toward the screen out of pure reflex before he caught himself and looked back at me.
That flick told me everything the rest of the conversation hadn’t managed to.
“I hear you,” he said. “I’ll do better.”
I wanted to believe him. Some stubborn, thirteen-years-married part of me did believe him, right up until the moment three days later when Delaney called about a genuine emergency and he was out the door before I’d finished asking whether he wanted the leftover pot roast for dinner.
I sat alone on the porch that night after he’d gone, the pot roast cooling on the counter, and called my mother, mostly because I needed to hear a voice that had known me longer than Gibson had.
“You sound tired,” Mama said, after I’d gotten through the surface details without mentioning the real ones.
“It’s been a season.”
“You’ve never been one to call me over nothing, Shelby Anne. What’s actually going on?”
I told her more than I’d told anyone besides Lainey Jo, laying out the last few months plainly: the phone calls, the eleven minutes, the empty chair at career day.
My mother listened without interrupting, a skill she’d honed over sixty years of listening to my father talk through insurance claims at the dinner table, and when I finished she was quiet for a moment.
“You know what your daddy used to say,” she said finally. “A man will always make time for whatever he thinks is on fire. The trick of a good marriage is making sure he still remembers you’re worth putting out fires for too, even when you’re not currently burning.”
“I don’t know how to make him remember that.”
“You can’t make him do anything, baby. You can only decide how long you’re willing to wait around for him to figure it out on his own.
” She sighed, and I could picture her exactly, standing in her kitchen back in Austin, phone tucked between shoulder and ear the way she always held it.
“I love Gibson. I do. But loving a man and excusing a man are two different things, and you’ve always been better than most at telling the difference.
Don’t lose that now just because you’re tired. ”
“I’m not excusing him. I raised it directly, Mama. I told him plainly I was uncomfortable with how much time he’s spending over there.”
“And what’d he say?”
“He said there’s nothing between them. He said it fast, like that answered the whole question.”
My mother made a small, knowing sound, the sound she made whenever a man’s logic confirmed something she’d suspected her whole life about the species generally.
“Course he said that. Men always think fidelity’s the whole conversation.
Your daddy did the same thing once, years back, before you were old enough to remember, got so wrapped up in a business partner’s crisis he like to forgot he had a wife and a baby at home.
I told him near enough what I’m telling you now.
It’s not about whether he’s faithful. It’s about whether he’s present.
A man can be faithful as a hound and still leave you feeling like a stranger in your own kitchen. ”
“What did you do? With Daddy, I mean.”
“I told him plain, same as you did, and then I watched real close to see if the telling changed anything, and when it didn’t the first time, I told him again, harder, and made it clear I wasn’t going to keep asking forever.
” She paused. “It took him the better part of a year to really hear it, Shelby. I won’t lie to you and say it was quick.
But he did hear it, eventually, and forty-one years later he still remembers to ask me how my day went before he starts in on his own.
Sometimes it takes a man longer than we’d like to learn a thing that ought to come natural.
Don’t let that convince you the learning isn’t worth waiting on, but don’t let it convince you to wait forever either, if it comes to that. ”
I held onto her words long after we hung up, turning them over in the dark, and understood, with a clarity that felt both comforting and a little frightening, that I wasn’t the first woman in my family to stand exactly where I was standing, and that the waiting, however it eventually resolved, had never been free.