Chapter 6 #2
Instead she stood there, and he stood there, and a hundred and forty people started coming out of the building behind them and going to their cars, and neither of them moved, and she saw his hands.
He had his hat in both of them and they were shaking.
Not a little. She watched him notice it and put the hat under one arm and shove both hands in his coat pockets, and she thought about a man who had run a boardroom at thirty-one, who had told a bank no in front of his own father, who had never in nine years so much as raised his voice, standing in front of a township meeting with his hands going like a kid.
She did not soften.
But something in her moved sideways about an inch, and she was too tired and too honest to pretend it hadn’t.
“I’ll tell you the thing I keep not saying,” Talia said, “and then I’m going home, because I’ve got a delivery at seven.
“In February, when the power went, I thought about you the whole time. Three days. Every single hour. That’s — Seth, that’s what I’ve never told anybody, including Bailey, because it makes me sound like a woman waiting by a window, and I’ve spent my whole life not being that.
“But it’s what happened. I kept the stove in and I drained the lines and I did every sensible thing there was to do, and under all of it, the entire time, there was a thing in me going he’ll be up by tonight. Saturday. Sunday morning. Sunday at three in the afternoon I was still doing it.”
He did not say anything. He had learned that much by April.
“And then I stood outside a window,” she said, “and you hadn’t thought about me at all.
“That’s it. That’s the whole injury. Not the woman.
Not the dinner. I had spent three days with you in my head and you had not spent four seconds with me in yours, and tonight you stood up in that hall and put my name in a room in front of a hundred and forty people who love me, and it was the loudest anybody’s ever been about me in my life.
” Her voice held. “And it still wasn’t asking. ”
The parking lot was almost empty. Somebody’s truck went past on the road with the window down.
“Go home,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Seth.”
He stopped.
“Take the generators to the board again in May,” she said. “Without me in it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
* * *
She walked back through the village, and it took her twenty minutes to do four hundred yards.
That is what a hundred and forty people coming out of a meeting does to a street.
They were at their cars with the doors open and the domes on, and every one of them had to say something to her, and every one of them meant well, and by the fourth she understood that she was going to have to stand there and take all of it.
Ed Coughlin’s wife said it was a wonderful thing he was doing.
A man from the road commission whose name she never could hold said that his mother lived alone on the Peninsula road and he had not slept right since February and now he would, and his eyes went, and Talia had to put a hand on his arm.
Somebody’s daughter, nineteen or so, said, “That was really brave, what you said,” which was the only one that got in.
And Marla Cutter, last, at the corner by the Mercantile, with her keys in her hand, said nothing at all for a second and then said: “He should have asked you.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s all I’m going to say about it. He should have asked you, and now nobody in this county is going to be able to say so, because they’re all going to be warm.” Marla unlocked her car. “That’s how it works with money. Goodnight, Talia.”
She let herself into her own building and stood in the dining room in the dark for a while.
Then she went behind the bar and got the bottle her father had kept for weddings and poured about an inch of it, and sat at the long window table and drank it slowly, and did not enjoy it.
Bailey called at half past nine, which she would not normally do on a meeting night.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, you did the voice.”
“What voice?”
“The one where you say fine and it comes out flat on the end.” Bailey let a second go. “For what it’s worth, and I’m going to hate myself in the morning — Gil Rausch stopped me in the parking lot and said it’s the best thing anybody’s brought that board in twenty years.”
“It is.”
“Yeah. Well.” A chair creaked somewhere. “I’ve been sitting here since nine trying to work out whether a man can do the right thing for the wrong reason and have it still count, and I’ve decided that’s above my pay grade and I’m a county employee.”
“Bailey.”
“What.”
“He didn’t ask me,” Talia said.
“Yeah.”
“That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it in one sentence, and I keep saying it and everybody keeps telling me about the generators.” Her voice slipped and she let it. “I know they’re good. I said so in the room. I’ll say so again in May. And he still didn’t ask me.”
There was a long quiet on the line.
“Okay,” Bailey said. “Yeah. I’ve got it now.”
Her phone went at ten past ten.
Bailey. Turn on your phone tomorrow before you talk to anybody.
Then, thirty seconds later: Roche is out at the firm. Gone. Since Friday.
Talia sat with the phone in her hand and the glass in front of her.
Fired? she typed.
The three dots went a long time.
Nobody’s saying. But Frank’s cousin does the cleaning contract and her stuff was in boxes Friday afternoon and Teague walked her out.
And then, while Talia was still looking at that:
Tal — she didn’t leave the county. She’s got a rental on the Peninsula road. Month to month. Signed it Saturday.
Talia set the phone face down on her grandfather’s table.
Out the window the street was empty and the snow had started again, small and dry, the kind that means it’s turning colder.
Ten weeks. She had spent ten weeks getting to the point where she could go a whole day without carrying him around, and it had taken one Tuesday night to undo it, and now the woman who had told her husband that his wife was warm was renting a house four miles from the building Talia slept in.
“All right,” she said, to the empty room.
It came out steadier than she expected.