Chapter 8
For nine days after the back stairs she did not go up the county road and he did not come down it.
That was not an agreement. Nobody said anything. The house was finished as far as two people with box cutters could finish it, the restoration outfit had its own crew in there now, and there was no longer any reason on earth for Talia Lassiter to be standing in a room with her husband.
So she worked. The first week of May did a hundred and ten on the Saturday.
Marilyn had the menu going somewhere good, whitefish and morels and a leek thing that people were starting to come back for, and Dot had started turning tables without being told, and Talia went nineteen hours a day and slept without dreaming and did not think about a man’s hand on a stair rail more than about twice an hour.
Jared finished the front door frame on the Tuesday. The front door hung true for the first time in her life and she stood and swung it back and forth like an idiot for a full minute.
“Told you,” he said.
“You did.”
“Rooms upstairs next.”
“Don’t push it.”
He grinned and went out the back and she stood there a while, and then went and rolled silver for forty minutes because her hands wanted something.
The nine days had a shape she could not admit to.
She would have told anybody who asked that she was relieved.
She had a business running at capacity and a building that had gone from a wreck to a room in six weeks and she did not have a spare hour in the day, and the absence of a truck in the street at five in the morning was one less thing in a life that had too many things in it.
What happened was that she started getting up at ten to five.
Not four. She had gotten up at four every morning of her adult life.
For those days in the first week of May she woke at ten to five, which is exactly ten minutes before the hour she used to unlock the front door, and lay there on her back in her father’s room listening for a truck that was not coming, and then got up furious with herself and went down and put the pot on.
She did not tell Bailey that.
And she did not tell Bailey the rest of it either, which was worse and simpler.
Her body had not gotten the news. That was the whole of it.
She had spent five months building a case against her husband in her head, line by line, and she had built it well, and none of it had reached her hands.
Her hands remembered a stair rail and a fist full of shirt and the particular warmth that comes off a man who has been working since seven.
She caught herself at it on the Wednesday, prepping alone at six in the morning with the radio off — standing at the board with a knife going and her mind two miles up a dark road and nowhere decent — and she said, “no,” and kept cutting.
It did not help. You can be right about a man in every particular and still want him to put his hand on the back of your neck.
* * *
Emerson Roche came in on the Thursday at twenty past three.
That’s the dead hour. Lunch was never a thing they did and service wasn’t till five, so the room was empty and the chairs were down and Renata was doing the candles at the long window table with the radio going.
Talia was at the pass with the order book.
She heard the front door — the specific groan of it, because Jared had lifted the frame and it now opened without being shouldered — and she looked up through the pass and saw the coat first. Oatmeal wool. In May.
She put the pen down.
“Renata.”
Renata looked up, and then across, and then back at Talia with her eyebrows halfway to her hairline, because Renata Dietz was nineteen and this village had one story that spring.
“Go take your break.”
“I don’t want a—”
“Go take your break, honey.”
Renata went. The back door banged.
Talia came out through the swinging door, which swung, and crossed her own floor.
* * *
Emerson stood just inside the front, perfectly still, looking at the room.
“It’s a beautiful building,” she said.
“What do you want.”
“I’d like to talk to you for about five minutes and then I’ll go, and I won’t come back.” She said it evenly, without any pleading in it. “You can tell me to leave now and I will.”
Talia should have. She has thought about that too.
“Talk.”
“Can we sit?”
“No.”
“All right.”
Emerson put her handbag down on the nearest table anyway, which Talia understood was not a mistake. Nothing this woman did was a mistake.
“I’ve left the firm,” she said.
“I heard.”
“I imagine you did. I have a position in Chicago beginning in July and I’ve kept the rental on the Peninsula road until then because I like it out there, which people find strange.
” She said it the way you’d read a weather report.
“None of that is why I’m here. I’m here because there is a thing you don’t know, and I think you should have it. ”
“You think I should have it.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Because it’s accurate,” Emerson said, “and everything you have is secondhand.”
“I’ve had it from my husband.”
“Yes.”
“You think he lied to me about it.”
“No,” Emerson said, and that was the first moment Talia understood that this was going to be much worse than she had braced for.
“I don’t think he lied to you at all. I think he told you exactly what he remembers, and I think what he remembers is a man in a room being deceived, because that’s the version a person can carry. ”
“And you’re here to correct the record.”
“I’m here because I’ve been in a rented house on the Peninsula road since April with nothing to do,” Emerson said, “and there is one thing I know that you don’t, and I have decided I would rather you had it.”
She said it without any heat at all. Talia turned that sentence over for years afterward and settled on the answer that it was probably all true, and that true is not the same as kind.
* * *
Talia stood with her arms crossed over an apron and said nothing, which she had learned to do at the pass, which is a different silence from the one people use in an argument.
“On the Saturday,” Emerson said. “The second day of the storm. Ian Teague came to me around ten in the morning and said Seth wanted somebody sent up to the house to check on his wife. Property was under my review at the time, so it came to me.”
“I know that part.”
“You know that he asked. You don’t know what he asked, and you don’t know what happened after.”
“Then say it.”
“He said, and I remember it because I wrote it in my day file, ‘Can somebody run up and make sure Talia’s all right.’” Emerson’s face did not change at all.
“I told him it had been checked. I told him the generator was running and the house was warm and that you’d been offered a car and said you’d rather stay put. ”
“None of which was true.”
“None of which was true,” Emerson agreed.
Talia’s hands had gone cold inside her sleeves and she did not let them move.
“Why,” she said.
“That isn’t the part you should be asking about.”
“Don’t tell me what to ask.”
“All right.” Emerson tilted her head a fraction. “Because a man who drives up to his house at ten on a Saturday morning does not come back down until Tuesday, and I had seven weeks of something I had built carefully and I was not going to lose it to a power cut.”
There it was. Said flat, in a dining room, in the middle of the afternoon.
“You knew he’d believe you,” Talia said.
“Of course he’d believe me. He believed everything I told him. That’s what I was for.” And then, very slightly, something moved behind her eyes — not shame. Something closer to pride. “But that isn’t the part either.”
“Then what is the part.”
“How long it took him.”
* * *
The radio was still going at the long window table. Somebody on it was talking about lake levels.
“I said it to him standing in the doorway of the conference room,” Emerson said.
“I said, the house has been checked, the generator’s running, she’s fine, she doesn’t want to come down.
And he said —” She stopped, and Talia understood that the stopping was deliberate, and understood too that it did not matter, because it was going to land anyway.
“He said, ‘Okay, good.’ And then he said, ‘Did we get the Dearborn numbers back?’”
The room did not move.
“That was it,” Emerson said. “That was the entire thing. Four seconds, maybe five. I didn’t have to convince him of anything. I didn’t have to work at it. I gave him a reason not to drive up and he took it and he was on to the next thing before I was out of the doorway.”
Talia heard herself say, “Stop.”
“He didn’t wonder,” Emerson said. “That’s the thing you don’t have.
He wasn’t torn. There was no moment where he thought about it and chose wrong.
He heard that somebody else had handled you and he put it down like a folder and it never came back up, not Saturday, not Sunday, not until a nurse called him on Monday morning. ”
“Stop.”
“You’ve spent three months believing he was lied to,” Emerson said. “He was. I lied to him. I’d do it again. But you should know exactly how little lying it took.”
* * *
Here is what Talia could not afterward explain to anybody, including Bailey.
She had spent three months building a version of it that she could live beside.
In that version there had been a man in a room being handed a false thing, and the false thing was the hinge, and if you took the false thing out he would have come.
She had not known she was carrying that version.
She found out she’d been carrying it the second it was taken away from her.
He asked. That was supposed to be the good part. She had heard it in a hospital bed and it had been the one thing she could put her hand on.
And it turned out that he asked and he did not wonder were the same four seconds, and that the asking cost him nothing, and the not-wondering cost him nothing, and she had lain in a ditch on the county road she grew up on while her husband asked about the Dearborn numbers.
She sat down.