Chapter 10 #2
She came in at eleven with her jaw set.
“Sixty nights.”
“About that.”
“Tal, I want to be clear with you that I have thought about this all day and I’ve got nothing to say about it that I’m proud of.”
“Say the unproud thing. It’s what you’re for.”
“Fine.” Bailey put both hands on the pass.
“I’m angry about it. I’m angry that he did a good thing quietly for four months in my county and I found out from Frank Dietz, and I have spent five months telling you that whatever he’s doing is for an audience, and there wasn’t one.
” She said it like it cost her. “And I’d like you to notice that being wrong about that has not made me like him.
It’s just made me a person who was wrong. ”
“That’s the least reassuring thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I’m not here to reassure you, I’m here to be the only one who says the ditch out loud.” Bailey rubbed her eyes. “I’ll tell you what I actually think, and then I’ll have a beer.
“I think he’s doing the right thing for the right reason and I think it’s real.
And I think if you go back to him and it goes wrong, you’ll be seventy years old in a beautiful house with nothing of your own, like his mother, and I will have to watch it happen for thirty years and be nice about it at Christmas. ”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“That’s what everybody says.” Bailey reached past her for the bottle opener. “You’ve got a building, Tal. You didn’t have one in February. That’s the difference between you and Cheryl Lassiter and it’s the only difference there is, and I’d like you to keep it whatever you do.”
* * *
There was one more thing in it that she did not see for another week, and when she did see it she had to sit down on the bottom stair.
Walt had said: he wrote something down.
Not he made a note. Walt Ostrom does not talk like that. He had said the man asked whether there was somebody coming if the heat went off, and Walt had said my daughter’s in Cadillac, which is two hours, and Seth had written something down.
So there is a list.
Somewhere — in a truck, on a phone, on a bit of card in a coat pocket — there is a list with three households on it and, beside each one, the name of the person who would come and how long it would take them to get there.
Two hours for Walt. She did not know what it said beside Ruthie’s name and she never asked.
And Talia sat on the bottom stair of her own back staircase in the middle of June and thought: my name was not on a list in February, and he has gone and made one.
Not for her. That was the part that undid her. He had not made a list with her name on it and brought it to her and said look. He had made one with three old people on it, for a winter that was already over, and put it in a pocket.
* * *
Jared Soto finished the rooms upstairs in the third week of June.
Four of them and the bath with the claw-foot tub, and a linen cupboard he built out of the old dining room wainscot because she could not bear to throw it out.
He put the last of the hardware on a Wednesday morning and then he stood in the hall and looked at it and said, “There.”
“There.”
“You’ll have them full by the Fourth.”
“I’ve got three booked for Saturday.”
“Then you’ll have them full by Saturday.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. “Tal, I’m going to say something and then I’m going to go put my tools in the truck, and you don’t have to answer it, and it doesn’t change the invoice.”
She knew. She’d known since the crate and the boots, in March.
“Okay,” she said.
“I like you very much,” Jared said. “I’ve liked you since the first morning, when you told me Frank Dietz talks a lot.
And you put your hand on my shoulder at the county dinner in front of everybody I know, and I have thought about that more than a grown man ought to, and I’d rather say so than go on thinking about it.
I know what’s going on and I know what it is, and I’m not asking you for anything in the middle of it.
But I’m forty-four and I’ve been on my own nine years and I’m not going to stand in a hallway and pretend I haven’t thought about it. ”
He said it the same way he said went up fine. Plainly, with his hands at his sides, a man reporting a condition.
She was so grateful to him for that she could have sat down on the floor.
“Jared.”
“Yeah.”
“If this were a year from now,” she said, “or if February had gone differently, or if I were a different woman than the one standing in this hall — I’d say yes. I want you to actually hear that, because I’m not being kind. I’d say yes.”
“But it isn’t a year from now.”
“No.”
She made herself finish it, because he had been straight with her and she was not going to be less than that.
“And I’d be thinking about somebody else,” she said. “Not in a year. Tonight. If you kissed me in this hallway I’d let you and I’d be somewhere else the whole time, and you’d know it inside a week, and I’d rather cut my hand off than do that to you.”
Jared took that standing up.
“Well,” he said. “That’s the most anybody’s said no to me in thirty years.”
“And you’re not done with him.”
“No,” she said. “I thought I was. I said it out loud to Bailey with my whole chest. And I’m not.”
Jared nodded slowly. He did not look destroyed and he did not look relieved and he did not, thank God, make it easier for her by pretending it was nothing.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, that’s insulting.” He picked up his level. “And for the record, the shoulder thing was nothing. I knew it was nothing at the time. I just liked it.”
“Jared.”
“I’m allowed one,” he said. “I’d rather you told me straight in a hallway than let me find out over six months.”
At the top of the stairs he stopped.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “and it’s worth about a nickel.
I’ve been in and out of this building since March and I’ve watched that truck sit out there.
I don’t know what the man did and I don’t want to.
But whatever he’s doing now, he’s not doing it for an audience.
There’s no audience at five in the morning in Leland. ”
“Thank you.”
“Okay.” He went down two steps and stopped again. “And Tal — you’d have made a hell of a life without him. I want you to know somebody saw that. Whatever you do next, you weren’t choosing between a life and nothing.”
Then he went out to his truck, and the next week he sent her an invoice with the rooms discounted fifteen percent, which she paid at full and he never mentioned.
* * *
That Saturday she did a hundred and forty-four covers and three rooms and turned six tables and made more money in one night than her father ever had.
At half past eleven she went up to the front room with her boots in her hand and stood at the window.
The village was quiet. The harbor lights were on the water. It had gone warm, properly warm, the first real night of the summer, and somebody’s kid was riding a bike up the middle of the street at an hour when no one should be.
She thought about sixty nights.
She thought about a man asking three old people whether their heat was on and never once telling his wife.
And she thought — clearly, without any drama in it at all, standing barefoot in the room where her father died — I am going to have to hear him say it. All of it. And he’s going to have to hear mine.
Not tonight. Not this week. There was the Fourth, and the rooms, and a girl she had to hire before July.
But she said it to the window, and once she’d said it she could not un-say it:
“After the Fourth.”