Chapter 18 #2
She found Jason at the bottom of the lane at about nine, leaning on the gate under the new sign with his jacket over his arm, looking at nothing.
The light was still going. Somebody had put music on up at the house and it carried down the lane, thin and cheerful, and the horses had come down to the bottom of the field to see what all the fuss was.
“Hiding?” she said.
“Completely.”
“Thank God.” She leaned on the gate beside him. “There are thirty people in my yard and I love all of them and I would like them to go home.”
“Roger’s opened the second bottle.”
“Then they are never going home.”
He laughed. She put her head on his shoulder and they stood there for a while, and then she said, “I want to say a thing and I’d like you to let me get to the end of it.”
“You always say that.”
“Because you always interrupt.”
“That is fair,” Jason said, “and I will be quiet.”
* * *
“A year ago,” Mila said, “I stood in our kitchen and told you the terms, and you agreed to all of them in about four seconds, and I have thought since that I never gave you the other half.”
“You don’t owe me half of anything.”
“Shut up, I’m getting to the end.” She turned around and leaned her back against the gate so she could see him. “Here it is. I’m not managing you. I stopped about eight months ago and I want to say it out loud because I don’t think you know.
“I don’t check what I’m about to say to you anymore.
I don’t run it past myself first. I told you in September that I hated your grandmother’s chairs and I told you in April that you were wrong about the Norfolk thing and I told you three weeks ago that I did not want to go to the Fairbanks thing and would not be going.
” She was smiling and her eyes were stinging.
“Eight years of marriage and I never once said any of those things, and now I say about nine of them a week, and you have never once made me pay for a single one.”
Jason was still.
“That’s the whole thing,” she said. “That’s what I actually wanted. Not the grovel and not the horse and not the recording — though I’ll take all three. I wanted to be married to somebody I could say things to.”
“Mila—”
“One more and then you can talk.” She put her hand flat on his chest. “I love you. Not despite it and not around it. I know exactly what you did and I know exactly what it cost and I’m not carrying it anymore, and I haven’t been for months, and I want you to stop carrying it too.
“It’s over. We’re not at the end of something bad. We’re a year into something good.”
* * *
He put his forehead against hers.
“Can I talk now?”
“Go on.”
“I love you,” Jason said. “I’m going to say it about nine times a week too and you’re going to have to put up with it. And I want to put something on the record, because you’ve done yours properly and I’m not going to do mine badly.”
“All right.”
“I’m not grateful.” He said it with his forehead still against hers.
“I stopped being grateful sometime last fall and it was the single best thing that has happened to this marriage. I’m not standing at the edge of my own life being glad to be let in.
I live here. It’s my sign too, it’s my horse’s foal, and if you try and take the Washington thing full-time without discussing it with me I will fight you about it like a man with a vote. ”
“Good,” said Mila.
“And the other thing is that I’m happy.” His voice went.
“I want to say that out loud because we spent a year in a house where nobody said anything out loud. I’m happy.
I’m forty-four and I’m happy, and I’ve got it written down in a diary like an idiot, and I’d quite like the next forty years of exactly this. ”
“You’ve got them,” she said.
“Say it properly.”
“You’ve got the next forty years of exactly this,” Mila said. “I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you, and that’s not a hope, it’s an arrangement, and I’ve never broken one yet.”
* * *
Somebody let the dogs out up at the house and there was a great deal of shrieking about a sausage.
Mila started laughing and could not stop.
She laughed until she had to hold the gate, and Jason was laughing too, and up at the top of the lane thirty people were eating off a trestle table under a sign with her father’s posts holding it up, and a mare who was not supposed to have survived the fall was standing at the bottom of the field with a foal in her, watching them both with her ears up.
“Come on,” Jason said, and took her hand. “They’ll be looking for you.”
“In a minute.”
“Mila.”
“In a minute,” she said, and kissed him, at the bottom of her own lane, in June, in the last of the light.
Then they walked up to the house together, and she could hear all of it the whole way — the music, and the dogs, and Roger holding forth about something, and her mother’s laugh, and thirty people in her yard making the particular racket that people make when nobody in the room is pretending about anything.
She had spent six weeks once in a room where she could hear everything and could not say a word.
She thought about that, sometimes, and she thought about it going up that lane, and she said it out loud, immediately, to her husband, the way she had every day for a year and intended to for the rest of her life.
“I’m so glad,” she said.
“So am I,” said Jason, and meant it, and held on to her hand the whole way up.