The Wife He Left To Burn (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #20)

Chapter 1

The wind started before it was light.

Renee heard it come down off the divide at five and knew the day was going to be ugly.

Not fire ugly. Just December ugly — the kind of wind that pushes the truck around on the county road and strips the last leaves off the cottonwoods in an afternoon.

She lay in the dark and listened to it work at the north side of the house and thought about the lease in her coat pocket.

She had signed it three weeks ago. Eleven acres, the old Tolliver ground, the same beds she had built out of nothing at twenty-six and closed at thirty-two.

The lease was one page. She had folded it in thirds and put it in the pocket of the canvas coat she wore every day, and every day since, she had not mentioned it.

She got up at six and made coffee she did not want.

The house was cold in the way old stone gets cold.

Chase's grandfather had built it in 1924 and every generation since had bolted something onto it, so that now it ran off in three directions and none of the floors met.

Renee had kept it for nine years. She knew which windows leaked and which door you had to lift to close and where the water shut off.

She could not have told anybody what she owned in it.

Her phone buzzed at seven forty.

"You're up," Chase said.

"Wind woke me."

"It's bad down here too. They shut the highway at Superior." Traffic behind him. He was driving. He was always driving. "Fenner call you?"

"About the roof?"

"About the roof."

"He's coming Thursday."

"Good." A pause that had a shape to it. "You okay?"

That was the part she could never explain to anyone afterward. He asked. He asked most days. He asked warmly, and he meant it, and there was nothing underneath it at all — the way you ask a person you have already decided is fine.

"I'm fine," she said.

"I'll be late. Board thing, then I've got a call."

"Okay."

"Love you."

"Love you," she said, and he was gone before the second word landed.

She stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand.

Outside, the wind pushed a lawn chair across the flagstone and dumped it.

Renee looked at the chair for a while. Then she put the phone down and went to find her boots, because the lease was one page and it committed her to eleven acres and a water share, and she had a seed order to write, and she was going to write it today.

She wrote it at the dining table on the back of an envelope, because she did not have an office in that house.

She had a room. It had a desk in it and a good chair and a window on the south side, and Chase had given it to her the first year, and she had never once been able to work in it.

She had never told him that either. She wrote lists on envelopes and receipts and the back of the feed store calendar, and put them in her coat, and the coat was the closest thing she had to a desk.

Blue grama. Little bluestem. Sideoats. She knew the pounds per acre without looking, which was a thing she had been quietly proud of for six years and had said out loud to nobody.

Fenner came at eleven to look at the roof. She took him coffee up the ladder and stood in the yard holding it while he walked the north pitch and complained about the flashing, and the wind kept trying to take his hat off, and twice he stopped what he was doing to look east.

"You don't like it," Renee said.

"I don't like it since Tuesday." He came down two rungs and looked east again. "Ground's got nothing in it. No snow since October. That's grass down there, Renee, that's not brush, that's cured grass and it's four foot in places."

"So."

"So grass burns different." He said it the way he said everything, flat, like he was reading a gauge. "Anybody tells you they'll get out ahead of grass, they've never stood next to it."

She remembered that later too. Everybody remembered somebody who said it out loud that morning.

The smoke came up out of the flats at three fifteen.

She saw it from the kitchen window as a brown smear low on the horizon, east and south, out past the last subdivision. It did not look like anything. It looked like a burn pile getting away from somebody. She watched it for maybe a minute.

By three twenty-five it was a wall.

She did not know that grass in a hundred-mile wind moves faster than a car on a county road. She learned it in ten minutes, the way everybody in that county learned it that day.

Her phone went off with the county alert. Then Fenner's truck came up the drive too fast and he was out of it before it stopped rolling, and she could hear him from the porch.

"Renee. Now. Right now."

"How long?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe. They're calling it at the fence line."

Ten minutes.

Here is what she did with them, and she would go over it for the rest of the winter.

She got the dogs. That was thirty seconds — they were already at the door, wild, because animals know before people do. She put them in the back of Fenner's truck and he already had the horse trailer hooked because he had been up there since noon on the roof.

Chase's mother's silver was in the dining room. Renee did not take it.

The hard drives with nine years of the foundation's records were in the office. Renee did not take those either, and nobody ever asked her about it.

There were four cardboard boxes in the cellar with her mother's handwriting on the sides.

Her mother had died fourteen months ago in October, and Renee had packed those boxes herself in a house in Longmont with a realtor waiting in the driveway, and she had brought them here and put them under the stairs and had not opened one of them since.

Not once. She had gone down there in April and stood in front of them and gone back up.

She was at the cellar door before she decided to be.

"Ten minutes," Fenner shouted from the yard.

"I know."

"Renee —"

"Four boxes. I'm counting."

She went down.

The cellar was cut stone, dug into the hill under the original 1924 part of the house, and it stayed fifty degrees in July.

The stairs turned once. There was a light on a pull chain at the bottom and a second one over the shelving, and the whole space smelled like dirt and old apples, which is a smell she had loved for nine years.

She got two boxes to the bottom of the stairs.

She went back for the third.

And the power dropped, and the light died, and above her the house made a sound she had never heard a building make — a long low complaint, like something heavy sitting down on its knees.

Then the noise. Not a roar. People always say roar. It was a freight-train shudder that came through the stone into her feet, and under it a crack like a rifle, and then another, and then a hundred of them at once.

Renee got to the stairs.

She got up four of them, and the door at the top was orange around all four edges, and she could feel it on her face from where she stood.

She went back down.

The thing nobody tells you about six hours is how much of it is boredom.

The first twenty minutes were terror. Pure, physical, animal — she sat with her back against the coldest stone she could find and her coat over her head and she shook so hard her teeth hurt.

The house went in stages. Something big let go over the kitchen and the whole ceiling of the cellar bounced dust down onto her.

Then it moved on, the way grass fire does, and what was left was the house burning on top of her, and that took hours.

She found the drain in the northwest corner and put her face near it and the air there was cold and smelled like water, and that is why she lived, though she did not know it at the time. She knew it was cold and that was all the reason she needed.

She had her phone. Two bars, then one, then none. She got one text out to Chase at 3:52. Cellar. Cant get up. Send someone.

It said Delivered. It never said Read.

She wrote a second one and it would not go. She wrote a third. She turned the phone off to save it, then turned it on again eleven minutes later because the dark was worse than she expected, and then she made herself turn it off again.

The dark was very dark.

Around what she guessed was five o'clock, she stopped expecting anybody.

She wanted to be clear about that afterward, when people asked, though they mostly did not ask.

It was not despair. It was arithmetic. Ten minutes had passed and then thirty and then ninety, and the house had come down on the door, and she was under a stone hill in a county where nine hundred structures were burning, and there was no reason on earth for anyone to be looking at that particular hole in the ground.

So she stopped expecting anybody, and her mind did something she had not asked it to.

It started making a list.

Not of what she was losing. That would have made sense. The list her mind made, in the dark, on a dirt floor, at thirty-eight years old, was a list of everything she had agreed to give up without anybody ever actually asking her to.

The nursery was first. Six years. She had closed it in March of the third year of the marriage and told everyone it was a joint decision, and it had been a joint decision the way weather is a joint decision.

Her Thursdays were on the list. She used to have Thursdays.

Her name was on the list. Not the Ridgeway part — she had taken that gladly, she had liked it, she had liked how her father's face looked at the courthouse. The part where people stopped putting Renee in front of it.

Then the small ones started coming, and the small ones were worse.

The way she had stopped saying I at dinners. She had noticed it once and then unnoticed it. We're looking at the Steamboat place. We think the second quarter's going to be rough. She had never been near the second quarter of anything.

The way she said the house and not my house.

The way, when people asked what she did, she had a sentence ready that took four seconds and made everyone comfortable.

Her father's face at the courthouse, which belonged on a different list, but her mind put it here.