Chapter 4 #2
"I want to say something and I'd like you to let me get through it."
"All right."
"I have known about the phone calls since the seventeenth," Bette said. "Gil told my son that I should hear it from him and my son told me. That is more or less the only thing he has done right this month, so I am counting it."
Renee did not say anything.
"I've been sitting with it for three weeks and I've done my own asking, because I don't take his account of anything and never have." Bette's hands were folded. "I want you to hear this from me, and then I will not raise it again unless you do. There was no affair, Renee."
There it was.
"He did not touch that woman," Bette said.
"He did not go anywhere with her. He was not in a hotel and there is no hotel.
I have been through a version of this in this family — I will not say whose — and I know precisely what it looks like when there is something, and there is nothing. Whatever else this is, it is not that."
She said it kindly.
That was the thing Renee would try to explain to Maggie later and fail to explain, and try again in March and fail again.
Bette Ridgeway said it the way you put a blanket over somebody.
She was seventy-one and she had come at this the way she came at everything, which was to find out the truth and then hand it to the person who needed it most, and she believed with her whole chest that she was giving Renee a gift.
"Thank you," Renee said.
"You don't have to thank me."
"No, I —" And she stopped, because she had opened her mouth to explain, and there was nothing in it.
That was the moment. Renee sat in a warm room with a cookie she had not touched and understood that she had no words for this.
She could say: he called her at eleven forty on a Sunday. And a reasonable person would say, so? People call colleagues.
She could say: ninety minutes on the afternoon of the fire. And the answer to that was forty-one client sites and a man at the county's emergency center who was alive because of it, and she had heard that answer from Chase's own mouth and believed it.
She could say: he told her things. And what was the rest of that sentence? He told her things was not a sentence anybody in the state of Colorado was going to convict a man on.
She could say: for eleven weeks my husband got up every morning and put the inside of himself somewhere else, and by the twelfth of December there was so little of him pointed at me that he drove down a hill without counting.
And she tried it. In her head, in Bette Ridgeway's living room, she tried the actual sentence.
It sounded insane.
It sounded like a woman who had had a very bad afternoon and needed something to hang it on.
"Renee?" Bette said.
"I'm all right." She picked up the cookie so that her hands would have something to do. "It's been a long month."
"It has." Bette watched her. She was not a stupid woman.
She was, in fact, the least stupid person Renee had ever sat across from, and Renee watched her decide, with real care, not to push.
"Whatever you do about the rest of it — and I want to be extremely clear that I have no opinion I'm entitled to about the rest of it — you'll always have this house. "
"Thank you, Bette."
"I mean it as a fact and not a kindness."
"I know you do," Renee said, and that was true, and it did not help at all.
She called Maggie from the truck on Pine Street with the engine running.
"She said there was no affair."
"Course she did."
"Mag, everybody's going to say that."
"Everybody's already saying it," Maggie said.
"Two people said it to me at the co-op on Tuesday.
And I'll tell you what I said, which is: nobody asked whether there was an affair.
Nobody in this county has asked what actually happened.
They've all just answered a question that wasn't put to them and then gone home feeling helpful. "
Renee put her forehead on the top of the steering wheel.
"I can't say it out loud," she said. "That's what I found out in there. I've got the true version and I cannot get it out of my mouth in a way that doesn't make me sound like I'm making something out of nothing."
"Yeah," Maggie said.
"You're not going to tell me that's not true?"
"No," Maggie said. "It's true. It's the worst thing about this and it's true.
If he'd slept with her you'd have a word for it and everybody in this county would know the word and it'd be over by Easter.
" A long breath down the phone. "You don't get a word.
You get to be the woman who left over a phone call. "
It was Chase, in the end, who closed it.
He came out to the ground on Saturday to bring her mail — three weeks of it, forwarded to the rental, held in a box on his passenger seat — and he stood at the north fence with her looking at eleven acres of dead-looking dirt while she went through it.
They were all right for about twenty minutes. That was the terrible part. He asked about the hoop house, and he actually listened to the answer, and he said the wrong thing about the water share and let her correct him.
Then he said, "Mom called me."
"I figured."
"She told me what she told you." He was looking at the rows. "I want you to know I didn't ask her to do that."
"I know."
"But she's right, Renee."
And Renee stood very still.
"I'm not — " He turned toward her and he was not being clever, that was the awful thing; his face was open, and hopeful, and he had been carrying this for a month.
"I'm not saying it fixes anything. I know it doesn't fix anything.
But you've been out here in the cold for three weeks over a thing that didn't happen, and I don't know how to — Renee, nothing happened. "
He said it the way a man says a thing he has been given.
She watched him take it. That was the exact moment, at the north fence, on the ninth of January: somebody had handed her husband a defense, and everybody had agreed on it, and he had not asked for it, and he was so tired, and he took it.
"Okay," Renee said.
"Don't do that."
"I'm not doing anything." She squared the mail into a stack against her leg. "Thank you for driving this out."
"Renee."
"You should go before the road ices."
He went.
She stood at the fence until his taillights were down past the second gate, and then she took the folded page out of her coat pocket — the one from the library, with the sentence she had cut — and she read it, and she put it back.
I wanted to be believed more than I wanted to be avenged.
Well, she thought. She had gotten exactly one of those.