Chapter 5 #2
"There's a place about halfway where it —"
"Chase. I've driven that road since I was fifteen."
"Right." He almost smiled. "Right."
He picked up the pen and put it in his coat, which was not his pen, and he did not seem to notice.
"That's everything?" he said.
"That's everything."
"Okay." He stood there another second. "Tell Fenner the offer stands on the shop. He won't take it from me."
"He won't take it from me either."
"No," Chase said. "I know."
And he got in his car and drove down the frozen road, keeping to the left, and he did not say one word about the twenty-second of January.
Not one.
Renee stood at the fence with two signed forms flapping under a rock on the tailgate and thought: he wants me to know. He is desperate for me to know. That is a man who has had eleven days to bring it up and he is going home without bringing it up.
And then, right behind it, because she was not going to be stupid twice in one lifetime: or he knows exactly how much better it plays if he doesn't.
She could not tell.
That was the whole trouble, standing at the fence in February. She genuinely could not tell, and she had no way to find out, and the not being able to tell was going to be her entire spring.
The parking lot was Gil.
It was the ninth of February by then, and Renee was at the Bristlecone building for the only reason she ever went there anymore, which was that the household paperwork had a corporate address on it and there were four things that needed her signature to be untangled from the company: two vehicles, an insurance rider, and the dogs' registration, which was a thing she had never known was in the company's name and which made her sit in her truck for a minute after she found out.
She came out at four with an envelope and Gil Vogel was standing by her truck.
"I didn't ambush you," he said immediately. "I'm parked over there. That's my car. I saw the truck."
"Hi, Gil."
He looked terrible. He had looked terrible since December and it had settled in now, like weather.
"How's the — " He gestured vaguely east. "The place."
"Cold. Good."
"Chase said you'd got the hoop house up."
"He did?"
Gil realized what he had said, and did the thing he always did, which was keep going.
"He asks. He doesn't — I mean he doesn't ask about you.
He'll say something and it'll be about the water share or the fabric or whether the road's frozen, and then he'll change the subject, and then forty minutes later he'll come back around to the road.
" Gil rubbed his face with one hand. "Anyway. "
Renee opened her truck door and did not get in.
"I want to ask you something," she said, "and I want you to answer it like a person and not like the company."
"Okay."
"The statement. The one he filed on the twenty-second." She kept her voice easy. "Whose idea was it?"
Gil Vogel looked at her with genuine confusion.
"His," he said.
"Danielle didn't —"
"Danielle found out about it from the docket.
" Gil actually laughed, one syllable, without any humor in it.
"Renee, she found out the same time as the Post. She was in a room with me.
I watched her read it on her phone and I have known that woman eleven years and I have never seen her face do that. "
Renee said nothing.
"I'd told him not to. Twice." Gil put his hands in his coat pockets.
"I told him on the nineteenth and I told him on the twenty-first at ten o'clock at night, and I said — I'm going to be honest with you, I said some things about his obligation to four hundred employees, and I said them fairly hard, and he sat there and let me say all of it and then he said, 'I know, Gil. '"
"That's all?"
"That's all. 'I know, Gil.'" He shook his head. "The board's still — there's a governance thing now. They've pulled the fire-severity model out of the January release for review, which is not nothing, that's the product. And the practice group is —"
He stopped.
He stopped exactly the way a man stops when he has walked one step past the fence, and Renee saw him do it, and she did not know yet what she had just watched.
"The practice group is what," she said.
"It's internal." He was flustered. "It's not — that's not mine to talk about."
"Gil."
"Renee, I assumed you knew all this." He said it plainly, and that was the moment; the whole month turned on the flat surprise in his voice.
"I assumed you knew. About the statement, about the board, about what it cost. I assumed the two of you were — " He gestured helplessly between his own hands.
"I assumed somebody was telling you things. "
"No," Renee said.
"Right." Gil looked at the asphalt. "Right, well. That's not — okay."
She got into the truck.
She sat with the door open and one foot still on the ground, and she asked the last question with her eyes forward, because she could not have asked it looking at him.
"Gil. Has he said anything to you about her?"
A long pause.
"No," Gil said.
"Nothing at all."
"He has not said her name to me since the fourteenth of December," Gil said. "And I want you to understand that I have given him about nine opportunities."
Renee nodded once. She pulled the door shut and started the engine, and Gil stepped back, and then knocked on the window, and she put it down.
"For what it's worth," he said, "and it's worth nothing, so ignore it — I've worked next to him for fifteen years and I've never seen him take a hit he could have ducked.
Not once. Not for me, not for the company, not for his father.
" He shrugged, miserable. "That's all. I'm sorry about the dogs' paperwork. That was stupid of us."
He walked to his car.
Renee drove out of the lot and got about two miles before she pulled over on Foothills with her hazards on.
I assumed somebody was telling you things.
Six weeks. Six weeks of the whole county telling her what her marriage was, and a binder telling her what she thought, and a woman she had met twice writing sentences in her voice — and the actual facts of what her husband was doing had reached her, tonight, from a tired man in a parking lot who thought she already knew.
She put her forehead on the wheel.
"He did it where it could be seen," she said out loud, to nobody, in a truck on the shoulder of Foothills Parkway.
And her own voice came back at her, flat and unimpressed, the way it had been since the shelter:
He also didn't tell you. And he still hasn't told you. And Gil Vogel just told you more true things in four minutes than your husband has told you since December.
She sat there until her hands were warm enough to drive.
She did not let it count.
But she wrote it down that night on the legal pad, under the seed order and the fencing quote, in her own handwriting, because she had started keeping a record of things she did not have a shelf for:
Jan 22 — filed it himself. Nobody knew. Gil says his idea. Cost him the model release + 4 pts.
Feb 9 — has not said her name since Dec 14.
Then she turned the lamp off, and lay in the cold with the wool blanket Bette had sent pulled up to her chin, and did not sleep for a long time.