Chapter 7 #2
They sat there for a while. The wind came around the corner of the building and neither of them said anything, and a woman went past them up the steps with a banker's box.
"You told them there was nine hours and everybody only asks about ten minutes," Renee said.
"That was out of line."
"It wasn't."
"It was. That's not my business." Fenner shook his head at the parking lot.
"That's between you and him and I've got no place in it.
But they had me in that chair an hour and forty minutes and every single question was when did he leave, when did he leave, when did he leave, and I'm sitting there thinking — " He stopped.
"Say it."
"I'm thinking they don't know he was on that fence line," Fenner said.
"Nobody knows. Deputy knows, and I know, and that's it, and the deputy's not going to say anything because he turned him back and it's the right call and he's still going to think about it every day for the rest of his life.
" He turned his hands over. "And I'm the only one left. So I said it."
Renee looked at her boots.
"Truman. What did he say to you."
Fenner did not answer.
"At the gate," she said. "They asked you and you said you'd rather not. And you didn't have to, and they let you off, and I'm not the commissioners, and I'm asking."
"I know you are."
"Truman."
"He wasn't talking to me," Fenner said.
That was all he gave her, and she understood immediately that it was all she was going to get, and that he would carry the rest of it to the end of his life, and that this was the exact quality in him that had put him back on that ridge at seven o'clock at night.
She let it go.
"Latch on the hoop house," she said.
"Thursday."
"Bring the good bar."
"I'll bring the good bar." He got up off the step with the sound men his age make and put his hand out and pulled her up by the wrist like she was fifteen. "Renee. I'm sorry about the phone."
"Don't be."
"I am, though." He straightened his sport coat, which did not need straightening. "Nine weeks he's had. I'd have said it the first night."
"I know you would," Renee said. "That's the difference between you."
Maggie called at eight.
"You read it."
"I read it."
"Okay." A long breath. "You want me to come out?"
"No."
"Renee."
"I'm all right, Mag. I've got the sub coming at seven."
"That is not — " Maggie stopped herself, audibly, which she had gotten better at over the winter. "All right. Can I say one thing and then I'll leave it."
"Go ahead."
"He went through a fence."
"I know what he did."
"I'm not saying it means anything," Maggie said.
"I want to be real clear. It doesn't fix the truck and it doesn't fix the binder and it does not fix nine years.
But I've been telling you since December that man does everything for an audience, and I was wrong about the twelfth of December, and I don't like being wrong so I'm saying it out loud once. "
Renee stood in the dark outside the trailer with the phone to her ear.
"Why didn't he tell me," she said.
And her voice did something on the second word that she had not authorized.
"Oh, honey."
"No — " She got it back. She got it flat again, which was the only skill she had left.
"No. It's a real question. He's had nine weeks.
He's had — Maggie, he had it in his hand at the fence eleven days ago.
Any man alive uses that. Any man alive on this earth says I came back for you, and I'd have had to sit with it, and he knows that. "
"Yeah."
"So why."
"I don't know," Maggie said. "I've got a guess and you're not going to like it."
"Say it."
"Because it's the only thing he's got left that isn't a play," Maggie said. "And he knows the second he says it out loud, it turns into one."
She drove to the rental at ten o'clock at night.
She did not plan it. She got in the truck to go to the co-op for a bag of dog food and she was on Mapleton at ten past ten with the engine running, three houses down, on the other side of the street.
The lights were on.
She could see him. That was the thing that undid her — she could see straight into the front room of that furnished house, because he had never in his life thought about a curtain, and he was sitting on the arm of somebody else's sofa with his elbows on his knees and his phone in both hands, not looking at it.
Just sitting there. Nine forty at night. A man alone in a rented room with somebody else's art on the walls.
Renee sat in her truck with both hands on the wheel.
She had a whole thing ready. She had built it on the drive, out loud, the way you do — you don't get to keep that, you don't get to hand me a docket and keep the fence, you have made me carry every single thing by myself since December and now this too — and it was good, and it was true, and she wanted to say it so badly her jaw hurt.
She put her hand on the door.
And she thought: if I go in there, one of two things happens.
Either he stands up and says the true thing, and she is in his arms in a rented living room within about ninety seconds, in February, nine weeks after the fire, with nothing settled and nothing changed and the whole county's version of her intact.
Or he manages it.
He would not mean to. That was the worst part.
He would be so glad she came, and he would be so careful, and somewhere in the first four minutes he would say something reasonable and slightly ahead of her, and she would feel the floor tilt the exact way it had tilted for nine years, and she would go home and not be able to explain to herself what had happened.
She took her hand off the door.
She sat there another minute, watching her husband sit on the arm of a stranger's couch, and then she put the truck in gear and drove out past the co-op, which was closed, and all the way home to County Road 9 with the heater roaring and no dog food.
At the fold-down table, at eleven forty, she wrote it on the legal pad.
Feb 17 — Fenner testified. C. went through the fence at 6. Fenner held him at the second gate.
She looked at that.
Then she wrote, underneath:
9 weeks. Never said it. Not once.
Don't know what to do with that.
Don't know what to do with any of it.
And then, at the bottom, small, because it was true and she had made herself a rule about writing down the true things:
Wanted to go in.