Chapter 8 #2
"Stairs are on the drawing."
"They rebuilt them in the sixties."
They did the whole east side that way, flat, professional, and it was fine. It was fine right up until they got to the kitchen.
The kitchen was a rectangle of stone about the size of a car with a chimney breast on the north end and a rust-colored smear across the slab where the range had been.
Chase stopped.
"The floor," he said.
"What about it?"
"You did the floor in — was it the second year?"
"Third."
"Third." He was looking at the slab. "You wanted the wide plank and everybody in that room told you it'd move too much at this elevation, and you did it anyway, and you were right, it never moved, and you never once said I told you so.
" He was smiling. He had his hands in his pockets and he was standing in the ruin of his grandfather's kitchen smiling at a concrete slab.
"You used to walk in here in the morning and I'd hear you stop in that doorway and just look at the floor for a second.
Every morning. Nine years. You never knew you did it. "
And Renee stood there with her pad against her leg and felt the whole thing go over sideways.
Because it was true. She had done that. She had stopped in the doorway every morning of her life for six years and looked at a floor she had chosen, and she had not known anybody had ever seen her do it, and the fact that he had seen it — that he had watched her from a table in the next room for six years and known it and kept it and never said — was, for about one and a half seconds, the most tender thing anybody had ever said to her.
And then the second and a half ended.
Every morning. Nine years.
He had watched her that closely.
He had seen the way she stopped in a doorway. He had it stored. And on the twelfth of December that man got in a truck at 3:33 in the afternoon and drove down a hill and did not think about where she was.
You cannot have both of those. Renee stood in the kitchen and understood with total clarity that you cannot have both of those in one man, and that she had married one who did, and that this was going to be true for the rest of her life whatever she decided about it.
"Don't," she said.
"Renee —"
"You don't get to give me that." Her voice was completely level and her hands were shaking, and she put the pad under her arm. "Not here. Not with a pad in my hand and a contractor in the driveway. If you have things like that saved up you can't hand them to me on a slab, Chase."
He did not say anything. That was new. Three months ago he would have said four things.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"I know you are."
"That's not —" He stopped himself. He actually stopped himself. "Okay."
They did the rest of the west side without speaking, and it took forty minutes, and it was the worst forty minutes of the winter.
The cellar was last.
They came around the north side at four o'clock with the light going, to the concrete steps down and the doorway with no door, because the door was in a pile at the bottom of the drive where Fenner had thrown it in December.
The contractor wanted to know whether to fill it or leave it.
"Leave it," Renee said.
"That's a hazard," the contractor said, not unkindly. "With no structure over it, that's an open hole with a stone throat on it, and if the county's going to have equipment across here in April—"
"Fence it. Don't fill it."
The contractor looked at Chase, which was the only genuinely infuriating thing that happened in three days, and Chase said, "It's her ground," in a voice that closed it, and the contractor wrote fence on his sheet and went to look at the chimney.
And then it was just the two of them at the top of the steps.
The light down there was the same. That was the thing.
The sun was coming in low and orange across the burn and it went about six steps down and stopped, exactly the way lamplight had stopped, and below that it was the same dark it had always been, going down to a stone floor and a drain in the northwest corner.
Renee stood at the top and looked at it.
She heard him breathing beside her. He had not moved for a while.
"Renee."
"Don't."
"I want to ask you something."
"Chase —"
"Nobody's asked you," he said.
And she went still, because he was right.
Eleven weeks. Nine hundred households, four hundred phone calls, a binder, a docket, a mother-in-law with a tray of cookies, two op-eds, a county paper, a photographer at the cattle guard.
Not one person had asked her what the six hours were like.
They had all decided. They had decided it was terror, because that is what it would have been for them, and having decided it they had been kind to her about it, and it had never once occurred to any of them that there might be something in it worth asking about.
"What was it like," Chase said.
He was not looking at her. He was looking down the steps into the dark, with his hands at his sides.
"I've wanted to ask you since the fourteenth of December," he said.
"And every time I've got close I've thought — I don't have the right.
I got in a truck. I don't get to ask what it was like down there.
" He swallowed. "But nobody's asked you.
And I've been laying awake about it for eleven weeks, that nobody's asked you, and I can't be the ninth person who doesn't."
Renee stood at the top of the steps.
And the true answer was right there in her mouth, warm and whole, the whole thing — it was boring, Chase, that's what nobody understands, the first twenty minutes were terror and then it was six hours of nothing and I made a list, I made a list of everything I'd given away and it was so long, it was so long —
She could have handed it to him. He would have taken it. He would have taken it and held it and not said one wrong word, and she knew that, standing there, with more certainty than she knew almost anything.
And that was exactly why she did not.
Because it was the only thing left that was hers. Because he had watched her stop in a doorway for six years and never said, and because she had learned in nine years what happens to a thing when you hand it to Chase Ridgeway: it becomes something he is handling.
"No," she said.
He nodded slowly, still looking down the steps.
"Okay," he said.
"That's not — " She stopped. Started again. "That's not never."
He looked at her then.
"It's just not now," Renee said. "And it's not here. And it's not because you asked."
She went down to her truck and drove home, and got about a mile past the second cattle guard before she pulled over, and she sat there with the engine running and put both hands over her face.
She had wanted to tell him so badly.
That was the thing on the legal pad that night, at eleven o'clock, under the flag list for the two-track:
He asked. First one.
Said no.
Meant it.
Wanted to say yes the whole time.