Chapter 9 #2
"That's it. He went back to his office." Gil finally picked up the forms and squared them.
"There's people in this building who think he's had a breakdown.
I want you to know that's the actual conversation now.
There's a governance review, the model's still out of release, and he sits in that office and does the work and does not defend himself about anything to anybody, and it has been eleven weeks. "
"Gil."
"I know."
"Why are you telling me this?"
Gil Vogel looked at the whiteboard for a while.
"Because he won't," he said. "And because I've been the guy who doesn't say things for fifteen years, and I'm forty-eight next month, and I read that magazine piece four times.
" He handed her the copies. "It's very well done.
It's the best-made thing I've read in a year.
And I sat there thinking, this is going to be what everybody believes, and there's nine people in this company who could put a stop to it in an afternoon and every one of us has been told not to. "
Renee stood up with the forms in her hand.
"Told not to by him?"
"Told not to by him."
She got to the door.
"Gil. When you stopped yourself in the parking lot in February. About the practice group."
Gil went carefully still.
"I'm not going to talk about that," he said.
"That's not a no."
"No," Gil agreed, unhappily, "it isn't," and he opened the door for her, and that was as far as he would go on the ninth of March.
Chase said nothing.
That was the whole of it. He said nothing on the fourth of March and nothing on the fifth and nothing on the eleventh, and there was no statement, no correction, no letter to the magazine, nothing in the docket.
For three days Renee had thought — had let herself think — that his silence was the same silence as the fence line.
That he was not going to touch it. That he had decided, somewhere in that rented house, that he did not get to say one word about Kendall Croft in public for the rest of his life, and was holding to it.
On the fourth day it turned over in her hands.
She was potting up when it happened, which was where all her thinking happened now, and it arrived whole:
He doesn't have to say anything. She said it for him.
Four thousand words in a real magazine had said there was no affair more effectively than Chase Ridgeway could have said it in a hundred statements, and it had cost him nothing, and he had not asked for it — he never had to ask for anything, that was the entire architecture of the man's life — and he was sitting in a rented house on Mapleton letting it work.
And the docket statement, the one that cost four points, the one Maggie said was welded on: what was it, really, in March?
I did not think about where she was.
Read it again in March, with a four-thousand-word feature sitting next to it.
It was a man who had confessed, at real expense, to the smaller thing.
To carelessness. To the ten minutes. He had gotten out in front and taken the whole county's punishment for exactly the crime he could survive, and the eleven weeks had never been mentioned by anybody with a name.
Renee put down the flat she was holding.
She could not tell.
That was the low point, and it did not look like one.
It was a Thursday afternoon in a hoop house and she was not crying and nothing had happened.
She stood there with soil on her hands and understood that she had no way — none, not one — to know whether the man who went through the wire fence at six o'clock and the man who was letting Kendall Croft do his work in March were the same man doing two things, or one man doing one thing very well.
She had been married to him nine years.
She could not tell.
She called Maggie from the hoop house and Maggie came in forty minutes and did not say a word for the first ten.
"I keep waiting to feel it," Renee said.
"Feel what?"
"Something. I read four thousand words about my own marriage by a woman I've met four times and I got in the truck and drove to Fort Lupton.
" She turned a pot around on the bench. "Bette hasn't called in eight days.
Did you know that? Eight days. And I catch myself doing the arithmetic on it, and that's — Mag, that's what I've turned into.
I'm a woman who counts days since her mother-in-law called. "
Maggie leaned on the bench.
"I lost two suppliers," Renee said.
"I know."
"It's going to be four by April. It's going to be four, and then somebody's going to write that the reclamation contract was a payoff, and I'm going to spend the best thing that's ever happened to me defending it.
" She laughed, and it came out ugly. "And the funniest part — do you want the funniest part?
He gave me the ridge in January. Unconditional.
Twenty-some million dollars, no strings, and if anybody ever finds that out, it doesn't matter what I do for the rest of my life. "
"That's not funny."
"No," Renee agreed. "It's not."
They stood in the plastic with the heater ticking.
"I'm going to file," Renee said.
Maggie did not say anything.
"I've had a lawyer since January and I've never told her to do anything.
Alison Dunlap. She's good and she's been extremely patient with me and I have been paying her to wait.
" Renee wiped her hands on her jeans. "I keep saying I can't tell.
That's been my whole position for three months — I can't tell, I need more, I don't have a shelf for it.
" She looked up. "Mag, I'm thirty-eight.
I've got nine hundred and forty acres to put in the ground by the end of May.
I cannot spend another season standing in a hoop house trying to work out what my husband is. "
"No."
"So I'm going to stop trying to work it out."
Maggie nodded slowly.
"Is that the same as deciding?" she said.
"No," Renee said. "But it's the only thing I've got that I can actually do."
She called Alison Dunlap at four thirty and told her to file.
It took eleven minutes. Dunlap asked three questions and did not editorialize once, which was why Renee had hired her, and at the end she said, "I'll have it in Monday.
Renee — you understand he's instructed his counsel to concede everything.
There's no fight here. This isn't a filing, it's a formality, and it'll be done in ninety days. "
"I know."
"I've never had one of these where the other side gives up more than we'd ask for. I've been doing this twenty-two years."
"I know that too," Renee said.
She hung up and stood outside the trailer in the last of the light.
Nine hundred and forty acres. A drill sub in Wiggins. Two suppliers gone and a sentence in the county minutes. A brother-in-law of a magazine writer, somewhere, saying there was no affair to somebody at a dinner party in Denver.
And a filing going in Monday.
She went inside and got the legal pad and sat down at the fold-down table.
Mar 11 — told Dunlap to file.
She looked at it a while.
Then she wrote:
Not because I stopped wanting to know.
Because I can't afford to keep waiting to find out.