Chapter 14 #2
Because he could. All he had to do was say the true thing about the practice — one sentence, twelve words, I took out the room so it could never happen again — and it would have been the end of it.
She would have had to sit with it. He knew that.
He had to know that; the man had run a company for fifteen years.
Chase Ridgeway sat on the sofa and looked at his hands.
"It's a business decision," he said.
"Chase."
"It's a business decision three weeks out from a hearing," he said, "and you'd see straight through me if I tried to sell it to you as anything else."
And Renee sat in a chair in a rented living room and put her hand over her eyes, because she had said that exact sentence out loud in her own yard on the sixteenth of April, alone, to nobody, and he had not been there, and he had arrived at it by himself.
"You're not going to say it," she said.
"No."
"Not even now. Not with me sitting here."
"Especially not with you sitting here."
"Why?"
He was quiet a moment.
"Because everything I've done since December that's worth anything," Chase said, "I've done in a way you'd have to find out about sideways or not at all.
And there's a reason for that and it isn't strategy, and I'd rather you never believed me than have you take one thing off me because I said it in a room at eleven at night the day before a hearing. "
He stopped.
"That's all I've got," he said. "That's genuinely all I've got, Renee. I don't have a better answer and I've looked for one since Christmas."
The clock on the stove said 11:20.
They sat there.
"I signed a lease," Renee said.
He looked up.
"On the old Tolliver ground. Eleven acres and a water share, three years with an option.
" She kept her voice even. "I signed it on the nineteenth of November at Rue Kemper's kitchen table in Niwot.
It was in the pocket of my coat on the twelfth of December and it burned with the coat and there's a copy in a drawer in the trailer. "
Chase said nothing.
"Three weeks before the fire," Renee said. "Twenty-three days."
"You never —"
"I never told anybody. Maggie found out in December because she was on the floor of this house at the time and I couldn't hold it. Other than that, nobody. Not Bette. Not Fenner. Not my lawyer, until she needed it for the filing." She looked at her hands. "Not you."
"Why?"
And there it was — the only question he had asked her all night, and he asked it with no edge on it at all.
"Because you'd have been wonderful about it," Renee said.
He went very still.
"You'd have been so good about it, Chase.
You'd have been thrilled. You'd have said something exactly right in the kitchen and then in about nine days there'd have been a soil report I didn't order and a guy from Fort Collins who owed you a favor and somebody in your office would have made a folder.
" She was not crying and her voice was not steady.
"And it would have been mine for about a week.
And I've watched that happen to everything I've ever brought into that house, and I have never once been able to say so out loud, because you were being kind, and how do you fight kind? "
"Renee."
"So I didn't tell you." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, once, impatient.
"I hid a lease from my husband for three weeks because I was afraid he'd help.
And then the house burned down, and everybody in this county spent four months deciding what happened to me, and not one of them knows that the woman in the cellar had already left.
Not the marriage. Herself. She'd already gone and gotten herself back and hadn't told anybody, including you, and then you got in the truck at three thirty-three, and I have never been able to work out which of those two things happened first."
The lamp was making a noise. She had not noticed it before.
"That's not on you," she said. "The lease. That one's mine. I want it said out loud once, because I've been carrying it since November and there's nobody else to say it to."
Chase Ridgeway sat on the arm of somebody else's sofa with his hands hanging between his knees and looked at his wife.
"I'd have made a folder," he said.
"Yes."
"I'd have —" He stopped. He looked at the ceiling for a second. "There'd have been a folder by Thursday."
And Renee laughed.
It got out of her before she could do anything about it — one syllable, wet and completely involuntary — and then she had both hands over her face and she was laughing and it was very close to the other thing, and across the room she heard him make a sound that was not a laugh at all.
She left at ten to twelve.
Nothing happened. Nobody reached for anybody. He walked her to the door and stopped four feet short of it, deliberately, and she was aware of the four feet and of the fact that he had measured them.
"Renee."
At the door, with her hand on it.
"You said something in February," he said. "At the cellar. You said no, and then you said it wasn't never."
"I remember."
"I've thought about that about a thousand times." He had his hands in his pockets. "I want you to know that whatever happens tomorrow — whatever gets said in that room — you telling me tonight is the best thing that's happened to me since the twelfth of December, and it's not close."
Renee stood in the doorway of a rented house.
"Don't say anything," she said. "Please. I've got about four inches of floor left and I need to get to the truck."
"Okay."
"Chase."
"Yeah."
"Nine o'clock tomorrow," she said, and went out.
She got as far as Nelson Road and pulled over on the shoulder with the hazards on and sat there in the dark for a long time with the engine off.
She was not thinking about the practice, or the docket, or the boxes, or the hearing, or four hundred and eleven pages.
She was thinking about four feet of hallway.
He had stopped four feet short. In a rented house at ten to twelve at night, at the end of the only honest hour they had had in six years, with his wife crying-laughing in a doorway and a divorce filed and everything he had left in the world sitting on the table between them — he had put four feet in and held it, because he knew exactly what she would have done if he had not.
That's the frightening thing, she thought.
Not that he might not have changed.
That he had, and she had felt it, and she had spent every mile from Mapleton to Nelson Road knowing with total clarity that if he had closed those four feet she would not have said no — not out of weakness, not out of loneliness, not because she was worn down.
Because she wanted to.
Renee Ridgeway sat on the shoulder of Nelson Road at half past midnight, six hours before the county sat down to decide the public story of the twelfth of December, and said out loud, to the windshield, in the flat voice she had had since the shelter:
"Oh, no."