Chapter 16 #2
"Chase." She laughed, wetly, once. "Who else in the world would have known what those boxes were?"
He got up and walked four steps away and stood with his back to her, and Renee let him have it, because she had been given a minute and a half at the county building and a night on Nelson Road and he had had nothing at all since December.
When he turned around his face was wrecked.
"I need to say one thing," he said. "One, and then I'll listen to the rest of it for as long as you want."
"Go ahead."
"None of that fixes the twelfth of December.
" He said it hard. "I've heard people try to hand it to me since February — Fenner's testimony, the practice, all of it — and every time somebody does I want to put my hand through a wall, because they've all decided that eight hours can buy back ten minutes and it can't. I got in a truck at three thirty-three in the afternoon and I did not think about where my wife was, and there is no fence and no box and no company on this earth that undoes that, and I'm going to be the man who did it for the rest of my life. "
"I know," Renee said.
"So I'm not asking. I want to be clear, standing here — I have not asked you for one thing since December and I'm not starting now. You don't owe me a hearing and you don't owe me a conversation and you certainly don't owe me—"
"Chase."
"—one single—"
"Chase."
He stopped.
"Sit down," Renee said, "and let me get to the end, because you are about nine seconds from managing this."
He sat down.
"Here are my terms," she said.
She got up off the wall and stood in front of him with the sun coming over the ridge behind her, and she said it the way she said things to suppliers, flat and complete.
"One. I keep Livermore. It's not a project and it's not a hobby and it's not something I do until we settle down.
It is my operation and I will run it, and I will be up there four days a week for the rest of my working life, and some weeks it'll be six.
If that is a problem it is a problem today and not in three years. "
"It's not a—"
"You'll get your turn. Two." She held up a finger.
"There is no machine. Not ever again. Nobody in your company writes a sentence in my voice, nobody makes me a schedule, nobody has a folder about me, nobody manages one single thing that has my name on it.
If Danielle Keegan ever calls me again it'll be to ask how I am.
Not once, Chase. Not for a good reason and not for a kind one. "
"Yes."
"Three." Her voice went, finally, on the third one.
"You don't help me. Not the way you do it.
If I want a soil report I'll buy one, and if I want a guy from Fort Collins I'll call him myself, and if I tell you about a thing I'm building, you're allowed to be glad and that's all you're allowed to be.
I will tell you when I want your hands in it.
I'm going to want your hands in it a lot.
But you wait until I ask, and if that takes you ten years to learn, then I'll say it for ten years. "
He was crying. She had seen him do it twice in nine years.
"Four," Renee said. "Nobody's on probation.
I want that said out loud, because I have thought about this for six weeks and I will not have it.
You're not on trial, you don't owe me a debt, you're not paying anything off, and I am not the wronged party in this house for the rest of our lives.
That's not a marriage, it's a sentence. Whatever this is, we're level in it from today or we don't do it. "
She stopped.
"And nobody thanks anybody," she said. "Not you, for this. Not me, for the boxes. That's the whole point. If we're even, we're even."
The wind came across the ridge.
Chase Ridgeway sat on his grandfather's foundation and looked up at her, and he did not say thank you.
He said: "Okay."
And then, after a moment: "The gate at Prentiss's. The north one."
Renee started laughing and could not stop.
"Fenner told you."
"Fenner has told me about that gate four times," Chase said, "and I have never once been up there, and I'm not going to be until you take me, and I've had to sit on my hands about it since the second of May, and it has been the single hardest thing I have ever done in my life."
"Come here," Renee said.
He got up.
He came across four feet of his grandfather's burned kitchen and stopped — actually stopped, one more time, the way he had in a doorway on Mapleton — and Renee said, "No. Not this time," and closed it herself and got both hands in his shirt and pulled.
Nine and a half years.
That was the first thing, and it went through her like the flare in the hoop house in February, only worse and better: she knew this.
She knew the exact place his hand went at the back of her neck and she knew the sound he made in his chest when she got her mouth on his and she knew, from six years of not having it, precisely how much she had been going without.
He kissed her like a man who had been holding four feet of hallway since December and had just been told he could stop.
"Renee—"
"Don't talk."
"I have to say—"
"Chase." She pulled back four inches and looked at him. "I have said everything. Every single thing, out loud, in daylight, in an order. There is nothing left to be careful about."
And he made a sound and got both arms around her and lifted her about six inches off the ground.
They did not stay on the ridge.
It was not, in the end, a place either of them could do that, and she felt him think it at the same second she did, his hand stopping in her hair, both of them going still in the middle of a burned rectangle in the July sun.
"Not here," she said.
"No."
"There's a trailer on County Road Nine with a lease on it until November."
He laughed into her neck.
They took her truck. He left the car at the second gate for two days and neither of them cared, and she drove down that road with his hand on her thigh and had to concentrate very hard at the cattle guard.
The trailer was nineteen feet long and eighty-six degrees inside and neither thing was relevant.
She got the door open and he got it shut behind them and she pulled his shirt over his head without unbuttoning it, which she had done a hundred times in a house that no longer existed, and he laughed and then stopped laughing when she put her mouth on his collarbone.
"Wait — wait." His hands came up to her face. "Look at me."
"Chase, I swear to God—"
"I've thought about this every day for seven months," he said, "and I need eleven seconds to be looking at you."
So she stood there with her hands flat on his chest and let him look, and it was the least bearable eleven seconds of her life.
Then it was not slow.
There was nothing careful in it. That was the whole thing — he had been careful since December, four feet of hallway and a hand on a chair and nine words at a hearing, and it came off him in the space of about thirty seconds and what was underneath was a man who had wanted his wife for seven months in a rented house with somebody else's art on the walls.
He got her jeans open and she said something that was not a word.
She was on the fold-down table before she entirely understood how she got there — the same table, the legal pad, four hundred and eleven pages, three in the morning in March — and she got a hand behind her and swept the whole thing onto the floor and heard the pad go down and did not care in the slightest.
"The table's not —" he said.
"The table's fine."
It was not fine. It went about two inches and she got her heels into the bench and it stopped, and by then his mouth was at her throat and his hand was between her legs and she had her fist in his hair.
He knew what he was doing. He had always known; that had never once been the problem in nine years.
But there was something in it that was not from before — he was not performing anything, and he was not managing anything, and when she said "harder" he did it without a word instead of checking her face first, and she understood dimly that she was being taken at her word by a man who had spent seven months learning what that cost.
She came with her forehead against his shoulder and both arms around his neck, hard and fast and embarrassingly quickly, and he held her through it and said her name once, and she felt it go through him.
"Bed," she said, when she could. "There's a bed. It's four feet away and it's terrible."
The bed was terrible.
They did not care. He got her the rest of the way out of her clothes on the way to it and she got his belt and there was a moment, both of them naked in eighty-six degrees in a fifth-wheel trailer on eleven leased acres, where he stopped again and put his hand flat on her sternum.
"What," she said.
"Nothing." His voice was not working properly. "You're — I thought I'd never. That's all."
"You've got me."
"Yeah."
"Say it, then."
"I've got you," Chase said, and she pulled him down.
It went on a long time.
The second time was slow, and it was the one she thought about afterward.
They had come down off the first one into that flattened, ringing quiet, and she had her head on his chest and his hand was moving up and down her spine, and after a while it stopped being comfort and started being something else, and neither of them said anything about the change.
He rolled her under him and took his time.
That was what undid her. Not the first one — the first one had been seven months of held breath going out at once, and she had known it would be like that.
This was different. He went slowly and he went nowhere she did not take him, and there was a whole conversation in it that neither of them was capable of having in words.