Chapter 16 #3
Because he knew her body the way she knew the ground at the top of that bench.
Nine and a half years. He knew that her left side was the one, and he knew what happened if he put his mouth just under her jaw and stayed there, and he knew — he had always known — that she would tell him she was fine about four minutes before she was anywhere near fine.
And in December that knowledge had been the worst thing in the world. She had thought about it in the cellar. A man who knew all that and got in a truck.
In July, in a nineteen-foot trailer with the door propped open, it was the opposite of that, and she lay under her ex-husband in the heat and felt the whole architecture of six years turn over.
"Hey," he said. "Where'd you go."
"I'm here."
"Renee."
"I'm here." She got her hand around the back of his neck. "I was thinking about the cellar. Don't stop."
He did not stop. He also did not do the thing he would have done in October, which was change the subject with his hands — he stayed exactly where he was, and he looked at her, and he said, "Okay," and let her have the thought, and kept moving.
She started crying about a minute later and it did not stop anything at all.
That was the part she could never have explained to anybody and never tried.
She cried through the whole middle of it, and he did not panic and did not stop and did not ask her nine times if she was all right; he put his forehead against hers and kept going and said her name, and she got her ankles locked at the small of his back and held on, and both of them said things that would have been unbearable in December and were not unbearable in July.
I know.
I know you did.
I've got you.
"Say the thing," she said, at some point, into his shoulder.
"Which thing."
"The one you didn't say at the fence in February. The one you didn't say at the hearing. The one you've been sitting on since—"
"I came back for you," Chase said.
She made a sound she had never made in her life.
"I got to the fence line and I went through it," he said, against her ear, ragged, and he was crying too by then, which she felt before she heard.
"And I'd have kept going and it wouldn't have done a damn thing, and Truman put his arms around me and I fought him, Renee, I fought a fifty-six-year-old man in the dark because he wouldn't let me up that hill—"
"I know."
"—and it doesn't count. It doesn't count for anything and I'm never going to say it in front of anybody—"
"Chase."
"—but it's true, and you're the only person I ever wanted to know it."
She said I love you then, and did not decide to, and he made a sound like he had been hit and said it back with his mouth against her jaw about nine times in a row until she had to put her hand over it, laughing, crying, both.
It went on a while after that. When it finished she was on top of him with her hands flat on his chest and her hair in her face, and he was watching her the way he had watched her work on the bench in February, and she came apart looking straight at him and did not close her eyes once.
Afterward they lay in a terrible bed in the heat with the door propped open and the dogs asleep in the doorway, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
"I'm not moving to Livermore," he said eventually, to the ceiling.
"I didn't ask you to."
"I know. I'm telling you what I'm going to do, and you can tell me if it's wrong.
" He shifted his arm under her. "I'm going to stay at the company, because there's four hundred people and Gil's been holding it up alone since February and that's not fair.
And I'm going to be up there Thursday through Sunday, and I'm going to be terrible at the work for about two years, and you're going to have to tell me things four times. "
Renee lay on his shoulder.
"Thursdays," she said.
"I know," Chase said. "That's why I picked it."
They got up at three in the afternoon because the dogs needed feeding and neither of them had eaten anything since a thermos of coffee on the cellar steps.
She stood in the doorway of the trailer in his shirt and looked out at eleven acres in July — the beds green and squared and running to the fence line, the hoop house, the pallet under the eave where four gray cartons had been — and she said it out loud, because she had promised herself in a hole in the ground that she was going to stop lying about what things cost.
"I want to say what this is," she said, "so that neither of us can be gentlemanly about it later."
He came and stood behind her in the doorway.
"I did not come back because I couldn't do it alone," Renee said.
"I could. I proved it, and I'm going to go on proving it four days a week for the next thirty years.
" She leaned back against him. "I came back because I've got a life I like and I want you in it, and because you spent seven months becoming a man I could have that with and never once tried to get credit for it. "
"Renee—"
"And I'm choosing you," she said. "Today, in daylight, with no lawyer and no paperwork and nothing owed. Not trying. Not seeing how it goes." She turned around and put her hand flat on his chest. "Choosing. Say you understand the difference."
"I understand the difference," Chase said.
"Good," said Renee. "Now come and look at the water line. I want you to see what I did to it in February, because it was nineteen degrees and I did it with a trenching shovel and my own hands, and I have been waiting five months to show somebody."
And he laughed and put his boots on and came out into the July sun to look at forty feet of repaired pipe, and he did not say one word about how he would have had somebody do it.