Chapter 17 #2
They wrote their own, because there was no way to do that day with somebody else's words.
Chase went first and it was eleven sentences long and he did not manage a single one of them.
"I got in a truck on the twelfth of December and I did not think about where you were," he said, out loud, on that ground, in front of two hundred people who all knew it.
"I'm not going to stand up here and skip it.
Everybody here knows what I did and I'd rather say it myself than have it be the thing nobody mentions. "
Nobody moved on that hill.
"I've spent twenty-one months finding out what I was doing for the six years before it," he said. "I wasn't cruel to you. That would have been easier to find. I just stopped bringing myself home, one Thursday at a time, and then I looked up and there was nothing pointed at you at all."
He stopped and got it back.
"So here's what I've got. I will not manage you.
I will not handle you and I will not help you unless you ask me to, and if you tell me a thing you're building I will be glad and I will keep my hands in my pockets.
" A pause. "I'm going to be up here every Thursday for the rest of my life.
I'm going to be bad at the work for another year and then I'm going to be all right at it.
And I'm not going to spend the next forty years paying you back, because you told me not to, and because you were right, and because a man who's paying you back isn't standing next to you. "
He looked at her.
"I love you," Chase said. "I have the whole time, including the part where it did you no good whatsoever. It does you good now. I'm going to see to that."
Renee's was shorter, because she had said most of it in July on that exact ground with her hand flat on his chest, and everybody who needed to hear the rest of it had heard it in a county building.
"I lived on eleven acres in a trailer at nineteen degrees," she said, "and I want everybody standing on this hill to know that I would have been happy. That's not a threat and it's not a warning. It's the reason today counts."
Somebody in the back said "hell yes" and it was Kyle Whitcomb, and it got a laugh, and Renee let it.
"I could have stayed up there," she said.
"I have two hundred acres and three employees and a book of work that runs into the year after next, and I built every bit of it myself, and I am going to go on building it, and none of that is going anywhere.
" She looked at him. "So I'm not here because I needed you.
I'm here because I've got a life I like and I want you in it, and because you spent twenty-one months becoming somebody I could have that with, and never once asked me to notice. "
She took his hands.
"I'm choosing you," she said. "In daylight.
In front of the whole county, which has had a great deal to say about the two of us and can hear it from me directly.
Not trying. Not seeing how it goes. Choosing — and I'll go on choosing you on the ordinary Tuesdays, which is the only place it actually counts. "
"I love you," Renee said. "We're level, and we're staying level, and that's the promise. That's the whole promise. There isn't a second half to it."
They ate at long tables on the grass until it was dark, and somebody had strung lights off the chimney footing, and Hugh Prentiss danced with Bette Ridgeway, which nobody had anticipated and everybody talked about for a year.
At about nine Renee found herself standing at the top of the cellar steps with a plate she had not eaten off, looking down.
The lights did not reach the bottom. It was a stone room ten feet down with grass in it, and it went dark about six steps in, the same way it always had.
Chase came and stood next to her.
"You all right?"
"Yeah." She leaned into his shoulder. "I was working out whether I had a big thing to say about it."
"Have you?"
"No," Renee said. "It's a hole with grass in it. Fenner's right."
He laughed.
"That's it, though," she said, and she turned around so her back was to the steps and her front was to the hill — two hundred people, and long tables, and Maggie Sutter dancing badly, and Tori Delaney arguing with a man from the drill crew about seed drills, and Gil Vogel asleep in a chair.
"That's the whole thing, isn't it. It's not a wound and it's not a monument.
It's a hole in my ground and I put grass in it and I'm going to walk past it four days a week for thirty years. "
"Renee."
"What?"
Chase Ridgeway put both hands on his wife's face.
"You're happy," he said. Not a question.
He was grinning like an idiot and there was cake on his sleeve.
"I've been watching you for four hours and you have been happy the entire time, and I have not seen that on you in ten years, and I want to say it out loud in case anybody here is unclear about it. "
"I'm extremely happy," Renee said. "I've been happy since about June."
"Since June."
"Since June." She got a fistful of his shirt.
"Since the count came in on the ninth of June and I stood on that bench and thought: I want to tell him.
Not I should. I want to. And I got in the truck and drove an hour and ten minutes to tell you in person, which was insane, and you came out of the barn and I said two and a half stems to the square foot and you picked me up off the ground. "
"I remember."
"That was the day," she said. "That's the one I'll tell people."
He kissed her, on a hill, in front of the whole county, and the whole county cheered like idiots, and Maggie Sutter whistled through her fingers, and Bette Ridgeway said something to Hugh Prentiss that made him laugh so hard he had to sit down.
"Come dance with me," Renee said.
"I'm terrible."
"You're terrible at everything up here." She was already pulling him. "Thursday you were putting plugs in backward again."
"That was once —"
"It was twice, and Tori has photographs, and she's going to show them at your retirement."
And Chase Ridgeway laughed and let his wife pull him out onto the grass where his grandfather's kitchen used to be, and she got both arms around his neck and her face in his collar, and she said it again right into his ear because she liked how it sounded and because she was going to say it out loud, in daylight and in the dark, every single day for the rest of her life:
"I love you. I'm keeping you."
"I love you," he said. "I'm right here."