Chapter 5
December went by in Sundays.
That was how she thought about it afterward.
Not weeks. Sundays. He came up on the seventh and the fourteenth and the twenty-first, and each time he drove three and a half hours in the morning and three and a half hours back at night, and each time he asked before he came and did not assume the next one.
The first Sunday they didn't talk about any of it. They cleaned out the mudroom, which had forty years of somebody else's boots in it, and threw most of it away, and it took six hours and neither of them mentioned Marin Keane once.
The second Sunday he brought a chainsaw and they cut up the deadfall that had come down behind the corral, and she ran the saw because she could and he hauled because she couldn't, and at four o'clock she caught him standing with an armload of aspen looking at the ridge with an expression she hadn't seen on him in ten years, and she looked away fast, like she'd walked in on something.
The third Sunday was four days out from Christmas.
"My father asked me to ask you," he said, over sandwiches, not looking up. "Christmas at the house. He'd like to see you."
"He would not."
"No," Porter agreed. "He would not."
"What did you tell him?"
"That I'd ask you."
"And if I say no?"
"Then I'm not going either," Porter said, and ate his sandwich.
Tess put her cup down. "You've never missed a Christmas at that house."
"No."
"Thirty-some years."
"Forty-six," he said.
She sat there. Outside the light was going flat and blue at three in the afternoon and the thermometer on the porch post said nine degrees.
"Don't do that as a gesture," she said.
"It's not a gesture. It's just where I want to be."
"That's the same thing dressed up."
He thought about it honestly, which was new.
"Maybe. But I'd rather be in the wrong here than at that table telling everybody you're doing much better.
" He looked up. "You don't have to have me.
I'll go sit in Denver by myself, that's fine, I'm not going to make you responsible for where I spend a Thursday. "
So they had Christmas at Elkhorn.
She cooked, badly, one-handed at the start and two-handed by the end, and he did the dishes, and they ate at four in the afternoon because neither of them could think of a reason not to.
There were no presents, by agreement. He gave her one anyway and she was so angry she almost threw it, and then she opened it and it was a can of horseshoe nails.
"There's a story," he said. "Is there a story?"
"You saw the floor."
"I saw the floor."
She laughed until it hurt, and then she cried for about ninety seconds, and then she stopped, and he did not touch her through any of it, and at seven that evening he put his boots on and drove back down.
Whit called her the next day to say how sorry he was to have missed her, and how much he hoped this business would resolve itself soon, and how strange the house had felt.
He came up on the second of January with a duffel bag and a laptop and did not make a speech about it.
"How long," she said, in the doorway, looking at the bag.
"That's your call."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got," he said. "I can drive back tonight. I can drive back Friday. I can drive back in March. You say a day and I'll say okay."
She looked at the duffel. It was old — a canvas thing from before her, with a strap he'd repaired himself once at a gate in Casper, and she had a sudden clear picture of him doing it, sitting on the floor with a roll of tape.
"Bring it in," she said. "You're in the front room. There's a bed."
"Okay."
"That's not— I'm not saying that as a—"
"Tess," he said. "Okay."
His world lost its mind about it, quietly, in the way that world did everything.
She got the shape of it in pieces over the next two weeks. Camille Fenwick called twice. A man from the Denver office called the ranch line, the actual landline, which nobody had called since about two thousand and nine, and asked in a strangled voice whether Mr. Thayer would be in on Thursday.
"Ask him," Tess said.
"I have."
"What did he say?"
"He said no," the man said, and there was a pause in which she could hear an entire building trying to work out what had gone wrong with the universe.
Because it wasn't a vacation. That was the part they couldn't hold.
He was working — he was on calls at six in the morning at her kitchen table with a headset on, he was in Denver Tuesdays and back Tuesday night, he was doing the whole enormous job of it from a house three and a half hours from anywhere with the internet coming in over a dish that dropped whenever it snowed hard.
There was a new voice on the morning calls, a young woman named Greta who read him his day in a tone of complete competence. Tess heard it through a wall four or five times that first week and did not think about it at all.
He never explained it to anybody. Not once, in front of her. People asked and he said I'm working out of the ranch this quarter in a voice that closed the subject, and that was all.
She waited for him to explain it to her, so she could reject it.
He didn't do that either.
What she had not been ready for was how good the days were.
That was the thing nobody warns you about. She had braced for a siege — for a man performing, for a hundred small campaigns, for flowers twice a week and dinners and the word us.
What she got was a person in the house.
He got up before she did and made coffee and did not bring it to her, because she'd told him in the first week not to bring her things. He worked in the morning. At noon he stopped, wherever it was, and came and found her, and whatever she was doing he did too, and he was not good at any of it.
He could not throw a rope. He set a fence post out of plumb three times in a row and swore at it in a way that made her laugh out loud. He shoveled the roof of the tack room because she couldn't and did it wrong and had to do it again.
And in the evenings they talked.
That was the part. Twelve years of how was your day, fine, how was yours, fine, and now she could not get him to shut up.
He talked about the leases and about his father and about the year he took over, and about a man named Corbin who had trained him and who he had loved and who had also taught him about six things that turned out to be poison, and he talked about how he had felt at thirty-four holding a thing that size and telling everyone he was fine.
She sat across from him and listened and it was so exactly what she had wanted for twelve years that she kept having to leave the room.
Because here was the truth and she made herself look at it every night before she slept: she was not being courted back into her marriage.
She was being given the marriage. The one she'd thought she was signing up for.
It had existed the whole time and it had been going on in a car outside a hangar in Casper.
And she wanted it anyway. That was the humiliating part. She wanted it so badly that some nights she lay in her grandmother-in-law's bed with her hand flat on her own scar and hated herself with real energy.
On the fifth he came in from the barn at dusk and said, "There's a bird in the tack room," and she went out with him, and there was a Steller's jay in there, blue as a bruise, throwing itself at the window over the bench.
It took them forty minutes. They took the window out of its frame in the end, both of them on the bench in the dark with a headlamp and a screwdriver, and Porter got two fingers cut on the old glazing and swore steadily the entire time, and when the bird finally went out it went straight up over the corral into the last of the light.
They stood there in the cold with the window on the floor.
"Well," he said.
"Yeah."
"I'm going to have to put that back in."
"You are."
He looked at his hand. "Do we have—"
"In the house," she said. "Come on."
She cleaned his fingers at the kitchen sink and put a bandage on the bad one, and it took a minute and a half, and neither of them said anything, and at the end of it he did not close his hand and she did not let go of it right away.
That was all that happened. Nothing happened. She thought about it for three days.
Toni called on the sixth.
"Is he still there?"
"Yes."
"Okay," Toni said, and did not say anything else, and that was worse than a lecture.
It happened on a Thursday and there was nothing special about the day at all.
That was what she'd tell herself later, and it was almost true. It had snowed most of the afternoon and quit around five, and the sky had opened up, and the temperature had gone straight down through zero.
The dish had gone out at two. He'd shut the laptop and said "well" and that was the end of the working day.
They ate at the table. He'd made rice and put too much salt in it and neither of them cared.
Afterward she went out to check the water line to the corral because it had frozen twice already that winter, and she was gone twenty minutes, and when she came back in he had built the fire up and was sitting on the floor in front of it with his back against the couch, doing nothing.
That was the thing. Doing nothing. Porter Thayer, sitting on a floor, doing nothing at all.
She stood in the doorway in her coat with snow melting on her shoulders and looked at him and felt the whole thing come up through her like water finding a crack.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"Line okay?"
"It's fine."
She didn't move. He looked up at her and then he looked again, properly, and whatever was on her face made him go very still.
"Tess."
"Don't say anything," she said.
She hung her coat on the hook. She took her time about it, and her hands were not steady, and she knew he could see that from across the room and she let him.