Chapter 6
The good days did not stop. That was the thing she wanted understood, later, by herself if by nobody else.
January went out and February came in and it stayed good.
He got up first. He worked in the morning and came and found her at noon.
In the third week of January he got the kitchen stove drawing properly for the first time in forty years by taking the pipe apart and cleaning it, which took him two days and cost him a fingernail, and he was so pleased with himself about it that she had to leave the room.
They talked at night. He was still talking. That had not worn off.
She got the sling off, and then the physical therapy started for real, twice a week in Steamboat with a woman named Angie who had hands like a farrier and no interest at all in who Tess was married to.
The shoulder came back by inches. In the last week of January she got the pack saddle up onto the rail one-handed, and stood there in the tack room breathing hard with her eyes stinging, and told nobody.
So it was good.
It is important to say that it was good, because of what she did at the end of it.
The first thing she noticed she made nothing of.
His phone rang at the table in the middle of dinner and he looked at it, and did not answer, and set it face down.
"You can take it."
"It's nothing."
"Porter."
"Greta's got it," he said, and went back to his plate.
Greta Selby had started the first week of January.
Tess had heard the name maybe nine times by then, always in that same offhand way.
Greta's got it. Greta'll move it. I'll have Greta send you the thing.
A voice on speaker sometimes, in the mornings, very young and very competent, reading him a day.
Tess ate her dinner.
Later that night, brushing her teeth, she thought: she's got the phone.
And then she thought: that is literally the job. That is what an assistant is. You cannot run a company that size and answer your own phone. Grow up.
Both of those were true. She spat, and rinsed, and went to bed, and he was warm, and it was fine.
Whit came on the first Saturday in February.
He did not call ahead. He drove up in the Land Cruiser with a driver and a hamper from a place on Sixth, as though this were an occasion he had been invited to, and by the time Tess got to the door he was already coming up the steps saying something about the road.
"Tess. You look well. You look strong, actually, which is more than anyone can say for my son."
"Whit."
"Is he here? Don't get him. Let him work." He handed the hamper to nobody in particular and it was Tess who took it. "I won't stay. I have the Pemberton thing at four and I'm not going to enjoy it."
He came in. He looked around the kitchen the way a man looks at a room he grew up in and has decided not to be sentimental about, and he did not take his coat off, and he was there for forty minutes.
He talked about the boiler. He talked about a hydrologist who had told him something about the creek. At the eighteen-minute mark he said, without any change of tone at all:
"The Whitworth dinner's the twenty-first. You'll both come, of course."
Tess said, "I don't think so."
"Oh, you must. People are asking after you." He smiled at her with great warmth. "I've been telling everyone you've been recovering at the ranch, which has the enormous advantage of being true."
There it was.
"Whit."
"Mm?"
"What have you told people?"
"That you were badly hurt in October and that you've been recovering at the ranch," he said. "What else would I tell them?"
She looked at him for a long moment.
The maddening thing — the genuinely maddening thing — was that he was not lying. Every word of it was true. It was true the way a photograph cropped at the wrist is true.
"And when the recovering's finished?" she said.
"Then you'll come back down and we'll all be very glad," said Whit Thayer, "and nobody will ever mention any of it again. That's the whole trick of it, my dear. That's the only trick there is."
He left before Porter came out of the office.
Tess stood in the kitchen with a hamper full of things nobody at Elkhorn was going to eat and understood, with total clarity, that in the eyes of that entire world nothing had happened.
Not the affair. Not the walk-out. Not the seven calls.
Porter's wife had been in a car accident and had gone up to the ranch to get well, and her husband, who was devoted, had gone with her.
She thought about saying it to Porter that evening.
She did not say it, because he came out at six with grease on his hands looking happier than she'd seen him in a decade, and there was a thing wrong with the well pump, and by the time they'd dealt with it, it was ten o'clock, and it seemed like a strange thing to bring up at ten o'clock.
A man named Ed Tillman drove up from Denver on a Tuesday with a folder and stayed nineteen minutes.
Tess made him coffee. He was about sixty, gray, pleasant, and had the particular manner of a person who has spent his entire working life in rooms where he is the least important man present and has made peace with it.
Porter signed four things. Tillman took them, drank half the coffee, thanked her twice, and drove back down the county road.
"Who is that?"
"Ed? He runs the office."
"Which office."
"The family office," Porter said, already halfway back to his laptop. "It's not— it's a nothing. Six people on Seventeenth. They do the trusts and the insurance and the cars and my father's Medicare, God help them."
"You have a passport."
"Ed has my passport."
She said it lightly, because she was in a good mood: "What else does Ed have?"
"Everything," Porter said, and laughed, and went back to work.
She thought about that for the rest of the afternoon while she was mucking out a stall that did not have a horse in it.
Six people on Seventeenth Street who did the trusts and the insurance and the cars, who had done them for his father and his grandfather. Six people whose entire job was to make sure that nothing tedious or unpleasant ever reached a Thayer man's desk.
She thought about the phone in a bag by a door.
And then, because she was getting good at it, she put the shovel back on its hook and went in and made dinner and did not think about it again for two weeks.
The second thing she noticed she also made nothing of, but it took more work.
Angie moved her Thursday session. Then Angie moved the following Tuesday.
On the third change Tess called the clinic to ask what was going on, mildly, and the woman at the desk said, cheerfully, "Oh — no, that came from your husband's office, they wanted everything on the Denver days so you wouldn't be driving the pass twice. "
Tess stood in the mudroom with the phone against her ear.
"His office."
"A Greta? She's been lovely. She's got you at four fifteen with Dr. Coe at Presbyterian on the twelfth, too — that's the shoulder consult — did nobody call you?"
"No," Tess said. "Nobody called me."
She hung up.
She stood there for a while.
Here was what she was going to have to think about, and she knew it before she started: it was thoughtful.
That was the trouble with all of it. Somebody had looked at her calendar and her drive and her shoulder and had arranged the world so that she did less driving on a mountain pass in February, three months after a mountain pass in February had nearly killed her.
Anyone would want that. A person who loved you would do that.
And she had not been asked.
She got as far as the kitchen with it and he was at the table with the headset on, and he looked up and made a face at her — the this guy face, the one he'd been making at her for twelve years across dinner tables and airports — and held up two fingers. Two minutes.
She smiled and gave him a thumbs-up and went outside.
She got all the way to the corral before she stopped and said, out loud, "Huh."
Because she had just done it. She had felt the thing come up in her chest, and she had smiled at him, and she had carried it outside, and out here it would get cold and small and by dinner it would not be worth mentioning, and by Thursday it would be gone.
That was the whole mechanism. That was exactly, precisely, in every detail, how she had spent twelve years.
She had not done that in December. In December she had said everything.
"Huh," Tess said again, to the corral, and the corral said nothing back, and she went in and had a nice evening.
On the seventh they went into Steamboat.
That was not a thing they did. In twelve years she could count the times they'd gone anywhere together where nobody was expecting them — where there was no table booked under his name, no car, no one looking up when they came in.
They went to a place on Lincoln with a hockey game on and had hamburgers, and the girl who took the order did not know either of them from anybody, and Porter ate his entire hamburger and half of hers and was, as far as Tess could tell, the happiest man in Routt County.
"Stop looking at me."
"I'm not."
"You're doing it in the window."
He turned his head. "I like it here."
"It's a bar."
"I know what it is."
Walking back to the truck the sky did that thing it does in February at seven o'clock, the whole west end of town going green and then nothing, and it was ten degrees, and he took her bad hand and put it in his coat pocket with his own, which he had done on a street in Casper the second month she'd known him and had not done since.
She stopped on the sidewalk.
"What," he said.
"Nothing."
"Tess."
"Nothing." She started walking again. "I just remembered something."
She did not tell him what. It was hers.
That is the sort of thing she would have to hold in her hand later, in a much colder room, and decide what to do with.
Toni called on the ninth of February at ten past seven in the morning, which meant she'd been up for three hours and had decided she'd waited long enough.
"You busy?"
"I'm making eggs."
"Is he there?"
"He's on a call."