Chapter 6 #2
"Okay." A pause, and something in the pause. "So I take a guy out every September who does the books for one of those Denver outfits, and he called me about next fall, and then he didn't hang up. I want you to know I did not go looking for this."
Tess put the spatula down.
"Say it."
"Marin Keane's still on the payroll," Toni said. "She's a consultant. She's been on since the week she got walked out. It's through the end of June."
The pan smoked.
"How much?"
"I didn't ask and she wouldn't have said. Enough that somebody noticed it."
Tess turned the burner off.
"Okay," she said.
"That's not okay."
"I didn't say it was okay, I said okay."
"Tess—"
"I have to go," Tess said. "Thank you. I mean that. I'll call you."
She asked him at lunch, and she was proud of how she asked. No preamble, no ambush, no trap. Straight across the table.
"Is Marin still being paid?"
He put his fork down.
"Yes," he said.
"Since when?"
"Since December. She's on a consulting agreement through the end of the fiscal year."
"That's June."
"That's June."
"Why."
"Because I fired a woman in front of eighty people with no cause on the record," Porter said, "and my choices were to do it that way and pay her out, or do it slowly and correctly and have her in the building until March.
I couldn't have her in the building until March.
So it's severance. It's severance with a different word on it because a general counsel told me to put a different word on it. "
Tess sat with that.
It was — and she made herself say the whole sentence in her head, honestly — it was completely reasonable. It was so reasonable that a person who objected to it would look like a person who wanted a woman destroyed rather than merely gone.
"Does she work?"
"No."
"Do you talk to her?"
"No." He said it fast and flat and then, to his credit, slowed down. "There's been one call. In January. It was seven minutes and it was about the Wyoming file and I told Delphine about it the same day, and you can ask her, and I should have told you and I didn't."
"Why didn't you."
He looked at his plate.
"Because everything's been good," he said, "and I didn't want to hand you a reason."
And Tess understood two things at once and only had room in her chest for one of them.
The first was that he had just told her, out loud, without being caught, that he was managing what she knew in order to protect a good stretch.
The second was that she was doing exactly the same thing, in the same house, on the same days. She'd been doing it since the first Saturday in February. She was doing it about a shoulder appointment and a hamper and a phone that a young woman named Greta held.
She could have said either one.
"Okay," she said.
"Tess—"
"No, I mean it. Thank you for telling me." She picked her fork back up. "Don't make me find things out from Toni."
"I won't."
"That's all," she said. "That's the whole thing."
He looked at her for a second like a man who had braced for a blow that had not come and did not know what to do with his hands.
Then he said, "Okay," and they ate lunch.
That night she could not sleep.
She lay with him warm and heavy beside her and stared at the ceiling and did the arithmetic she had been refusing to do since a Thursday in January.
Six-fifty-two, the gate.
Four, Marin wakes him. Four-oh-four, in the truck, he says.
Five-forty, the gate opens on his code. Six-ten, the hospital, which is thirty minutes down the hill and always has been.
Ninety-six minutes. Ninety-six minutes in a house half an hour from the room where they were opening her, and every one of them falls after the moment he says he left it.
The severance was fine. The consulting agreement was fine. The phone and Greta and the shoulder appointment were all, individually, every one of them, fine. She had checked them one at a time and they were fine.
It was only when she stacked them that she couldn't breathe.
And that, she thought, lying there — that is the trick. You cannot object to any single thing. Whit had told her the trick to her face in her own kitchen and she had not recognized it as instruction.
She got up at two.
She went down in her socks and did not turn the big light on. The stove in the kitchen was still going, the one he'd fixed, drawing beautifully.
She opened the second drawer in the kitchen and took out the legal pad.
She stood there with it for a long time.
The whole log in her own handwriting, every line, times and codes, the way she'd copied it out on a Tuesday in December when she was still a person who wrote things down.
18:52 MAIN GATE OPEN code 4. At the bottom, in that bad post-accident scrawl: he was here.
She had asked herself, on the drive up in the dark that night, what she was for. She had answered it then: I'm the one who wants the times.
She could go up right now and wake him and say tell me about the ninety-six minutes.
He would tell her something. That was the part she could not get past. He would tell her something, and it would be reasonable, and it would be true, and then she would have to decide whether she believed it — and she would, because she wanted to, and then she would have burned all of this good weather to buy an answer she'd already decided to accept.
Or he would tell her something that was not reasonable.
Tess stood in her own kitchen at two in the morning and admitted to herself that she was not afraid of the lie.
She was afraid of the truth.
She opened the front of the stove. The coals were low and orange and the draft took hold with a sound like a held breath.
She fed the legal pad in, page by page, and watched her own handwriting go brown and then black, and stood there until there was nothing left of any of it, and then she shut the door and went back up the stairs and got into bed beside her husband, and put her cold feet on his shins, and he said something in his sleep and pulled her in.
She stopped counting that night.
For eighteen days it worked.