Chapter 7 #2
She could not say it out loud yet. That was the thing.
Not because Toni would say I told you, because Toni would not — Toni had said it once in December and had never said it again.
She could not say it out loud because saying it out loud meant saying the other half, and the other half was that she had been given the number in January, on a mattress, in the dark, and had put it down.
She went back out to the east line at four and worked until she couldn't see.
It was a stupid thing to do. The shoulder was already done for the day and she knew it at the third post, and she kept going anyway, and by the time she came in she could not lift her arm above her shoulder and there was a hot wire running from her neck down into her hand.
That was the closest she got, that whole afternoon, to feeling anything about it.
He came up the drive at five past nine.
She heard the truck. She heard him take his boots off, and then his voice, saying something to the dog they did not have, which was a joke he had started in January and which had been, until that afternoon, one of the dozen small reasons she had let herself be happy.
He came into the kitchen holding a paper bag.
He saw the pages on the table and he stopped in the doorway with the bag still in his hand, and Tess watched his whole body understand it before his face did.
"Okay," he said.
"Don't say okay."
He set the bag down on the counter very carefully, as if it mattered where it went.
"Ask me," he said.
"Not this time." Her voice came out low and even and she was distantly aware that her hands had started shaking and that she did not care.
"You told me you never saw them. You told me that on a Tuesday night in December while I was standing in our kitchen with my arm in a sling.
And then you came up here and you sat on that floor and you gave me back my own night hour by hour — every hour of it, every single one, except the four minutes where you were looking at the phone. "
He did not say anything.
"Say it out loud."
"I saw them," Porter said.
"All seven."
"I saw six and the seventh came in while I was holding it."
"And Marin asked you."
"Yes."
"And you said no."
"I said no," he said.
Tess got up. She had to. She stood behind her chair with her hands on the back of it and held on to it, and the wind came around the north corner of the house the way it did, hunting for a way in.
"Why."
"Tess—"
"You don't get to not answer this one. You have had four months of my life and a January and a February and you have had me in the same bed as you." Her voice cracked, finally, and she let it. "Why did you say no?"
Porter Thayer stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked at the floor and said the truest thing he had ever said to her.
"Because I thought it was about the trip."
She did not understand for a second.
"The Cabrera thing," he said. "Toni wanted you down in Grand Junction for that pack trip in November and we'd had it out on the Sunday, and you'd gone up here Thursday without— you left early and you didn't say goodbye.
" He was not looking at her. "I thought you'd got to the ranch and worked yourself up and wanted to finish it.
Seven times at eight o'clock at night, that's — I thought that's what that was. A woman calling to finish an argument."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"So I was tired," he said, "and I did not want to have it, and I put it face down."
"And in the morning."
"Tess—"
"She woke you at four." Tess had the pages in her hand now. She had not decided to pick them up. "The gate opened at twenty to six. What were you doing for ninety-six minutes, Porter, while I was on the fourth floor asking a night nurse where you were?"
"You know what I was doing."
"I want you to say it."
He put his hands on the back of the chair he was not sitting in.
"I was working out what to tell you," he said.
"Out loud. All of it."
"I sat on the arm of that couch and I made up an airplane," Porter said, "and then I got a piece of paper and I wrote down the times so I wouldn't get them wrong, because I knew — I already knew, at four in the morning, before I had put my shoes on — that you were going to be somebody I had to get a story past. That is what I did with the first hour and a half of knowing my wife had nearly died. "
"Say the last part."
"I did not spend it driving to you," he said.
It was not another woman.
That was the thing. She had spent four months rehearsing every version of this, and the one she got was smaller than any of them, and being small was what made it unsurvivable.
He had not chosen Marin Keane over her. He had not been overcome by anything. He had looked at his wife's name on a screen, six times and then a seventh, and he had made a completely ordinary decision that men make about their wives every day in every kitchen in the country.
It'll keep.
"You thought I was calling to nag you," Tess said.
"I thought you were—"
"Say it the way it was."
He was crying. She noted it the way she'd noted the light on the pages.
"I thought you were going to be a problem I'd have to manage," Porter said, "and I didn't want to do it that night."
Tess picked up the four pages and squared them on the table, the way she squared paperwork, because her hands wanted a job.
She was not thinking about him. That was the strange, cold, clarifying thing. She was standing in her own kitchen with the whole floor gone out from under the winter and she was not thinking about her husband at all.
She was thinking about a woman in a sling in December, forty-one years old, standing at a counter in Cherry Hills, deciding to be reasonable.
She was thinking about January, and a rug, and being happy for six days.
She was thinking about a legal pad going brown and then black behind the door of a stove he had fixed with his own hands, and about how it had felt to close that door — like a decision, like generosity, like being the kind of woman who does not count.
I did that, she thought. He lied and I burned the page.
"Go and sleep in the front room," she said.
"Tess."
"I'm not deciding anything tonight." She set the pages down flat. "But you're going to want to have slept, tomorrow. Believe me."