Chapter 12 #2
"Four hundred. Which is about two hundred more than the hold, and there's no name on it, so I've got it sitting in the safe and I don't know what the hell to do with it."
"Put it against Toni Cabrera's repair," Tess said.
"That's what I figured. That all right?"
"That's fine."
She got back in her truck and sat in the lot for a minute with her hands on the wheel, because there it was again — the same shape as the fence, the same shape as everything since February. Not a gift, which she could have refused. Not a gesture, which she could have resented.
An envelope through a slot before opening, with no name on it, arranged so that the only way to find out was to go looking, and so that there was nothing at the end of it to say thank you for.
You cannot return a thing like that. That is the entire design.
Reid came by on the eleventh to walk the meadow for the season and see where she wanted the windsock.
They did it in forty minutes and then stood at the fence line with coffee, and he looked out at three quarters of a mile of brand-new four-strand and whistled.
"That's a good fence."
"It is."
"Somebody did that right."
"They did," Tess said.
He waited about four seconds — she counted them — and then did not ask, and changed the subject to a helicopter part he was waiting on out of Ogden, and Tess stood there with her coffee and thought about how restful he was and how completely she was not going to do anything about it.
That was the trouble, actually. Reid Danvers was a kind, funny, entirely available man who had never once made her feel like a piece of weather to be routed around, and every single time she saw him she was clearer about the fact that she was not free.
Not loyal. She wanted to be exact with herself about that, because loyal would have been a nicer word for it.
Occupied. There was a whole floor of her taken up by a man who was three and a half hours away setting posts badly, and until she did something about that floor, it was not honest to invite anybody into the building.
"You all right?" Reid said.
"I'm fine. I'm thinking about wire."
"You're not thinking about wire."
"No," Tess agreed. "I'm not."
He laughed and let it go, and that was the whole thing, and it was one of about four kindnesses she could remember receiving from a man that year.
She did not sleep at all on the night of the twelfth.
She was up at five and made coffee in the dark and stood at the kitchen window while the ridge came up gray and then gold, and she took inventory the way she would have taken inventory of a string before a trip, because that is the only way she has ever known how to think.
March. Four telephone calls to four trustees, dismantling the thing that had absorbed forty-one years of a family's private disasters — done when he had no access to her, when she had just taken his great-grandfather's ranch off him, and when the most likely outcome of his entire life was that she would never speak to him again.
April, and again in May. Three quarters of a mile of fence, in a company name she wouldn't know, on days he had confirmed she was gone.
April through June. A man who has not answered his own telephone since he was thirty-four, answering it on the first ring, at nine at night, to a man from a feed store about nine hundred dollars of hay. Every call. Everyone. For months. In a city where it is being discussed as a symptom.
Last night. Three and a half hours each way, and twenty-five minutes of work, and not one question about his wife.
June the twelfth. A phone call about an insurance renewal, in which he had the single best card he will ever hold in his hand — I closed the office, I did it in March, I did it when I had nothing — and did not play it.
And under all of it, the thing she kept coming back to, the thing she could not get around at five in the morning in her own kitchen:
He is not trying to get me back.
That was the piece that would not fit anywhere. Everything he had done since February had been shaped, deliberately and at considerable expense, so that it could not function as a request. He had built the whole thing to be unable to ask her for anything.
Which was the only thing, she understood — standing there with the coffee going cold, in the exact spot where she had stood in December when she still believed him — that could ever have worked on her.
And she did not know whether that was the most honest thing a man had ever done for her, or the most sophisticated thing anyone had ever done to her, and there was nobody alive she could ask.
She picked up her phone at ten past six.
She got as far as his name. She sat down at the table with it in front of her and typed three words and looked at them.
Come up Sunday
She read it maybe nine times.
She thought about a Friday night in December — the cold coming off the window, a man in his coat in her mudroom, a spiral notebook, a cut ring in a plastic bag.
Come up Sunday. She had said it out loud and meant for the day, not to stay, and she had believed, at the time, that she was in charge of it.
Two weeks later he had been living here. Six weeks later she had burned the only true page she owned in a stove he had fixed with his own hands.
Tess deleted it one letter at a time.
Then she put the phone face down on the table.
She sat with that for a second, looking at the blank back of it, and heard herself make a sound that was not quite a laugh, because she knew exactly what she had just done and exactly where she had learned it.
"Yeah," she said, to nobody.
Then she got up, and washed the cup, and went out to get nine head ready for nine strangers who were arriving on Thursday, because the season started in two days and none of it was going to wait for her to be finished thinking.