Chapter 14
The second trip went out on the twenty-third with seven clients, and she hired him for it, and neither of them said one word about the first one.
That was how it went for the rest of June.
She would think about the shape of it later and be struck by the arithmetic.
In January he had gotten from a stranger in her mudroom to a man living in her house in nine days.
He had done it with a notebook and a ring in a plastic bag and a night he had gone and bought back for her, and it had been the most effective four days of work anybody had ever done on her.
Now it was June and he waited a week for a sentence.
He did not text. That was the discipline of it, and she came to understand that it was a discipline, because he was not a patient man and never had been.
When she called about a trip he answered on the first ring and said yes and asked what time.
When she did not call, nothing came. There were nine days in the last week of June and the first of July where she did not contact him at all, and in those nine days her phone did not once have his name on it.
She checked. She checked more than she was going to admit to anybody.
She gave him one inch on the second trip and then spent two days regretting it.
It was the fourth night. The clients were down and the fire was low and Toni had gone to the line, and Porter was sitting on an upturned pannier drying a sock, and Tess sat down on the other side of the fire because there was nowhere else to sit.
They did not talk for about five minutes.
Then she said, "The shoulder's better than it was in March."
She had not meant to say anything. She heard it come out of her and could not think, afterward, what had made her offer him a fact about her own body.
He did not look up from the sock.
"That's good," he said.
"It gives out around three."
"Then we'll load the panniers before three," Porter said, "and you'll tell me if I'm doing it wrong."
And that was all. He did not ask a follow-up question. He did not say I've been thinking about your shoulder, which he had been, or is there anything I can do, which would have been the end of the conversation.
The next morning the panniers were loaded before three, and every morning after that, and it was Tate who did most of it and nobody ever explained to Tate why.
She regretted it for two days. Not because he had done anything with it — because he hadn't, and because she had spent forty-eight hours realizing that she had wanted him to.
She tested him. She was not proud of most of it.
The first one she could defend. She put him on the worst horse in the string for six days — a big rangy gelding named Judge who would not stand and had a mouth like a rock — and told him it was because he was the heaviest and Judge could carry him, which was true, and not why she did it.
He did not complain about Judge. On the fourth day he had the horse standing.
The second one was worse. She had him drive up from Denver on a Tuesday to bring a hitch pin that Tate could have gotten in Steamboat in forty minutes, and she was not in the yard when he arrived, and she watched him from the tack room window stand there for six or seven minutes with a hitch pin in his hand, and then put it on the bench by the barn door where anybody would put it, and get back in his truck, and drive three and a half hours home.
He did not mention it the next time. He never mentioned it.
The third one she did on purpose and knew exactly what she was doing while she did it.
It was the last day of June and they were loading feed and Reid's helicopter went over low on its way to the meadow, and Tess said, without looking up, "That's Reid Danvers. He's county. He's been staging here since April."
"I heard that."
"He's up here a fair amount."
"That's good," Porter said. "That's a good thing to have on your ground." And he picked up two more sacks and carried them into the barn.
She stood there in the yard and was furious.
That is the part she made herself look at, that night, at the kitchen table.
She had gone fishing for a flicker — for one second of a man being jealous, one crack in it, some evidence that under all that grinding patience he still wanted something from her — and he had not given it to her, and she was angry about it, and being angry about it meant that she had wanted him to fail.
She wrote that down.
Then she looked at it for a while and understood a second thing, which was worse: he probably had felt it.
He was not a saint and she had married him at twenty-nine partly for how badly he wanted things.
He had felt it and he had put two sacks of feed on his shoulder instead, because at some point in the last five months he had decided that his feelings were not going to be her problem anymore.
She sat with that for a long time.
The correction came on the second of July, on a Thursday, over the telephone, because of a grant report.
The Larkspur Trust wanted a mid-year narrative and a budget variance, and Tess had questions about how to book the donated stock trailer, and Delphine was the only person she knew who would give her a straight answer in under four minutes.
She got her answer in three.
And then Tess said — and she had not planned to, and she thought about that afterward, at length, and concluded that she absolutely had planned to and had simply not told herself:
"Delphine. Can I ask you something that isn't about the trailer?"
"You can ask."
"In May you told me there was something you knew and weren't going to give me."
"I remember."
"I'm not asking for it," Tess said. "I want to ask a different question. A factual one." She was standing in the tack room with her free hand flat on the bench. "Did he have to close the office?"
There was a silence on the line that went on long enough that Tess heard the wind come up outside.
"No," Delphine said.
"Was there exposure? Compliance, regulatory, anything — was there a reason a lawyer would tell him to wind it up?"
"There was no exposure. The office was clean.
It had been clean for thirty years, which is not the same thing as good, and I want that distinction on the record.
" Her voice had gone flat and precise. "It was administratively expensive and structurally old-fashioned and there was no legal or reputational reason on earth to close it.
Three separate people told him so. I was one of them.
He listened to all three of us and then he did it anyway. "
Tess sat down on the bench.
"Why."
"He told the trustees it was because the office made it possible for a Thayer to never once in his life have to hear a thing he didn't want to hear.
" A pause. "That is nearly a quotation. I was in the room for two of the four calls.
He also said that he had used it that way, and that his father had used it that way, and that he was not going to hand it to anybody else. "
"And the board? The foundation?"
"He brought the motion himself," Delphine said.
"In person, at the April meeting, with his father sitting at the table.
He gave the reasons out loud. He did not soften them.
Whit has not spoken to him since, and he is not going to, and Porter knew that would be the outcome before he opened his mouth, because I told him so in the parking garage twenty minutes beforehand. "
Tess put her forehead in her hand.
"Why are you telling me now?"
"Because in May you asked me whether the board moved him out, and I said the board voted unanimously, and I watched you take that away and be satisfied with it.
" Delphine's voice did not change at all.
"I let you have a wrong answer because it was convenient for me not to be the person who corrected it.
I have thought about that for six weeks.
This afternoon you asked me a direct factual question and I am not prepared to do it twice. "
"Delphine—"
"There is one more thing and then I am going to hang up, because I have a call at four.
" A rustle of paper. "He has never asked me what you know.
Not once, in seven months. He has never asked me what you said, or whether you asked about him, or how you seemed.
I have given that man legal advice for twenty-six years and I have never known him not to want information.
Whatever else you decide, you should know that he has been extremely careful not to have any. "
The line clicked.
Tess sat on the bench in the tack room for a while with the phone in her lap.
Then she got up and went and found the piece of paper.
It was still in the drawer where she had put it at the end of May, folded in half, with March written on it in her own handwriting and, underneath, before Marin came up here, and underneath that, in the same hand:
Or: he had to.
She stood at the kitchen table and looked at it.
She had written both of them down. That was the thing she could not get past — she had done the honest work, she had laid out both readings the way she would have laid out two routes on a map, and then she had picked the one that cost her nothing.
And she had known she was doing it. She had written it down at the time. Because the other version would require something from me, and I have a season starting in three weeks.
She had done it once before, in February, with a legal pad and a stove.
That was the sentence that arrived, and she made herself stay in the room with it. Not the same, she told herself. In February she had chosen the version that let her keep being happy, and in May she had chosen the version that let her keep being free, and those are different crimes.
They are the same crime. She knew that too.
The difference — the only difference, and she gave herself credit for it because there was nobody else to — was that this time somebody had told her the truth and she had not thrown it in a fire.
She took the paper to the stove.