Chapter 14 #2
Then she stopped, and thought about it, and put it back in the drawer instead, flat, where she could find it.
She did not call him after the Delphine call.
She wants that on the record too, since she is keeping a record. She sat at the kitchen table on the second of July with the phone in front of her and a piece of paper beside it and every single reason in the world to pick it up, and she did not.
Because what would she have said? I know what you did in March.
And he would have said okay, in that flat voice, and then there would have been a silence in which he would have understood that she had spent four months believing he had done the most expensive thing of his life out of administrative necessity, and he would have said okay to that too.
She was not going to make him do that on a telephone.
That was the first honest reason. The second one was worse and she wrote it down: she did not know what she wanted, and a woman who calls a man at nine at night with nothing to say is a woman who has decided something and hasn't told herself yet.
She put the phone face down.
She was getting extremely tired of putting the phone face down.
Reid asked her on the fourth of July, in the meadow, standing next to a helicopter, which is a ridiculous place to be asked anything.
He did it plainly, which she should have expected.
"There's a thing in Steamboat on Saturday. Barbecue, band, a lot of people you'd have to talk to." He was coiling a strap and not looking at her, which was the only tell. "I'd like to take you to it. Not as ground."
Tess stood there with the sun on the back of her neck.
She thought about lying — about I'm not ready, which was true and was also a door left open, and about let's see how the season goes, which was worse.
"No," she said. "And I want to do this properly, because you've been decent to me since April and I'm not going to hand you a soft one."
"Okay."
"I'm not free." She made herself say it looking at him.
"I'm not being noble and I'm not carrying a torch and I'd like to be somebody who could say yes to Saturday.
But there is a whole floor of me taken up, and it has been taken up since October, and it would be a rotten thing to invite you into a building in that condition. "
Reid finished the coil.
"Is he going to fix it?" he said.
"I don't know."
"Are you going to let him?"
"I don't know that either."
"Well," Reid said, "that's two more honest answers than I've had from anybody this year." He hung the strap on its hook. "The meadow's the meadow. Nothing changes about the meadow."
"Reid—"
"Tess." He almost smiled. "I'm forty-five, I've been divorced for six years, and I have flown about nine hundred people off mountains. I know the difference between a no and a not-yet, and that was a no, and you did it well." He put his helmet under his arm. "I'll be up Tuesday about the windsock."
He was up Tuesday about the windsock. He never mentioned it again, and neither did she, and she thought about it that whole week — not about him, exactly, but about the fact that a man had asked her a question and taken the answer.
She told Toni on the fifth of July at the picket line, because that was where they had all their real conversations that summer.
Toni listened to the whole thing without saying anything. Then she said, "Huh," and went on with what she was doing for about two minutes.
Then she said, "Okay. I'm going to say a thing and I want it understood that I am furious about having to say it."
"Go on."
"He closed that office knowing his father would never speak to him again." Toni was not looking at her. "And he did it in March, when you'd taken his ranch and thrown him off it and he had no way to tell you, and he has sat on it for four months while you thought he did it because he had to."
"Yes."
"That's not a man trying to get you back," Toni said.
"I've been waiting since December for the move.
Everybody makes the move. My ex-husband made the move six times, and every single time it was beautiful and every single time it had a hook in it, and I know what a hook looks like better than anybody you've ever met.
" She threw a lead rope over the rail with more force than was necessary.
"There's no hook. I've looked. I've been looking for seven months and I want you to know I have been looking hard, and there's nothing there. "
Tess waited.
"That's all," Toni said. "That's the whole sentence. I'm not saying take him back and I'm not saying I like him. I'm saying I've stopped being able to make the case, and I resent it, and I'd like it noted that I have hated every second of this."
"It's noted."
"Good." Toni picked up a hoof. "Now hold this idiot's head."
She stood in the yard that night after the trucks were quiet.
It was the fifth of July and the light does not go until nearly nine up there, and the whole valley was gold and green and absurd, and the horses were down at the bottom of the meadow in a group the way they get at that hour.
She did the honest arithmetic.
She was not afraid of him. That had gone somewhere in the spring and she had not noticed it going.
She was not waiting for the other shoe, either. That was the one that surprised her, standing there — she had spent months braced, with a part of herself permanently turned toward the door, and at some point in the last three weeks that part had put its hands down.
She was not waiting for him to fail.
That was the sentence, and it arrived whole, and she said it out loud in an empty yard because there was nobody there to hear it and she wanted to know what it sounded like.
"I'm not waiting for him to fail."
The horses did not look up.
And underneath it, immediately, in the same breath, the thing that made her heart go hard: then what are you doing?
Because if she was not waiting for him to prove her right, then she was doing something else, and had been for a while, and it had a name, and she was not going to say that one out loud in a yard.
She went inside and did the books.