Chapter 15
She called him on the seventh of July at four in the afternoon and said, "Can you come up tonight."
There was no pause at all.
"Yes."
"It's not about a trip."
"I know it isn't," Porter said. "I'll be there by eight."
He got there at ten to eight.
She was on the porch with two chairs already out and a bottle of the terrible tequila on the boards between them, which she had put there for something to do with her hands and neither of them touched all night.
He came up the steps and did not sit down until she said, "Sit down."
The light was going long across the meadow.
It was the seventh of July at eight thousand feet and it would not be properly dark until nearly nine-thirty, and the horses were down at the bottom in a group, and somewhere out past the corral the season's first real crop of mosquitoes had found the wet ground.
"I want to talk," Tess said. "I don't want to fight and I don't want to be careful. I've been careful since December and it's the thing that nearly killed me."
"Okay."
"You don't get to ask me questions. Not tonight. If I want to be asked something I'll say so."
"Okay."
"And you don't get to fix anything I say."
"Tess," Porter said, "I'm going to sit in this chair and you can talk until the sun comes up."
She started in the wrong place, which is how these things go.
She talked about the fence.
She told him she had found out about it in May, and how, and that she had driven to Steamboat and made a woman turn a screen around, and that she had sat on the tailgate of her own truck for twenty minutes afterward because she could not work out what to do with a fence.
"You made it so I couldn't say thank you."
"That wasn't—"
"Don't." She held up one hand. "You don't get to tell me what it wasn't. I've had that from you before."
He shut his mouth.
"I'm not saying you did it to trap me. I'm saying I'd have had somewhere to put it if you'd let me pay for it." She looked out at the meadow. "You built the whole thing so I couldn't refuse it and couldn't return it and couldn't be grateful for it. That's a lot of engineering for a fence."
"Yes," he said.
"Was that on purpose?"
"You said I don't get to answer questions."
"You get to answer that one."
Porter put his hands on the arms of the chair.
"Yes," he said. "Not the way you mean, but yes.
I worked out in about February that anything I gave you that you could refuse was a thing I was making you handle.
And you'd handled enough." He said it steadily, without any weight on it.
"So I stopped giving you things you could refuse.
That's the whole of it. It isn't cleverer than that. "
She talked for a long time after that and he did not interrupt once.
She told him about January. She had never told anybody about January, not properly, not even Toni — the specific pleasure of it, how good the days were, how she had lain in a bed upstairs in this house and been happy and hated herself for it in the same hour.
She told him about the arithmetic in the dark. About lying with his arm across her at two in the morning doing a sum twice and getting ninety-six minutes both times, and about the twenty feet between that bed and a drawer with a legal pad in it, and about deciding not to walk it.
And then she told him about February, which she had told exactly two people.
"I burned it," she said. "The whole log, in my own handwriting, in the stove you fixed.
In February, after Toni told me about the consulting agreement.
" Her voice was perfectly level and her hands were not.
"I stood there and fed it in page by page and I watched it go, and I did it because I had been happy for a few weeks and I could not stand to stop. "
Porter did not say anything. He had gone very still.
"So here is the thing I actually wanted to say to you," Tess said, "and then you can have your turn."
She turned in the chair so she was facing him.
"I am not afraid of you," she said. "I want that understood, because I think you've been operating since February on the idea that you're something I need protecting from, and you're not, and it's a slightly flattering thing for a man to believe about himself.
" She saw that land and did not soften it.
"You are not frightening. You're just a man who did a small ugly thing and then told a large ugly lie about it, and I've survived worse weather than you.
"What I'm afraid of is the woman in that kitchen in February."
The light had gone off the meadow.
"That's the one," Tess said. "That's who I can't forgive.
Not you — I've got somewhere to put you, I've had eight months to build somewhere to put you.
Her. The one who had the number in her hand in January and set it down.
The one who burned the only true page she owned so she could have a nice winter.
" Her throat closed and she pushed straight through it.
"I have run people above treeline for twenty years and I have never once let anybody talk me out of a weather call.
Not once. And I let a man talk me out of a fact, in my own house, because I wanted him to be who he said he was.
"So when you ask me — and you haven't asked, and I know you're not going to, and I'm answering it anyway — what's actually in the way, it isn't you.
It's that I don't currently trust myself around you.
And I don't know how a person fixes that.
There's no gesture for that. There's nothing you can do about it at all. "
She sat back.
Then she sat forward again, because there was one more piece and she had not intended to say it and it was going to come out anyway.
"There's a thing I've never told you," she said. "I'm going to say it now and I want to be extremely clear about what it is and isn't, because if you take it wrong I will put you off this porch."
"Okay."
"I didn't want to sell the outfit."
She heard him breathe.
"Twelve years ago. I didn't want to. Not for one second of it.
" She had her hands around her own elbows.
"You never made me. I want that said plainly — you never once said the words, you never gave me an ultimatum, there was no moment where a reasonable woman would have said he's making me do this.
You were kind about it and you were reasonable about it and you said things like you could always start it up again, and I sat at that island in Cherry Hills and signed the bill of sale with a pen somebody handed me and I never said one word.
"I said yes to a thing I did not want, at twenty-nine, and then I spent twelve years being angry at you for a sentence I never said."
Porter did not move at all.
"So that's mine and it's real and I've had a whole year to look at it.
" Her voice was steady. "And now here's the part you need to hear exactly right, and I'm going to say it once.
That is not why. That has got nothing to do with the thirtieth of October.
There is no line from a woman who wouldn't speak up twelve years ago to a man who read her name six times and put the phone face down.
" She turned her head. "If you ever, once, in the whole rest of your life, let those two things stand next to each other in a sentence — if you ever offer me well, you didn't tell me as any part of any explanation for anything — I will be gone and I will not come back, and you should believe me because I've had the practice. "
"I know," he said.
"Say the whole thing."
"Your silence is not a reason for what I did," Porter said. "There isn't a reason for what I did. There's just what I did."
"All right."
"Tess." He said it very carefully. "Can I say one sentence about the outfit?"
"One."
"I've known you didn't want to sell it since about the fourth year," he said, "and I told a woman in a car in Casper about it before I told you, and that's the second-worst thing I've ever done to you."
Tess sat in the dark with her arms around her elbows and did not answer that for a while.
"Yeah," she said finally. "It is."
"That's mine," she said. "That's all of it. Your turn."
It was almost dark. She could see the shape of him and not his face, which she thought afterward he had probably waited for on purpose, and then decided he hadn't, because he did not do things like that anymore.
He was quiet for a long time.
"I want to tell you what was in my head," Porter said, "in the four minutes. I've never said it to anybody. I'm not going to put anything under it and I'm not asking you for anything at the end of it."
"Okay."
"You already know the top layer. I thought it was about the Cabrera trip. I said that in February." He had his forearms on his knees. "That's true and it's not the thing.
"Here's the thing. The phone rang six times and I looked at it six times and at no point — not one second of those twenty-four minutes — did it occur to me that something might be wrong."
Tess did not move.
"That's the part," he said. "I've been sitting with that since October and it is worse than anything else in the whole business.
It isn't that I ignored my wife in an emergency.
It's that there was no emergency in my head.
It never entered it. Seven calls in half an hour at eight o'clock at night, and the possibility that you were hurt did not cross my mind one time, because nothing had ever been wrong with you. "
He stopped and started again.