Chapter 15 #2
"Twelve years. In twelve years you did not need one thing from me.
Not one. Your father died and you organized the funeral and drove yourself home.
You had the thing with your hand the year we moved — and I found out four days later.
Every single thing that ever went wrong in our life, you had it handled before I knew it existed.
" His voice had gone rough and he did not do anything about it.
"And I let that be the arrangement, because it was the most comfortable arrangement any man has ever had.
My father is looked after by an office. My company is looked after by a hundred people.
And my wife was the one thing in my life that did not require any attention at all, and I loved that about you, and I never once said so, and I never once looked at it.
"So when your name came up seven times, my entire body said: it'll keep."
The mosquitoes were bad. Neither of them did anything about that either.
"It was not a decision," Porter said. "That's what I need you to have, because it's the ugliest part.
If it had been a decision I could tell you I decided wrong.
There wasn't a decision. There was a man on the far side of a kitchen island who was tired, and a phone with his wife's name on it, and it did not rise to the level of a thought.
That is what twelve years of you being fine had made me into. "
Tess had her hand over her mouth.
"And I want to say the next bit exactly right.
" He turned toward her in the dark. "That is not a reason.
It is not an explanation and it is not a because and if any part of that landed on you as you were too competent, Tess, then I've said it wrong and I'll say it again until it comes out clean.
You did not do this. You being able to handle things is not a defect and it is not what caused it.
It's just true that I had a wife who never asked me for anything, and instead of noticing what that meant, I spent twelve years enjoying it. "
He sat back.
"That's it," he said. "That's the four minutes. That's what was in there."
Neither of them said anything for a while.
Down in the meadow a horse moved and another one moved after it and then they settled.
"You didn't ask for anything," Tess said finally.
"No."
"You could have. That was the moment. That was the single best moment you're ever going to get."
"I know exactly what it was," Porter said. "I've known since about April what that conversation would be worth if I ever got to have it, and I have thought about spending it about nine hundred times."
"Then why not."
"Because you'd have said yes."
Tess turned her head.
"Not to everything," he said. "But you'd have given me something tonight, because you're wrung out and I'd just said a true thing and true things are extremely persuasive at midnight.
" He was looking straight ahead. "And in three weeks you'd have worked out that I got it by talking, which is the thing I do, which is the thing I have always done, and it would have been January all over again with better material.
I'm not doing January again. Not for anything. "
He stood up.
"That's the whole of it. Thank you for calling me."
They sat there a while longer with the dark all the way down.
"Can I ask you something," Tess said. "You said no questions from you. I didn't say anything about me."
"Ask."
"What's it like."
"What's what like?"
"Answering the phone," she said. "First ring, everybody, all the time. The feed store guy in Steamboat told me about it in April and Camille told me about it in May like you'd taken up drinking. What's it actually like?"
He laughed. It was the second one she had heard out of him that summer.
"It's awful," Porter said. "It is the single worst thing I have ever done to my own day.
Do you know how many people want something from a man like me in a week?
I get about ninety calls. I used to see nine of them.
" He rubbed his face. "There's a guy in Rifle who wants me to look at a piece of ground and he has now told me about it four times because he's lonely, and there's a woman on my own board who cannot end a phone call, and last Thursday I was on the phone about a culvert for fifty minutes. "
"Why keep doing it?"
"Because that's the whole thing, isn't it," he said.
"That's exactly the thing. Ninety calls a week is what a life sounds like when nobody's sorting it for you, and I got to be forty-six years old without ever hearing it once.
It's not a punishment. I'm not doing it for a gold star.
" He looked out at the meadow. "It's just — this is what it's actually like, being a person other people can reach. I should have known that at thirty."
"It's inconvenient."
"It's unbelievably inconvenient," Porter said, with real feeling, and Tess laughed out loud on her own porch for the first time since a Thursday in January.
She let him get to the top of the steps.
"Porter."
He stopped.
"Don't drive to Denver at midnight. There's a bunkhouse and it's got four beds in it and one of them is made up because Tate's mother stayed in April."
He stood there with his back to her for about three seconds.
"Okay," he said.
"That's not anything."
"I know."
"I mean it. That's a bed in an outbuilding."
"Tess," Porter said, "it's a bed in an outbuilding," and went down the steps and across the yard, and she heard the bunkhouse door and then nothing.
She sat on the porch for another hour and a half in the dark.
She was crying on and off and did not particularly notice. The mosquitoes ate her alive. At some point she picked up the tequila and looked at it and put it back down.
What she was afraid of had changed shape somewhere in the last four hours, and she made herself sit there until she could name it.
It was not that he would fail her again.
She had checked, all spring, and that fear was simply not there anymore — she had watched a man tell four trustees to dismantle his grandfather's machine with no way of ever getting credit for it, and stand in a creek, and sit on a log with a stranger at two in the morning, and refuse the single best card he would ever hold, twice, in eight weeks.
What she was afraid of was the light in the bunkhouse window across the yard, and how much she wanted to walk over there, and how easy it would be, and how completely she was not going to do it tonight — and the certainty, sitting in her chest like a stone, that she was going to do it eventually.
She was afraid of herself.
She had been for eight months.
Only now it was not because she had let a man lie to her.
It was because she had spent an hour and a half on a porch listening to the truth, and had believed it, and had not once — not for a second, not at any point in the whole of it — wanted to check.