Chapter 17 #3
They took a long time about it. Neither of them was in any condition to be quick a second time and they were both too tired to be athletic, and it turned into something slow and thorough and unbearably close, his forehead on hers, her hand flat on the back of his neck, the two of them looking at each other from three inches away for what felt like an hour.
She cried at the end of it and did not bother to hide that either.
"There we are," Porter said, unsteadily, into her hair. "There we are."
They lay there a long time afterward, in the middle of the afternoon, with the window open and a fly working the ceiling and the horses making noise down in the meadow.
She had her head on his shoulder and her hand flat on his chest, and she could feel his heart under it doing the slow work of coming down, and she thought about the last time she had lain like this — in January, in a different room in this house, with a number in her head she had chosen not to go and get.
She waited to see whether the thought would ruin it.
It did not. That was the whole news of the afternoon, and she lay very still with it.
The January night was in the room and would always be in the room, and it did not take anything away from what had just happened, and she understood at last what she had been trying to work out all summer — that the two of them were not going to get a version of this with the bad part cut out, and that she had stopped wanting one.
"What," he said. He had gotten better at hearing her think.
"I'm about to say something appalling."
"Go on."
"This is better." She lifted her head. "Than any of it. Than the first year. Than any of the twelve."
Porter looked at her for a long moment.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
"That's a terrible thing to be true."
"It's true anyway," he said, and pulled her back down.
At two in the afternoon she made coffee and they sat at the kitchen table, and she said, "Now."
"Now," he agreed.
She had it ready. She had had it ready since the second week of July and had rehearsed it in a truck and it came out nothing like the rehearsal, which is how these things go.
"Two things," Tess said. "One's yours and one's mine.
"Yours first. The thirtieth of October is not a debt.
" She had both hands around the cup. "You do not owe me for it.
There is no amount of fencing and no number of trailheads and no speech in a tent that pays it off, and I am telling you that as good news, not bad — because if it were a debt you'd finish paying it one day, and then we'd be a man and a woman who were square, and that's not what I want to be married to.
"It's just true. It happened and it will always have happened and it is part of the furniture now.
You own it forever. Not as a punishment.
As a fact." She looked up. "You are not on probation.
I am not going to spend the next thirty years being owed something, because a woman who is owed something is a woman with a job, and I have a job.
"So: it's finished. That's what I'm saying. It's not forgiven, because I don't think that word means anything. It's finished."
Porter had his hand over his mouth.
"Mine," she said. "Mine is that I don't disappear again."
"Tess—"
"Let me. This is the whole of my half and I've only got it once.
" She set the cup down. "I signed a bill of sale at twenty-nine for a thing I did not want to sell and I never said a word, and then I spent twelve years being angry about a sentence I never said, and I let it go quiet because being agreeable was easier than being a problem.
That is mine. It is not why you did what you did and it never will be, and if you ever say it is, I'm gone.
"But it's still mine. And I'm not doing it again. So from here on you're going to get told things. At the time. In the kitchen. About the stools and the thermostat and every other stupid thing, and some of it is going to be extremely inconvenient for you, and that's the deal."
"That's not a cost."
"It is a cost. You just don't know it yet." She almost smiled. "You've been married to a woman who never needed anything for twelve years. You're about to find out what a wife with opinions is like at eight thousand feet in February."
"Tess," Porter said. "Please."
"Almost done."
She turned the cup around on the table.
"I want you to know what I'm turning down," she said. "Because if I don't say it, in ten years you'll decide I stayed because I ran out of road, and I'm not having that in the house.
"Reid Danvers asked me out on the fourth of July, in the meadow, and I said no.
He's kind and he's funny and he has never once in his life managed anybody, and I liked him from the first day, and he'd have been good to me.
" She watched him take that and did not spare him any of it.
"And it's not just him. I've got a permit and a partner and sixteen hundred acres in my own name, and if I never saw you again I would be all right.
Not sad-and-coping. All right. I'd have had a whole life and it would have been a good one and I know that for a fact, because I've been living it since March and it fits.
"That's what's on the other side of the table."
She looked at him.
"And I'm choosing this one," Tess said. "Not because I'm tired and not because you wore me down and not because I couldn't manage on my own.
Because I like the man who sat on a log with Osgood at two in the morning and I'd rather have him than the other thing.
That's it. That's the whole reason. It's a decision, and it's made, and I'm not going to be revisiting it in the spring. "
The stove ticked.
"Say something."
"I can't," Porter said, "for a second."
"Take the second."
He took it. He sat at her kitchen table with his hands flat on the wood and his shoulders going, and Tess reached over and put her hand on top of his and left it there and let him have it.
"Okay," he said eventually.
"Yeah."
"Can I say one thing?"
"You can say a lot of things now," said Tess. "That's the arrangement."