Chapter 18
Thirteen months later, on a Thursday morning in the second week of August, Redmond Pack & Trail took ten clients up the drainage with four hands, and one of the hands was a forty-seven-year-old man who still could not throw a decent diamond hitch.
"He's not getting better," Toni said, at the rail, watching.
"He's better than he was."
"Tess, he has been doing this for two seasons and Tate does it in nine seconds and he does it in forty."
"He does it in thirty-one," said Tess. "I timed him. He's very proud."
Toni made a noise.
Down in the yard Porter got the hitch thrown, badly, and Tate came and re-threw it, and Porter said something and Tate laughed out loud — Tate, who in two years had produced perhaps nine sentences — and the two of them went on down the line.
Tess leaned on the rail with her coffee and watched her husband load a horse and was, in a completely uncomplicated way, happy.
That is a thing she can say now. She spent a long time being unable to.
The second season had gone well enough that they were running fourteen trips instead of nine, with a second string and a girl from Meeker who was going to be better than all of them inside three years.
The Larkspur Trust had renewed and doubled.
There was a veterans' routing in September and a bank in Steamboat that had stopped asking her about signatories.
Porter had been on the manifest twice that summer and would be twice the next, and paid at the going rate, and had turned out to be a genuinely good hand with frightened people and a permanent liability with knots.
He ran the company from a room in the house with a window that faced east. He was in Denver three days a fortnight. There was no chief of staff and would not ever be one, and Tess had not checked, not once, not in thirteen months.
She was going to be able to say that for the rest of her life. It is one of the two or three things she is proudest of.
Here is what a rebuilt marriage looks like at eight thousand feet, in case anybody needs it written down.
In June a man from a pipeline company called the house line at ten past eight in the evening, in the middle of dinner, with nine people at the table including Reid Danvers and the girl from Meeker's parents.
Porter got up and took it in the kitchen and came back four minutes later.
"That was a man in Rangely who is extremely angry about a right-of-way," he said, sitting down.
"Is he right?"
"He's completely right, which is going to cost me about ninety thousand dollars." He picked his fork back up. "Reid, you were saying about the Ogden part."
And the girl from Meeker's father, who was a contractor and had spent thirty years being unable to get anybody on the phone, sat there looking at Porter Thayer like he had grown a second head, and said, "You answer your own phone at dinner?"
"I answer everything," Porter said.
"That's insane."
"It's unbelievably inconvenient," said Porter, with feeling, and Tess laughed so hard she had to put her glass down, and under the table he put his hand on her knee and left it there.
That is one half of it.
The other half is that in April, in a room in Denver, at a dinner she had not wanted to go to, a man who had known Porter for thirty years made a joke about wives and mountain ranches that had a small hook in it, and every person at that table did the thing where they laugh and move on.
And Tess said, in a completely ordinary voice, "That's not funny, and I'd like you to not do that."
The table went quiet for about two seconds.
Then the man said, "You're right. That was rude. I'm sorry," and the dinner went on, and that was the entire event.
She thought about it the whole drive home, and not because it had been hard.
"You went quiet," Porter said, at Idaho Springs.
"I did."
"Do you want to tell me now or in the morning?"
"Now." She watched the headlights. "Twelve years I'd have said that in this truck.
Not at the table — here, afterward, to you, and you'd have said he's an idiot, don't think about it, and I'd have been furious for four days about a thing you were never going to be able to fix, because I never gave you the chance to be in the room for it. "
"And tonight?"
"Tonight I said it in the room, and he apologized, and it took ten seconds, and now I have nothing to be angry about and I don't know what to do with the drive home."
Porter laughed.
"Welcome to having a wife," he said, and she reached over and took his hand off the gearshift and held it the rest of the way up the pass.
They fight about twice a month now and they are good at it, which nobody warns you about.
In February they had a real one — about money, of all things, about whether the outfit should take on debt for a second string — and it went on for two days and there was shouting on the second afternoon, in the barn, with Tate hiding in the tack room pretending to sort bits.
And on the second night Tess came downstairs at eleven and found him at the kitchen table with a spreadsheet and said, "I've been thinking about it and you're right about the interest and wrong about everything else," and he said, "That's about where I got to," and they did it in forty minutes and went to bed.
That is the whole difference and she has thought about it a lot. It is not that there is less anger in this marriage. There is considerably more. It is that none of it has anywhere to hide.
Somewhere in the first spring she stopped bracing.
She could not tell you the day. She noticed it in a hardware store in June, standing in an aisle looking at hinges, when she realized that she had not thought about the thirtieth of October in weeks and that when she did think about it, it did not do anything to her chest.
She trusts him. That is a flat sentence and she means every word of it, and she is aware that a certain kind of person would like her to hedge it, and she is not going to. Not she is learning to. Not most days. She trusts her husband, in the whole and ordinary way, the way you trust the floor.
It took thirteen months and it is not provisional and it is not going anywhere.
She put his name back on the deed in May.
She did it herself, at Dale Bannon's office on Lincoln above the ski shop, and she did not tell Porter she was doing it, which she enjoyed enormously.
"You understand what this is," Dale said.
"I do."
"Mrs. Thayer, I have to say it once for the file. Sixteen hundred acres, the water, the outbuildings, the grazing lease. You are putting a man's name back on a thing you got clear of."
"I am."
"May I ask why?"
Tess picked up the pen.
"Because I took it away from him," she said.
"In February, when I was as angry as I have ever been in my life, and I was entitled to and I'd do it again.
But I've had it in my own name for fifteen months now and I know exactly what it feels like, and it turns out what I wanted was to know I could hold it.
" She signed. "I don't want to live on a ranch I'm holding against my husband.
That's not a marriage, that's a hostage situation with good views. "
Dale Bannon read it over and stamped it.
"For the file," he said, "this is the first genuinely happy thing anybody has asked me to do all year."
She gave it to Porter at the kitchen table that night, in an envelope, without a speech.
He read it twice. Then he put it down on the table and put his face in his hands and did not say anything for quite a long time, and Tess stood behind his chair with her arms around his shoulders and her cheek on the top of his head and let him have it.
"You don't have to—"
"I know I don't have to," she said. "That's the whole point of it. Nobody made me do anything."
They were married again on the sixteenth of August in the meadow, in the evening, with about forty people there.
It was not a benefit and there was no tent.
Toni cooked, badly, with help, and the girl from Meeker's mother did the flowers out of the ditches the way somebody had at the benefit two summers before, cow parsley and blue flax, and Tate wore a tie for the first time in his life and was miserable about it and would not take it off.
Tess wore a green dress and the boots. Porter wore a suit that fit him again.
Osgood came, which nobody expected. He had booked a trip every summer since and had told the story of the log at two in the morning to approximately everyone in Pueblo.
Reid came, and brought a woman named Marisa from Hayden who he had been seeing since the spring, and the two of them stayed until one in the morning, and Tess watched him laugh at something and was so pleased about it she had to go and stand by the horses for a second.
Delphine Sturges came and wore a hat and drank three glasses of wine and told a funny story about a Thayer trust from 1979, and left at nine because she had a flight.
And Whit came.
He came at six and stood at the edge of it for forty minutes with a glass he did not drink and let a number of people be surprised to see him, and at half past six he came over to where the two of them were standing and said, "Porter.
Tess." And then, after a pause, to his son: "It's a good piece of ground for it. "
"It is," Porter said.
"Your great-grandfather was married in a field."
"I know he was."
Whit nodded once, and looked out at the meadow for a moment, and then went and spoke to Delphine, and at twenty past seven his car went down the county road.
Tess will not pretend that was a reconciliation. It was not. He has never said one word about the tent or the office or the seven calls, and he is not going to, and there will be Christmases in the years ahead that are difficult in a particular quiet way.
But he came, and he said it was good ground, and Porter watched his father's car all the way to the county road with an expression Tess had never seen on him before.
"You all right?"
"Yeah," he said, and meant it, and put his arm around her.