Chapter 5
VIRGIL KILGORE: People think the hard part's the no. It isn't. The hard part is the maybe. A no you can drive home from. A maybe keeps you in the parking lot till four in the morning with the radio on, doing math.
She came home on a Sunday, in the afternoon, with the duffel and the pillow.
She had rehearsed a number of things on the drive and used none of them. He was on the porch when she came up the gravel, in a coat, doing nothing, which meant he had been out there a while.
He didn't come down the steps. That was the first thing he got right.
He stood where he was with his hands in his pockets and let her park and get out and take her own bag out of the bed of the truck, and when she got to the bottom step he said, "Hey."
"Hey."
"You want help with that?"
"I've got it."
"Okay."
She stopped on the second step, which put her eye to eye with him, more or less.
"I'm not saying it's fixed," she said.
"I know."
"I mean it, Virgil."
"I know you do."
"I'm saying I can't sleep on that couch anymore and I want to be in my own house. That's what this is. It's not a — it isn't a decision."
He nodded. He looked down at the boards for a second and then back up.
"Can I say one thing," he said.
"One."
"I'm not going to make a speech at you. I've written about six of them and they're all garbage." He took a breath. "I'm just glad you're here. That's all. That's the one thing."
The whole three weeks came off her at once, in the middle of her chest, like a coat.
He had cleaned the house.
Not staged it. Cleaned it — badly, the way a man cleans, which meant the counters were spotless and the baseboards had three weeks of dust on them.
He'd put her reading glasses back on the kitchen counter where she'd taken them from.
There were flowers in the blue pitcher and they were grocery store flowers and she loved him for that more than she'd have loved him for the other kind.
They were careful with each other all afternoon.
That was the word for it. Careful. He asked if she wanted coffee and she said yes and he made it and he did not hover.
She unpacked the duffel and put the pillow back and stood in the closet for a minute looking at her own clothes hanging in a row.
He put the game on low and did not ask her to come watch it.
Around five she went out to the porch and he came out ten minutes later and sat on the other end of the swing, not the middle, and they watched the light go down over the field.
"There's six reels on the bench," she said.
"I know. I didn't touch 'em."
"You could have moved them."
"I wasn't going to move your reels, Amber."
She looked at him.
"I went out there twice," he said. "Just stood in the door. Couldn't make myself turn the light on."
She didn't answer that.
The yard light came on at the barn the way it does, on its own, on a timer she'd set years ago. The field went blue.
"You cold?" he said.
"A little."
He put his arm along the back of the swing. Not around her. Along the back of it.
She sat there for about a minute and a half, and then she moved down the swing and put herself under it.
They made dinner together, badly, the way they always had.
He cannot cook and knows it and does the parts he can do, which is chop things too big and stand where you need to get.
She burned the first batch of cornbread because the oven at the farm runs hot and has for fifteen years and she still forgets.
"You always forget," he said.
"I do not always."
"You have burned the first pan of cornbread in this house since 2011."
"That's not —" She stopped, because it was. "That's a mean thing to keep track of."
"It's the best thing I know about you."
He said it easy, over his shoulder, not making anything of it, and she stood at the oven with a dish towel in her hand and felt it go through her like a hot wire.
That was the trouble with him. That had always been the trouble with him. He would spend a month unable to say a single true sentence about her into a microphone and then hand her something like that across a kitchen without even looking up.
They didn't talk about it.
She noticed. She wants that on the record — she noticed, at the time, in the moment, with her eyes open.
They ate at the table and talked about the roof and about Fort Worth going on sale and about his sister's knee, and they did not talk about the film, and they did not talk about the eight-figure phone call, and neither of them said the name Julia Novak.
And the not-talking felt good. She could not get past that afterward. It was like relief. It was like coming in out of weather.
He got up to do the dishes and she stood beside him and dried, and their hips touched at the sink, and neither of them moved away, and she stood there with a plate in her hand and her whole side lit up like a struck match.
He turned the water off.
He didn't say anything. He took the plate out of her hand and set it down, and put both wet hands on the counter on either side of her so she was between his arms and not touched anywhere, and looked at her.
"Tell me no," he said, "and it's nothing."
She looked back at him.
Fifteen years. Fifty-four years old and gone soft in the middle and the best-looking man she had ever been in a room with, still, on a Sunday, in a kitchen.
"Don't be careful," she said.
He kissed her against the sink and it was not careful.
It was the other thing, the thing from the first years, the thing she had honestly assumed was gone the way a knee goes — his hand up into her hair and the other one flat and hard at the small of her back, hauling her up onto him, and her hands already inside his coat because she had wanted them there since the carpet.
She got a fistful of his shirt and pulled and heard a seam go and did not care.
"Upstairs," he said, against her mouth.
"No."
"Amber —"
"Here first."
He laughed into her neck, a low broken sound, and then stopped laughing.
He got her up onto the counter. He did it like it was nothing, which it never had been and wasn't now, and she wrapped her legs around him and he stood between them and took her face in both hands and kissed her until she couldn't hold her own head up.
She knew every part of this. Nobody tells you that about fifteen years. She knew the exact second his breathing would change. She knew he'd put his mouth just under her jaw on the right side and stay there too long, and he did, and she made a sound she hadn't made in a very long time.
He pulled back to look at her.
"There she is," he said.
"Shut up."
"No, ma'am."
He got her sweater off over her head and dropped it on the floor and put his mouth on her collarbone, and then lower, and she leaned back on her hands on the counter with her eyes shut and let him.
He knew every part of it too. He knew where. He always had.
Her jeans went, one leg and then the other, off onto the floor with the sweater. His hands on the insides of her thighs, thumbs working, patient in a way that was frankly unfair given the state she was in. She said his name and he said "I know" against her stomach and did not hurry.
When he finally put his mouth on her she said something that wasn't a word.
He took his time. He had always taken his time, and there had been years — she thought about this later, at three in the morning, and hated herself a little for it — there had been years where she had let him do this and had been somewhere else entirely, thinking about the barn, about a call she hadn't returned.
Not tonight. Tonight she was nowhere but under his hands, with the counter edge cutting into her palms and the ceiling light on and her heels dug into his back, and when it broke over her it took her clean out at the knees and she heard herself, loud, in an empty house, and did not care about that either.
He came up and held her while she shook.
"Okay," he said into her hair. "Okay. I've got you."
"Upstairs," she said, when she could.
"Now she wants upstairs."
"Virgil."
He carried her. He shouldn't have; his back's been bad since 2019 and she told him so and he told her to hush, and he got her up the stairs and put her down on their bed and stood at the end of it and got his shirt off, and she watched him do it.
Then she sat up and reached for his belt.
She took her own time with him. She had reasons.
Some of them were kind. She got him out of everything and put her hands on him and watched his head go back, and she thought about a man who could talk for two years to a stranger and never once say a true thing to his wife, and she thought: you can't fake this.
There is one room in this house where you have never lied to me.
"Amber," he said, ragged. "Honey —"
"I know."
"I can't —"
"I know," she said, and let him go, and lay back and pulled him down after her.
He came into her slow and stopped all the way in and held there, propped on his elbows, and looked at her.
"Hi," he said.
Her eyes went, then. That was the ambush. Not the kissing, not any of the rest of it — this. His face six inches over hers, and the weight of him, and hi.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You are."
"Alright," he said, and kissed the corner of her eye, and started to move.
It was not fast and it was not gentle. It was fifteen years of two people who fit.
He got a hand under the small of her back and lifted her into it and she got her heels up around him and they found the thing they had always been able to find, that grinding, unhurried, terrible rhythm that had made her lose whole afternoons at twenty-six years old.
She held onto his shoulders. She said things.
Some of them she remembered afterward and some she didn't. At one point she said don't stop over and over and he said "not planning on it" in a voice like a man carrying something heavy up a hill, and she laughed and it turned into something else halfway out.