Chapter 11 #2
The room over the garage had a double bed with a chenille spread, a rocking chair, a dresser with a doily on it, and a framed picture of a lake.
They stood inside the door with their coats on.
"I'll take the chair," Virgil said.
"You will not take the chair."
"Amber, I'll take the chair."
"You are fifty-four years old with a bad back and if you sit in a rocking chair all night I will have to hear about it for the rest of my life." She put her bag down. "Get in the bed. Stay on your side. It's one night."
He stood there.
"Okay," he said.
They took turns in the bathroom down the hall like people in a boarding house. She slept in the T-shirt she'd worn under her dress. He got in on the far side in a shirt and his jeans, which she noticed and did not comment on, and turned the lamp off.
The ice ticked on the window.
They lay there in the dark about eighteen inches apart, in a dead man's spare room, in Logan County, Kentucky.
"He gave me the Friday and the Saturday," Virgil said, after a while.
"I know."
"Nobody gave anybody two nights. Not to a kid who couldn't draw.
" His voice in the dark was very level. "I made ninety dollars that weekend and I bought the boots on the Friday because I thought — I don't know what I thought.
That it had turned. It hadn't turned. It didn't turn for another fifteen years. "
"Fifteen," she said.
"Fifteen," he said.
The heat came on somewhere under the floor.
"I didn't know you had a picture of him."
"I've got about four hundred pictures of people you've forgotten."
"I haven't forgotten him."
"No," she said. "You haven't."
Quiet.
"Ruby said he never let her come to the room."
"I heard."
"Fifty-three years," Virgil said. "And she's never once seen him do the thing he did."
Amber lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling of a stranger's spare room and said, "Well."
He did not answer that, because there was no answer to it, and because he understood it, which is not something she could have said about him in October.
She does not know which of them moved.
She has been over it and she genuinely does not know, and she has decided that not knowing is probably the truest thing about it. What she knows is that at some point in the dark her hand was on his chest, and his was in her hair, and the eighteen inches were gone.
It was not tender. That is not what came up out of them.
It was three and a half months of a locked door coming off its hinges — his mouth on hers hard enough to hurt, her fist in his shirt, his hand going down her side and gripping and pulling her up against the whole length of him, and a sound out of him she had not heard since she was thirty.
She got her leg over his hip. He said her name into her throat like a man going under.
"Amber —"
"Don't talk."
"Honey —"
"Don't talk."
His hand went under the T-shirt and flat up her back and she arched into it, and he rolled and she was under him and it was going to happen, it was two seconds from happening, she had her hands at his belt —
And he stopped.
He got hold of her wrists. Both of them. Gently, and completely, and he pulled them up off him and held them against the spread and put his forehead down on her collarbone and stayed there, breathing like he'd carried something up a hill.
"No," he said.
Amber lay under her husband in the dark and could not, for a moment, understand the word.
"Get off me."
"Amber —"
"Get off me."
He got off. He rolled onto his back and put both hands over his face.
She sat up on the edge of that bed with her back to him, and her ears were roaring, and there is no other way to say what she felt in the first four seconds, which was that she had offered a man something and been handed it back.
"Well," she said. Her voice came out level. It has never once let her down and it did not then. "That's new."
"Don't do that."
"Don't do what."
"Don't be flat at me." He sat up. She heard him. "Please. Not tonight."
"You want to tell me what that was?"
"Yes," he said. "That's the whole reason I stopped."
He turned the lamp on, which she had not expected, and which was somehow the worst part — being looked at.
He was wrecked. His hands were not steady. He sat on his side of that bed with his shirt half off his shoulder and his hair every direction and he looked forty years old and completely sober.
"I want you more than I have wanted anything in my life," he said. "I want you to know that first, because I'm about to say a thing that's going to sound like I don't."
She did not say anything.
"If we do that tonight, you get in the truck in the morning," Virgil said.
"And by Tuesday you'd be sitting in that house on Marlin Avenue working out whether it counted.
And it wouldn't. And you'd know it wouldn't, and I'd know it wouldn't, and in about a week you'd hate yourself for it and then you'd hate me for it, and you would be right both times. "
"That's my decision to make."
"It is."
"Then let me make it."
"No," he said.
She stared at him.
"That's the first time in fifteen years I've told you no about anything," he said.
"You can hate me for that too. But I have taken every single thing you have ever handed me, Amber.
Every one. For fifteen years. And you handed me that just now because you're tired and because a man died and because it's dark, and I would have taken it, and it would have been the last one. "
Her eyes had gone. She hated that.
"You don't get to be noble at me," she said.
"I'm not being noble. I'm being greedy." He said it fast. "You think this is me being good?
I'm doing arithmetic. If I take that tonight I get one night.
If I don't take it, there's a chance — there is a chance, I'm not saying more than that — there's a chance that one day you walk into a room and choose it in the daylight with your whole head, and that is worth more to me than anything that could happen in this bed. "
He stopped.
"That's it," he said. "That's the ugly version. I'm not a better man than I was in October. I've just finally worked out what I actually want, and it isn't a night."
The ice went on ticking on the window.
"Turn the light off," Amber said.
He turned it off.
She did not sleep for a long time.
He did not either; she could tell by the breathing, and neither of them said so, and neither of them moved.
Somewhere around two she said, into the dark, "I'm not sorry."
"No," he said. "Me neither."
And that was the whole of the conversation.
The ice was off the road by nine in the morning and the sun came out the way it does after, hard and white on everything, and the whole county looked like it had been dipped in glass.
They ate eggs in Ruby Cofield's kitchen with four other people and a girl of about six, and Virgil was funny, and Ruby laughed twice, and Amber watched a woman who had buried her husband on Thursday laugh on Friday and thought that she did not know one thing about anything.
They walked out to the cars together because there was one path scraped.
"Drive slow," he said.
"Yep."
"Amber."
"Don't."
"I'm not," he said. "I was going to say your left rear's low. That's all. There's a place on 431 by the Sonic."
She looked at the tire. It was low.
"Okay," she said.
He got in his truck and she got in hers and he pulled out first and turned south and she sat in Ruby Cofield's driveway with the engine running for a minute and a half.
Because here is the thing she had understood at about four in the morning, lying eighteen inches from her husband in a dead man's spare room, and had not been able to put down since.
He had refused her.
Not gently and not cheaply. He had put his hands on her wrists and said no to the one thing he wanted, in the dark, with nobody in the world watching and no possible way to get credit for it, on the reasoning that she deserved to make the decision somewhere she could see it.
That was not a gesture. You cannot buy that, and you cannot arrange it, and you cannot put it in a movie.
Amber Galloway sat in a driveway in Logan County, Kentucky, with both hands on the wheel and the glare coming up off the ice, and understood that the ground had moved, and that she was going to have to do something about it, and that she had absolutely no idea what.