Chapter 16 #2
"So that's where I am," she said. "I'm not standing out here holding a grudge. I got over the grudge in February, if you want to know. I'm standing out here because I do not know how a person takes that risk twice and I would very much like somebody to tell me and there isn't anybody."
She stopped.
She waited for it. She had braced her whole body for it — for the offer, for the plan, for the thing he would go and get, for tell me what to do and I'll do it.
Virgil Kilgore sat on the tailgate of her truck and looked at the barn.
"I don't know either," he said.
That was all.
He did not promise her anything. He did not tell her it wouldn't happen again. He did not say the words I've changed or the words let me show you or any of the nine hundred sentences she had heard from him since October.
He sat there with a beer he hadn't drunk and said I don't know either, and then he shut his mouth and left it shut, and the two of them sat on a tailgate in the cold with the whole enormous unfixed thing lying out in front of them where they could both see it.
It was the single most useful thing he had ever done.
"Can I ask you one," he said, after a while.
"You can ask."
"Was any of it good?"
"Was any of what good?"
"The fifteen years." He was looking straight out at the barn.
"I've been sitting out here since Christmas taking it apart, and I keep getting to a place where the whole thing was a — where you were just carrying it.
And I can't tell anymore if I'm being honest or if I'm being dramatic, and there's nobody to ask but you and it's an unfair question and I'd like an answer. "
Amber sat with that for a long moment.
"It was good," she said.
"Amber —"
"Don't." She turned and looked at the side of his face.
"You asked me and I'm going to answer you properly, so don't you dare help me.
It was good. It was mostly good. I have had fifteen years of a man who makes me laugh in the truck and who has never once been cold to me, not one day, not when he was tired and not when he was famous, and I would like the record to show that, because everybody in this town is going to write it down some other way. "
He did not say anything.
"It was good and it was also the thing I said in January," she said.
"Both. That's the part I couldn't get anybody to understand in December.
It's not one or the other. I was happy in a house with a man who never told me a hard thing, for fifteen years, and both halves of that are true and I've had to learn to hold them at the same time and it about broke my hands. "
The bottle turned on the metal.
"Okay," Virgil said. His voice was not good.
"Don't cry out here, it's freezing."
"I'm not."
"You are."
"I'm going to," he said, "in about a minute, and I'd take it as a kindness if you'd look at the barn."
So she looked at the barn.
The temperature kept going. She had come out in a jacket meant for a gas station and not for four hours on a tailgate, and at some point her hands stopped working properly and she put them under her arms and hoped he had not noticed.
He had noticed. He notices everything and always has, and the only new thing about him is what he does with it.
"Give me your hands."
"I'm fine."
"Amber."
"If this is a —"
"It's not a thing. Your lips have gone." He put his bottle down on the metal. "Give me your hands or go home, those are the two."
She thought about it for four seconds, which was three seconds longer than she needed and which she took on purpose, because she wanted to know what she was doing before she did it.
Then she gave him her hands.
He took them both, and turned them over, and made a noise about how cold they were, and then he opened his coat and put them flat against his chest and closed the coat over her wrists and held them there.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
She could feel his heart going. Not fast — steady, and hard, the way a big man's does.
She could feel the flannel and the heat coming up through it and the shape of his breathing, and she sat on the tailgate of her own truck with both hands inside her husband's coat in the last of the light and did not take them back.
It was not the spare room, and she would come back to that. In Logan County it had come up out of the dark and taken them both, and neither of them had decided anything.
This she had decided. She had done it in daylight, with her whole head, on purpose, and she had counted to four first.
"There," he said, after a minute. "That's better."
"Don't be smug."
"I'm not smug. I'm freezing. You're using me as a stove."
"That's what you're for."
He laughed, once, and she felt it go through his chest and into her palms, and something in her that had been braced since October let go about an inch.
"Amber," he said.
"Mm."
"About Kentucky."
She went still.
"I'm going to say one sentence about it and then I'm going to shut up forever, and you can hit me."
"Say it."
"I've thought about it every day," Virgil said. "Every day, and not the way you think, or not only. Mostly I think about the part after. You sat on the edge of that bed with your back to me and said well, that's new, and I have never in my life wanted so badly to take a thing back."
"You wouldn't take it back."
"No," he said. "That's why I only get the one sentence."
She looked down at the coat, at her own wrists disappearing into it.
"I was so angry," she said.
"I know."
"Not at the no. At being read." Her voice came out lower than she meant.
"You were right about all of it. That's the part I couldn't stand in the truck going home.
You knew what Tuesday would have looked like better than I did and I have spent fifteen years being the one who knows what things will look like. "
"Yeah, well." He shifted his grip a little. "I've had a lot of time to think and nothing else to do with it."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed. "It's the true thing though. I'm not smarter than I was. I've just got nobody left to hand things to."
The light went off the top of the field and the cold came up out of the ground the way it does, and she left her hands where they were.
She stayed until it was properly dark, which she had not intended.
They talked about small things. The bales.
His sister's knee. Whether the barn roof would go another winter.
She told him about Odell hugging her and he laughed so hard he had to put his head back, because he has known Odell Pate for twenty years and had once seen him decline to shake hands with a governor.
At one point she said, "Sixteen people," out of nowhere.
He knew exactly what she meant. He said, "Nineteen degrees," and then, after a second, "your mother wouldn't look at me."
"She was looking at me."
"She was not looking at either one of us," he said. "She was looking at the back wall like it owed her money."
"She kept every review," Amber said.
He turned his head. "What?"
"Every one. Seventeen years. In a shoebox in the back bedroom. There's a thing from Ireland."
He looked at her for a long moment in the dark.
"I'd like to see that," he said. And then, immediately: "That's not — I'm not asking. Forget it."
"No," she said. "That was all right."
At about eight she got down off the tailgate.
The gravel drive at the farm had washed out on the bend in February and he had not had it fixed, which she noticed on the way in.
He noticed her notice it.
"Hang on," he said, and went and got the good flashlight out of the shed, and then he walked the whole hundred and forty feet of that drive in front of her truck, in the cold, waving her over to the left where the base was still good, all the way down to the road.
She rolled the window down at the bottom.
"Get in the ditch and you'd have sat there till Tuesday," he said.
"I know how to drive this driveway."
"I know you do."
He stood there with the flashlight pointed at the ground between them.
"Amber," he said.
"Yeah."
"I'm not going to call you."
She looked at him.
"That's not a — " He shook his head at himself.
"That came out like a threat. I mean I'm not going to.
I've got a hundred things I want to say to you and I'm going to keep every one of them, because every single time I've opened my mouth at you since October it has cost you something.
" He clicked the flashlight off. "So you'll have to come to me.
That's an awful thing to put on you and I know it and I've thought about it for a month and it's still the right answer. "
"Okay," Amber said.
"Okay."
"Virgil."
"Yeah."
"Get the drive fixed. You're going to break an ankle out here."
"I'll call somebody," he said.
She drove home.
She got all the way to Marlin Avenue, and put the truck in the drive, and sat there in the dark for a minute with the engine off and her hands still on the wheel.
Nothing had been fixed. Nothing had been settled and nothing had been promised and she did not know one single thing at eight forty that night that she had not known at four in the afternoon.
But she had sat on a tailgate for four hours and said the worst true thing she had and nobody had tried to take it off her.
And somewhere on the way home she had stopped composing the version of the evening she was going to tell Bess.
She sat in the truck in the dark on Marlin Avenue and let that land, and it landed hard, because it meant she was not building a case anymore.
She was just a woman who had spent an afternoon with her husband.