Chapter 14 #2
“I’d sent the pilot home that morning,” he said.
“He couldn’t have the plane ready till seven.
There was a flight out of DFW at five-forty.
I knew about it. I didn’t take it. I told myself my plane would be just as fast. It wasn’t.
I knew it wasn’t.” He stopped. “I sat at Love Field four hours. I texted Manny at twenty to four. He wrote back bad. I had your number in my hand the whole time, and I didn’t call you. ”
His voice was very steady. He had practiced this, she thought. He had said it to himself enough times that he could say it without breaking.
“I didn’t call because I didn’t want to hear you ask me why,” he said. “That’s what I was doing in the lounge at Love Field, while you were on the highway. I was hiding from my wife’s voice.”
Down the road, the cotton gin was running. The colts were eating hay.
“And I didn’t leave that meeting,” Cole said, “because leaving meant standing up in front of that whole room and saying my wife was right and I was wrong. That the clinic didn’t have it.
That I’d heard her say so in March and hadn’t listened.
I didn’t want to look like a man who’d been wrong about his own wife.
” He took his hat off. “So I sat there, and let it cost you.”
He turned the hat once in his hands.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “It’s the worst one. I almost didn’t tell you.”
Rae waited.
“In April,” he said, “in the truck in the yard, I told her about my mother. The branding, and the horse going down on her, and the two hours in the back seat holding her hand while Dad drove the long way.” He looked at the ground.
“I never told you that. Six years, and I never once told you. I told a woman I’d known three months, on the phone, with the engine off, while you were inside setting the table. ”
Rae stood very still at the corner of the barn.
Sharon had told her that story on a bench at Kincaid’s, a month ago, as a secret she had kept for forty years. Rae had carried it home like something breakable. And Cole had handed it to Blair Hensley in April, on an ordinary weeknight, through a phone.
She had thought nothing he could tell her would be worse than the four hours. This was worse. It was not about what had happened to his mother. It was about who he had decided was the one to hear it.
“That’s all of it,” Cole said. “There’s nothing under it.”
“I’m not saying it so you’ll stay,” he said. “You’re not staying. You’re here. I hauled your colts.” He put his hat back on. “I’m saying it because you should have all of it. You gave me all of yours. It’s only right.”
He stepped back from the trailer, one step, and then another.
“That’s all,” he said. “I’m going now.”
He did not wait for her to answer. He did not ask her for anything. He walked around the front of the big ranch truck and got in. He started it, and pulled the empty stock trailer out of her yard and down the dirt road past the cotton gin. She stood at the corner of the barn and watched it go.
He did not look back. She was sure of it. She watched the whole way to the county road, and the truck never slowed.
* * *
She unpacked in the afternoon.
She did not have much to unpack. She put her clothes in the closet.
She hung her father’s saddle on a rack in the barn.
She put the box fan in the bedroom window, though it was November and she did not need it.
She liked the sound. She put Dub’s hoof knife on the kitchen windowsill, where she could see it when she washed dishes.
The last things in the last box were from the drawer of the bedside table in the cook’s room.
The divorce papers, still unsigned, in their envelope. And the ring.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the empty little bedroom and held them, one in each hand. The papers in her right, where she could barely feel them. The ring in her left.
She had brought them both. She had not left either one behind.
She put them in the drawer of the new bedside table, together, the way they had been. She shut the drawer.
* * *
It got dark early. She made a grilled cheese on the old stove and ate it standing at the sink, looking out at the barn. She could see the shapes of the colts in the pen, dark against the lighter dark. Hondo was grumbling for his supper hay. She would go out and give it to him in a minute.
The house was quiet. There was no Clem at the table. There was no one arguing about the Rangers, no one humming Marty Robbins, no one up at all hours with the coffee on. There was no porch light on a hill three hundred yards away.
She had wanted this. She still wanted it. It was only quiet.
There was a knock at the door.
It was not Cole. She would have known his knock. This one was two easy raps, friendly, like somebody who expected to be let in.
She opened it. Travis Kincaid was standing on her new porch with a covered dish in one hand and a six-pack of Shiner in the other. One of his border collies stood at his heel.
“Housewarming,” he said. “Enchiladas. I didn’t make them, the lady at the café did. I’m not a fool.” He held up the dish. “Figured you wouldn’t have groceries yet.”
“I made a grilled cheese.”
“That’s not supper. That’s a snack.” He did not come in. He stood on the porch with the dish and the beer and waited. “Can I come in, Rae? Just for supper. I won’t stay late.”
She stood in the doorway.
Behind her was the quiet little house, and the one bedroom, and the drawer with the papers and the ring. In front of her was the kindest man she knew, with enchiladas, asking.
He was asking something else too. She could see it in his face. He was not pushing. He would never push. But she had left the Ashby place today, and he knew it, and the whole county would know it by morning. He had driven over with supper, the first night, to ask if the door was open.
She stood there with her hand on the frame and did not know the answer.