Chapter 15 #2
“It went over my house,” Rae said.
Russ nodded. He did not ask her why she was there. He looked up at the house, and then back at her, and something went across his face that she had never seen there before.
“He’s in the kitchen,” he said. “Been in there since five. Hasn’t eaten anything.”
He started toward the henhouse. Then he stopped, with his back to her.
“I signed the lease for that pad,” he said, to the hens. “Back in October. I’d like you to know that.” He shifted the bucket to his other hand. “I don’t know why I’d like you to know it. But I would.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Rae said.
He went on to the henhouse without turning around.
She walked up the porch steps.
The porch light was on. It was nine o’clock in the morning and full daylight, and the porch light was on.
She knocked on her own door.
She heard his boots in the house. They were not fast this time. They were slow, as if he did not want to hope. The door opened.
He was in his work clothes, a flannel shirt and his old jeans. He had a coffee cup in his hand. There was a new scrape on his jaw, and he was thinner than she had ever seen him. He looked at her standing on the porch, and he did not say anything at all.
“I’m not asking to come in,” Rae said. “I’m coming in.”
She walked past him into the house.
* * *
The kitchen was the same. The table for sixteen, the lemon smell, the clock ticking somewhere.
His reading glasses were on the table next to a stack of papers from the county.
She went and stood at the end of the long table with her back to the window.
He shut the door and stood inside it, with the coffee cup, and waited.
“I lived by myself for three weeks,” she said.
“I wanted you to know that. I didn’t come back because I couldn’t make it on my own.
I made it fine. I could make it forty years.
” She looked at him. “I want to be very clear about that. I could have a whole life without you, and I know it now, and it would be a good life.”
“I believe you,” he said. His voice was rough.
“So this isn’t me giving up. This is me choosing.” She put her left hand flat on the oak, the way she had in September. It was not shaking this time. “And if I’m choosing, I’m going to say how it’s going to be. Not as a punishment. As the shape of it.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t live in this house the way I did,” she said.
“I’m not your mother. I’m not going to get smaller in it.
My work is mine, under my own name, and I get paid for it.
I’m not going to run the Ashby horses for nothing anymore.
If the ranch wants me, it pays me like it’d pay anybody.
” She took a breath. “You don’t decide things for me.
You don’t decide things for us. You ask.
And when it’s you and me in a room, it’s only you and me.
Nobody else’s voice in it. Not your daddy’s. Not the county’s. Not anybody’s.”
He had not moved from the door. He was holding the coffee cup so hard his knuckles were white.
“That’s what I want,” she said. “Now you tell me what you want. And don’t tell me whatever you want, Rae. I don’t want a man who wants whatever I want. I had enough of that from you on the other side of it.”
He looked at her. Then he set the coffee cup down on the counter, very carefully, like it was full of something that could spill.
“I want you to call me in meetings,” he said.
She had not expected that. She stared at him.
“Every time,” he said. “Anything. A horse, a flat tire, you saw a hawk. I want to be the first person you call, and I want to pick up.” He came a step closer.
“I want to run cattle again someday. Not the whole ranch. Not for Dad. Something that’s mine, that I built, where I say how it goes.
I don’t know what that looks like yet. I want you to tell me when my ideas are stupid.
” Another step. “I want to fight with you. Out loud. I don’t want you to go quiet on me and have me not notice for a year.
I want you to yell at me across this kitchen if you have to. ”
Another step. He was halfway down the table.
“And I want to take you dancing at the VFW every Friday,” he said. “Even though the band’s too loud, and the beer’s bad, and it’s the same people every week. Because I saw you dance with Clem in August from the parking lot, and I sat in the truck and couldn’t breathe.”
“You were there?”
“I was there. I drove by. I sat in the parking lot with the lights off.” He stopped in front of her. “That’s what I want. That’s all of it.”
She looked up at him. He was close enough now that she could smell him. Coffee and cold air and the soap he used. Hay. His eyes were wet.
She took the ring out of her coat pocket.
She had not planned to. It had been in her pocket all morning, and in the drawer for three weeks before that. It had been in her shirt pocket under a windmill in June with her hand on fire. She held it out to him on her open right palm, the bad hand, the one with the scar.
“It won’t go on this one anymore,” she said. “The knuckle’s too thick. The surgeon says it might never.”
Cole looked at the ring in her hand. He picked it up.
Then he took her left hand in his, gently, and slid the ring onto her left ring finger. It went on easy, all the way down.
She looked at it there. It was a plain gold band on the wrong hand, and it fit.
“Okay,” she said. Her voice was barely there. “Okay.”
He kissed her.
* * *
It was not careful.
She had thought, if it ever happened, it would be careful.
Six months of careful, of bolts and notes and fence rails.
It was not. He put both hands on her face and kissed her like a man who had been holding his breath since June.
She kissed him back the same way. She got both fists in the front of his flannel shirt, the good hand and the bad one, and hung on.
It did not matter that the bad one could not grip. It held on anyway.
He tasted like coffee. His jaw was rough against her face. She had known it would be, and she had forgotten how it felt, and she remembered all at once.
“Rae,” he said against her mouth.
“Not here,” she said. “Not in the kitchen. Your mother has a key.”
He laughed, a short shaky laugh against her cheek. Then he took her hand and pulled her down the hall and up the stairs, and she went.
The bedroom was the same too. The big bed with the quilt, the brass lamp on his side, the window that looked down the hill at the bunkhouse. It was full of pale winter light. He stopped just inside the door and turned around to her. For a moment neither of them moved.
“Are you sure,” he said.
“Ask me again and I’ll leave.”
He did not ask again.
He undressed her slowly. She had not expected that either.
He unbuttoned her coat and slid it off her shoulders.
He unbuttoned her shirt, one button at a time, with his big rough hands shaking a little.
She let him, the way she had learned to stand quiet for a colt.
When her shirt was open he stopped and looked at her.
He looked at her as he must have from the parking lot of the VFW.
As he had not looked at her in a year or more.
“God,” he said quietly. “I forgot. How did I forget.”
“You didn’t forget,” she said. “You stopped looking.”
“I’m looking now.”
He was. He looked at all of her. He took her right hand, the bad one, and lifted it and turned it over in the light. He looked at the scar running pink up the back of it, past the wrist, where the surgeon had opened it. At the curled fingers.
He kissed the back of her hand, where the snake had struck. Very softly, right on the two small white marks.
Then he kissed the scar where it ran across her wrist, and up the inside of her forearm, slowly, all the way to the crook of her elbow.
His mouth was warm. She could feel it on every inch except the two fingertips.
She stood in the winter light with her shirt open and her husband kissing the whole length of the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She could not breathe.
“Cole,” she said.
He looked up.
“Come here,” she said, and pulled his shirt over his head.
* * *
They went down onto the bed together in a tangle of flannel and denim.
She had forgotten how big he was. How warm.
How his weight settled over her and made her feel held down and safe at the same time.
His skin was hot everywhere she touched it.
She ran her good hand down his back and felt the muscles there, new, from two months on the south crew.
He was harder than he had been. Leaner. She could count his ribs.
“You’re too thin,” she said.
“I’ve been eating standing up.”
“Well, stop it.”
He laughed into her neck. Then he stopped laughing, because she had got her hand on the button of his jeans.
It was clumsy. She could not work a button with her right hand, and her left kept shaking.
He had to help her, and then she had to help him with her boots, and there was a moment when they were both half undressed and tangled up and one of her boots would not come off.
He was pulling on it and she was laughing so hard she could not help.
When it finally came loose he nearly fell off the bed backward, and she laughed until she could not breathe.
He lay there on his back with the boot in his hand, looking at her laugh, with his whole face gone soft.
Then he dropped the boot and came back to her. There was nothing funny anymore.