Page 63 of Denied

“Earl.”

“You’re not going in there, son. You go in there, you’re a man in a hat with a temper standing over a man in a jacket who’s done nothing yet but ask for pie, and he’s got a phone in his pocket the same as you have. Go home.” Earl pushed the staples across. “Remi went past here twenty minutes ago doing sixty. I’d say she’s ahead of you.”

He didn’t go to Pearl’s.

He sat in the truck outside Earl’s for about a minute with his hands on the wheel and thought about Pearl’s, and the front window, and a man in a jacket at the counter with a coffee he’d ordered from a woman who’d looked him in the face and lied for a girl she’d known four months. Then he thought about Sunny on a county road in July with a tire iron in her hand and her whole body shaking, and he started the truck, and he drove home, and he did it under the limit the whole way because if he didn’t he’d have ended up in town.

Remi’s truck was in the yard. Remi was on the porch steps. Sunny was on the porch steps beside her with her hands between her knees, and she looked up when his truck came around the barn, and her face didn’t do anything at all, and he knew, from the yard, that she already knew.

Remi stood up.

“I told her,” she said, coming down the steps. “Pearl called me. I got here at eight-thirty and told her at the sink. She put the plate down and she’s been sitting there since.” Remi stopped in front of him. “Don’t be kind to her. She hates it. I’ve had an hour of it and I’m telling you, she’ll take anything from you but kind.”

“Where’s Lara?”

“Elena came and got her. She’s not to be upset, she’d have been upset, so she’s at Elena’s with the kids. Dad’s at the co-op. I’m going to find Dean.” She got in her truck. She looked at him out the window. “It’s nine in the morning, Brody. Nobody’s home. Sit on the step with her in daylight and let the county drive past and look, and if she tells you, don’t do that thing with your face.”

“What thing?”

“The one you’re doing now,” Remi said, and drove off.

He sat down on the step. Not close. A foot of daylight between them, and the yard in front of them with the church tables still stacked against the barn from Saturday, and a windmill going, and nothing else.

“Sunny Tyler,” he said.

“That’s my name.”

“It’s your name. He asked for it at Pearl’s. By name. At eight in the morning, in a rental car, with a plate Tate Malone’s already run.” He looked at the barn. “You told me nobody.”

She didn’t say anything.

“In the dark. The night before Odessa. I asked you once, the only way I know how to ask a thing, and you said nobody, nothing, go to Odessa, and you said it in the voice.” He stopped. He hadn’t meant to say the next thing, and it was out before he’d decided. “You said nobody. In that voice. I’d have believed that voice if it told me the sun came up in the west, Sunny, and you knew that, and you used it.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I used it.” She looked at her hands. “You want the story or you want to be angry first. I’ll wait for either. I’ve had an hour.”

He sat there. A truck went by on the county road, slow, and didn’t stop, and he watched it go.

“The story,” he said.

So she told him. On the step, in daylight, with her hands between her knees and her face doing nothing and her voice flat, the fast voice, the Pearl voice, because it was the only one she had that would get through it, and he sat a foot off and let her use it.

“His name’s Tom Matthews. He runs a hospitality company. Suites, sponsors, the tents at the track where men in loafers drink for free, that’s his. I met him in March at a sponsor dinner and he was funny and he asked me to dinner and I went. Two dates. Two. He was fine on both of them. He was polite. He paid, he didn’t push, he asked about my parents and I told him they were dead and he said the right thing.” She looked at the yard. “I didn’t want a third one. I didn’t have a reason. I’ve got a face for that, you’ve seen it. I said I was busy with the season and he said of course, and I thought that’d be the end of it. It wasn’t the end of it.”

“What’d he do?”

“Nothing. That’s the thing you have to understand, Brody, that’s the thing nobody understands. He didn’t do anything. Flowers came to the office. Then flowers came to the house, which I’d never given him. Then he was in the coffee shop I go to, once, and it’s a coffee shop, people go to it. Then he was in it every day. Then there was a gray sedan outside my house at night, three nights out of five, with a man in it reading his phone, and when I went out to it he drove off. Six weeks. He called. Warm, reasonable, just wanted to talk. I told him to stop calling. He said of course, and called again.” She stopped. “The police said what police say. Has he threatened you. Has he touched you. Has he said one thing to you that a jury would call a threat. And he hadn’t. He’s too smart for it. He’s never once said a thing I could put on paper. He sends flowers.”

“So what made you run? If it was flowers?”

“It wasn’t the flowers.” She turned her head. “I typed his name in a search bar.” She said it to the yard. “The fourth week. I don’t know why it took me four weeks, I do it for a living. And there was a woman in Ohio. Two years ago. Same thing. Flowers, coffee shop, a car outside. She got an order against him and he never broke it, not once, because he’s too smart for that too, and she moved to Seattle. I found her and called her. She told me he doesn’t hit and he doesn’t threaten and he never does one thing you can take to a judge, he just doesn’t stop, and one day you look up and it’s been two years and you don’t go anywhere alone. She told me to move, and not tell anybody where.” Sunny looked at her hands. “So Lauren said Texas, and I put a bag in a car.”

The windmill turned. He sat there with a foot of daylight between them, looking at the barn, not saying anything for a long time, because everything he had to say had a truck in it, a drive to the motel, a man in a jacket, and none of that was any use to her on a step.

“Why nobody,” he said. “Why not say it? In the dark. I’d have taken a man and nothing else. I said so.”