Page 82 of Denied
“I’m only saying.” Chase pulled out of the lot. “You’ll want a hand. With the roof. I’ve got Saturdays.”
They drove out the county road with the works going by on the left and the corridor going by on the right, scrub, nothing, eleven miles of nothing worth three times what was under Clay, and past the end of it the Hardwick fence started, and Chase turned in at a gate that had a chain on it and no lock, and drove up a track with grass in the middle of it to a house with a tarp where the roof should be and a windmill going, and stopped, and left the engine running.
Brody got out.
He stood in the yard. He stood in it with his hat on and his hands at his sides and looked at a house with no roof, and pens gone to rust, and a tank with water in it, and a windmill turning, and two sections of ground running off south to a fence line, and past the fence line a strip of scrub, and past the scrub his father’s north fence, with a well on it he’d tapped every day for five months, and past that, a long way off, the top of a barn.
Chase sat in the truck with the engine going and didn’t get out. He’d walked over the marks in the dust with his hat off and said there, and this was the same thing, and Brody knew it, and let him wait.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“He won’t take me back.”
“That’s not yours to decide.”
“Pearl—”
“It’s not yours, honey. It’s his. You decided one thing for that boy already, two weeks ago at a door, and look how that went.” Pearl put the coffee down in front of her and didn’t move off. “You decided he couldn’t take you. You decided he’d be better with you gone. You decided what he could stand and what he couldn’t, all on your own, at a door, and you never once asked him, and now you’re sitting at my counter on a Tuesday deciding the next thing for him too. He won’t take me back. How do you know. Did you ask him.”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know. And it’s not yours.” Pearl picked up the pot. “Drink that. You’ve got a look on you like a girl who hasn’t slept since that hallway in Midland, and I’m not having it in my place.”
She drank it. It didn’t help. She went home and cooked for eleven, because Addi counted as two, and stood at the stove with her hair up and her chin level and a man at the far end of the table who’d bought the Hardwick place on Friday, two sections and a house with no roof on the far side of the corridor from his father’s fence, and hadn’t set foot on it since. Everybody knew it. Nobody said it. Max cried at nine, Lara went up, and the house went to bed around her.
He was still at the top of the stairs on Tuesday with his bag under the bed, and Remi said it was because there was a tarp where the roof should be, and Chase said it was because there wasn’t a stove, and the old man said nothing, and looked at his second son over the potatoes with a face she couldn’t read, and Sunny knew why he hadn’t moved, and it wasn’t the roof.
He was waiting for her to go first.
Saturday, Addi came into the guest room at seven at night without knocking, with a pair of boots in her hand that weren’t hers.
“Put these on.”
“Those are Remi’s.”
“Remi’s got four pairs and she’s already at Harvey’s in the good ones, and yours are the ones you walk to a stove in.” Addi put them on the bed. “There’s a band on. Chase dragged him out an hour ago, and I’ve never liked Chase more. So he’s at the rail with his brothers not drinking, and you’re in a guest room in a T-shirt with your hair up, deciding things.”
“Addi.”
“I told you Wednesday. Being decent is just being scared and calling it something nicer. I’ve done a year of it and I’m still doing it, and I’m not the one being handed a pair of boots tonight.” She looked at Sunny. “You told a man you didn’t love him. In a voice he trusts. I know that now. Lara told me. And I’ve sat on it for a week and I’m done sitting. You did that to him. Fine. It’s done. But you don’t get to also decide he won’t forgive it. That’s two things, and the second one’s his, and you’re keeping it from him the way you kept the first.”
Sunny sat on the bed with the boots beside her.
“He’ll never take me back.”
“Then he’ll say so. To your face. In front of the county, at a rail, on a Saturday, and it’ll be the worst night of your life and you’ll drive to Indiana on Tuesday knowing.” Addi stood up. “Or he won’t say so. Either way you’ll know, and right now you don’t, you’ve just decided, and I’ve had enough of women deciding in this house to last me. Boots. Hair down. I’ll drive you, I’ve got the rental, the A/C’s broke but it’s November.”
Sunny looked at the closet.
“Wait,” she said.
She got up. She opened the closet and reached up to the shelf and took down the third box, the taped one, and stood there with it in her arms, and Addi looked at it, and didn’t ask, which was the second time in Sunny’s life she’d seen Addi Baxter not ask.
“That’s coming,” Sunny said.
“Then it’s coming,” Addi said, and picked up the boots.
The rental had no air and no heat either, and Addi drove it the way she’d have driven in Boston, which was at people, and Sunny sat with the box on her knees and Remi’s boots on and her hair down and watched the county road come at her in the headlights.
