Page 57 of Desired

He took that. He stood in her yard and took it, and he didn't reach for charm and he didn't reach for the door, and when he answered her his voice had dropped all its polish somewhere in the grass.

"You're wrong about that one thing." No heat in it. "I'll grant you the embarrassed. It's new, and it fits like another man's boots. But yesterday morning I stood in my own kitchen and watched my son's eyes fill up in front of his whole family. Thirty-one years, and I never saw that boy cry once, not at funerals, and I looked at it and understood I'd done it. Me. To my own boy, and to a woman who never did this family one thing but good." He held her eyes the whole way through it, and there was nothing in his face now but an old man's plain grief. "I love my children. I've been careless with everything else my whole life, but not that, never that, and this week I found out I'd been careless with that too. So yes. I'm sorry, Lauren. It won't sound right, I've had no practice. But it's real, and it's why I'm standing in your yard instead of sending paper."

He put the hat back on and squared it, and she thought that was the end, and then he stopped, half turned to the truck, and looked back at her.

"I've got four sons. Three of them I can predict to the dollar. The fourth one stood in my kitchen six weeks ago and turned me down flat over a woman he'd never laid eyes on, and I was fool enough to think that was the least interesting thing about him." He opened the truck door. "Whatever you decide about him, that's yours and his. But you ought to know you're the only thing anybody ever put in front of that boy that made him refuse me. I'd have paid a great deal to learn what he was made of some cheaper way."

He gave her a nod then, unhurried, the plain country kind his sons had inherited and spent freer than he ever had.

"Goodbye, Lauren. Thank you for hearing an old man out. Whatever you decide, about the land or the boy or the whole sorry lot of us, this county's better with you in it."

He walked back to the truck where Owen stood waiting, and got in, and the truck went out over the cattle guard, and the yard was quiet, and Lauren stood in her doorway in the cold for a long time after the dust settled, and then she went inside and did not pick up the tape gun.

The versions were piling up on her table like the boxes. Owen's. His father's. And underneath all of them, unwrapped once and never rewrapped, the one she'd been running from for two days: six weeks of a man showing up with the right tool before she knew to ask, against orders, for free, for nothing, for her.

But why the secret, then. That was the piece that wouldn't lie flat no matter which version she set it next to. If the no was real, if it was real from the very first morning at the gate, then why did he never tell me. Six weeks of mornings and suppers and dark quiet rooms, and he never once said it, and Owen couldn't answer that, and his father couldn't answer that, and there was exactly one man in the county holding that piece.

Mason came down the road at four the next afternoon, in the last of the light, with his heart going like he was seventeen. Her truck was in the yard. The boxes showed through the front window, stacked three high, and the porch was swept, and the gate he'd hung in November stood plumb at the end of the drive, and he parked short of the house and walked the last of it, because a man ought to arrive at this particular door on his own feet.

She opened before he knocked. She'd watched him come, then. She stood in the doorway in her grandfather's flannel with her arms crossed and her hair tied back, and her eyes were red-rimmed and dry, and her face was a face that had already done two days' work by four in the afternoon.

"You're the third Royston in this yard since yesterday," she said.

"Third?" He stopped at the bottom of the steps, her step, the one he'd fixed in the dark, and ran the count, and came up short, and she watched him run it. Owen he'd figured, the somewhere to be. "Who else came out⁠—"

"Your father."

It went through him like a dropped gate. His father, in this yard, hat in hand or not in hand, saying God knew what, and nothing about it mentioned at the house, and Mason stood there and absorbed the fact that his family had run a relay behind his back, one truck at a time, and that his mother had known exactly what she was doing when she told him to wait a day.

"I didn't know," he said. "Either of them. I need you to know that. And I'm not going to ask what he said."

"No, you're not." She leaned her shoulder into the doorframe, which wasn't an invitation, but wasn't the door shutting either. "Everybody keeps handing me versions, Mason. I've got a collection going. Your brother's. Your father's. There's one left." Her chin came up, the old way, the first-day way. "So go on. Hand me yours. Say it from there."

"All right." He took his hat off, and held it, and stood at the bottom of her steps in the cold.

"I was stupid, Lauren."

She didn't move.

"I want to walk you through the whole shape of the stupid, because you asked me a question on this porch Monday night, you asked me how a no nobody heard was any different from a lie, and I didn't have the answer then and I've done nothing since but dig for it. So here it is. At the start I didn't tell you because it was a mess, and I've spent my whole life being the man who doesn't make messes. I let my father run his machine and I kept my mouth shut and I called that being easy to live with. That's the first floor of the stupid. But then." He had to stop and get his breath under him. "Then I fell in love with you."

"Mason—"

"No. Let me get it out, because you deserve the whole of it, and I've never once said any of this out loud to the one person who was owed it first." His voice was rough and he let it be rough. "I fell in love with you somewhere between a gate and a well pump, and it kept getting bigger every day, and the bigger it got, the more that truth I was sitting on turned into a loaded gun. Because telling you meant you might do the exact math you ended up doing anyway. Look at me and see the play instead of the man. And I could not stand it. I loved you so much I couldn't afford the one thing you actually needed from me, and if you want to know what a fucking idiot sounds like at full stretch, that's it, that's the sentence. I hid the truth to keep you, and the hiding is what lost you. I did the thing I was scared of with my own two hands."

The light was going fast now, the sky doing its enormous indifferent thing behind the windmill, and she stood in her doorway with her arms crossed and her eyes bright and terrible, and she didn't stop him, so he didn't stop.

"And I need you to hear what this week has been, not so you'll feel sorry for me, you shouldn't, but because it's evidence, and you like evidence. My life without you is nothing, Lauren. I went back to it and it's nothing. It's a house I built with no one in it and work I do with nobody to tell about it and a county full of people I can charm and not one soul in it I want. Thirty-one years I had it easy, and I never knew the whole time I was poor. You're it. You're everything. There's no version of my life on the far side of this that adds up to anything, there's just the years in it, and I'll live them if I have to, but I wasn't going to live them without having stood on this spot and said so."

"Don't." Her voice cracked on it. Her arms had come uncrossed. "Don't you say things like that unless⁠—"

"I love you." He said it up into her interruption, plain, loud enough for the yard and the gate and the whole listening dark to hear it. "I love you. First time I've ever said it to a woman in my life, and I'm saying it standing in your yard in December because I was too much of a coward to say it in your bed in November, and I'll regret the order of that till I die. And I'm not done. I want to marry you. Not today, not this year if this year's wrong, I'm not asking you for one thing today, but you ought to know the full size of what you're deciding about. I want to grow old with you. I want kids with you if you want them, whenever you want them, and none if you don't. I want to watch you build whatever you're going to build out here, the beds behind the house, a shop in town, there's a storefront two doors down from Pearl's been standing soaped-over and empty like it's been waiting for somebody, and I'd carry buckets in that shop till my back gives out. And if what you want is Denver," his voice held, he made it hold, "then I want Denver. I don't know what a man like me does in Denver. Parking garages, maybe. It doesn't matter. Home quit being a place for me about six weeks ago, Lauren. Home's wherever you're standing. It took losing you to learn that, which is one more thing on the bill, and I'm not asking you to answer any of it tonight. I just needed it said where you could hear it."

The yard was silent. Somewhere off east a coyote started up and thought better of it. Lauren stood in her doorway with both hands over her mouth now, and her eyes were streaming, she was letting them, and Mason stood at the bottom of her steps with his hat in his hands and nothing left anywhere in him, turned all the way out, done.

"That's all of it," he said, quieter. "There's no more speech. I'll be at my place. Tonight, tomorrow, next year. However long it takes, and if the answer's no, then I'll be the neighbor who minds your fence line from his own side of it for the rest of my life, and you'll never hear about any of this again. But you'd be leaving loved, this time. Whatever you decide, you decide it knowing that. That's the only thing I came to change."

He put his hat on. He made it two steps back toward the truck.