Page 91 of The Lonely Road

mason

We pull out of Ignacio onto the road north, and the mesa country opens up around us the way it did yesterday, going the other direction.

I watch it from the passenger window and try to locate the version of myself that knows what he’s doing.

He’s not here this morning.

What’s here is a man who held a woman in the dark and didn’t sleep, and who woke up in her grandmother’s bed in the early morning and lay still for as long as he could manage, listening to her breathe, before she got up.

Then he apologized for not being enough—for not being the man who could have her, be with her.

She said the words to me—and I now know her well enough to know that it took courage for her to do that.

When I rejected her—because I did—she didn’t pout, didn’t tell me I’m full of shit, even though that is true.

No—she just continued. Made love with me. Let me hold her like a drowning man does to a life raft.

She’s not punishing me with the no-pressure. She genuinely doesn’t operate in ultimatums. Her confession was hers, and what I do with it, according to her, is my business.

She told me her truth, and I replied with a lie.

Which is why this is unbearable.

She deserves someone who says it back.

She deserves it the way Clara Whitman deserves to keep her water—not because she’s asked for it, not because she’s fought for it, but because it’s hers. Because it has always been hers. Because taking it would be damaging something real, good, and irreplaceable.

I look out the window at the San Juan Basin.

We’re approaching the pull-off outside Durango.

She slows but doesn’t pull over—she doesn’t on the way back.

“You, okay?” I ask her because I’m a man on his knees begging for surcease, pleading for respite from the agony inside of me for the pain I put her through.

Talk about being selfish!

“Maybe.” And then, after a pause, in the careful voice she uses when she’s deciding to give me something, she adds, “But ask me in an hour, I’ll give you a different answer.”

Again with the honesty. The brutal candor.

My mendacity is in stark contrast to it.

Her phone rings, and she answers using the Bluetooth in the Wrangler.

“Hello, this is Taya.”

“Taya, it’s Hugh.”

Pause.

“Sheriff Dillon, how can I help you?”

“I’m so sorry, Taya, but there’s been a break-in at your office.”

I freeze—completely.

“What?” she almost shouts.