Page 46 of Devoured

She knew the ceiling was there. He'd named it himself, that morning, over cold coffee, no marriage, no more kids, not offering forever. She knew it the way you know a thing in daylight that you can't quite feel in the dark.

She'd think about the ceiling tomorrow.

Tonight she sat on the floor in her dress and let herself, for the first time in longer than she could remember, be purely and recklessly happy.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A man could get a lot of work done on a ranch when he was trying not to think about one specific thing, and Dean got more done that Sunday than he had in a month.

He was up before the light, the way he always was, except that this morning there was no reason to be, Sunday was the one day the work eased off, the day a smart man slept the extra hour his body had been begging for all week. Dean lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling for about ninety seconds and then gave it up as a bad job and got up, because there was no staying in that bed with what was waiting at the end of the day, and went out into the gray and found things to do with his hands.

He moved hay he didn't need to move yet. He walked the south fence and found two strands wanted tightening and tightened them, slow, taking his time over a job that should have taken ten minutes. He cleaned tack that was already clean. He stood in the round corral with the green colt as the sun came up over the basin and worked it in slow circles, and the colt was easy this morning, soft and willing, and gave him nothing to fight, which was a shame, because a fight would have eaten the hours faster.

The whole day had a charge running under it. He felt it the way you feel weather in a bad knee, the low constant pressure of the thing coming, and there was not enough work on God's earth to bleed it off. He'd catch himself stopped, mid-job, looking at nothing, at the long flat run of the land toward town, toward the one direction that mattered today, and have to make himself start moving again. He was thirty-three years old and he was wandering his own ranch on a Sunday like a colt the night before a storm, and he knew exactly why, and there was not one thing he could do about it but wait out the sun.

Helen made her move at three.

He came in through the mudroom for water and found her in the kitchen with the kids' overnight bags already packed and lined up by the door, both of them, Levi's with the dinosaur he wouldn't sleep without already zipped in so the head stuck out the top.

"I'm taking them to mine tonight," Helen said, not looking up from the sandwich she was cutting. "In town. Marge has that granddaughter visiting, the one Giana likes, and there's a thing at the church hall, a movie for the kids, popcorn, the whole business." She set the knife down. "I'll bring them back after lunch tomorrow. No sense dragging them home late."

"It's Sunday."

"I'm aware what day it is, Dean."

"The church-hall thing." He leaned on the counter. "When'd that get planned?"

"This afternoon," said Helen, with the serene face of a woman who had planned exactly nothing and would die before she admitted it, "when I decided on it." She picked the knife back up. "You don't want them here tonight. You've been no use to anybody all day, you've checked that fence line twice and you keep looking at the road. I've run this house since your mother's time. I know what a man looks like when he's got somewhere to be." She cut the sandwich corner to corner, precise. "So go be there. And eat something before you go, you've had coffee and nothing since five and I'm not patching you back together."

Dean looked at her. Fifteen years she'd kept this house, come to it in his mother's time, when Kelly-Anne still ran the place and still had her health, and stayed on through all of it after: through the long slow losing of her, through the worst night four years back, through every gray day since. She'd fed his children when he couldn't see straight enough to do it himself. There was no point in being embarrassed in front of Helen. She'd seen the whole of him already, the worst of it, and stayed.

"Thank you," he said.

"Mm." She slid the plate toward him. "Eat."

He ate.

He cleaned up after the kids were gone, showered, shaved again though he'd shaved that morning, stood in front of his own closet like an idiot for a minute before he pulled down a clean shirt, and he was aware the whole time of what he was doing and could not seem to stop doing it, and somewhere in the middle of it he caught his own face in the mirror over the dresser and saw a thing there he hadn't seen in four years and didn't have a name ready for. He turned off the light rather than look at it.

He drove to town with the windows down and the radio off. Twenty minutes. He'd driven it a thousand times and never once like this, with his pulse up the whole way and his hands too careful on the wheel, the want he'd been hauling around for weeks finally pointed at a door he was actually going to walk through instead of one he was going to make himself drive past.

Elena lived out the east end of town where the lots ran bigger, an old place she'd bought when she took over the practice, and the garage sat off to the side of the main house with the apartment built over it and its own stair running up the outside. Lara's blue truck, his father's loaner, still parked in the gravel below it. There was a light on up top, warm behind the curtain.

Dean cut the engine and sat one second, the old habit, the looking-before-the-door. Then he made himself get out and cross the gravel to the foot of the stair.

The stairs were steep and he took them slow, and at the top he stood on the little landing with his hat in his hand — he'd brought the hat, he didn't know why, habit, something to do with his hands — and he knocked.

The door opened.

She had her hair down. She'd changed out of whatever the day had been into something soft, dark, and she stood in her own doorway with the lamplight behind her and looked at him, and neither of them said anything for a second, because there was nothing to say that the whole long day hadn't already said for them.

"You came," she said.

"Said I would."

"You did." Her voice had gone low. She stepped back to let him in, and he came in, and she shut the door behind him, and the latch was a small loud sound in the quiet.

It was a small place. One room, more or less, a bed against the far wall, a couch, a kitchen the size of a closet, a window looking out at the dark and the back of town. Her things in it, the few she'd brought two thousand miles, the place she'd come to to be nobody and had not managed it. He took it in the way he took in any room, fast, without meaning to, and then he stopped taking in the room because she was standing in front of him with her hair down and her hands at her sides, not nervous exactly — Lara didn't do nervous, or didn't show it — but waiting, the way she'd waited on the porch the first day, steady as a fence post, except that the steadiness this time had a fire banked under it he could see plain.