Chapter 10: Hot Water

I was still standing in his study doorway when I heard him on the stairs.

He came down barefoot in last night's trousers, with his hair standing up.

He stopped in the hall and looked at me in his shirt.

He looked at the gray folder on the blotter behind me, and his face went careful.

"You saw it," he said.

"I saw a folder," I said.

"I didn't open it."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because I'd rather you told me," I said.

"I've had a week of reading things off the backs of tickets."

He stood with one hand on the newel post.

Morning light came through the fanlight over the door and laid a gold square on the floor between us.

"Come and sit," he said.

We sat at the long kitchen table with the vines dripping outside the window.

He made coffee in a battered tin pot with his back to me.

I watched the muscles move in his shoulders and remembered what they had felt like under my hands.

He put a mug in front of me and sat, and laid both hands flat on the wood.

He did not speak for a long moment.

"My mother wants something from your family," he said.

"I gathered that," I said.

"It is not a wedding."

"I gathered that too."

"I cannot tell you all of it yet," he said.

"Why not?" I asked.

"If I tell you and you act on it, she will know that I told you," he said.

"Then she will move faster than I can stop her."

"Stop her from what?"

He looked at me.

I had never seen anyone look so tired.

"I can tell you this much," he said.

"The thing she wants cannot be done without your name, and I do not intend to let it be done.

"I need time."

"You want me to trust you," I said.

"Yes."

"On a scale ticket and a night."

"On the ticket," he said, "and on whatever else you have decided."

I turned my mug in my hands.

I thought about the lawyer on my porch and the gray crest, and what my father had said in the kitchen.

I thought about the seven words in blue ink and the sound his pen had made on one letter.

I decided that half a truth from a man who could not speak without effort was worth more than a speech.

"I'll give you half," I said.

"I'll keep the ring for now, and I won't sign, and I won't tell you why I said yes.

"When you can say all of it, I'll say mine."