They Sent Me to Prison for the Family Fire, So I Came Home to Sell the Ranch Out From Under Them novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: What I Can't Be Sure Of

I didn't wake him.

I sat with the page in my lap until the lamp burned low, and then I folded it into thirds and put it in the pocket of his shirt.

In the morning I made coffee in his grandmother's dented pot.

He came out of the back room at seven in his jeans, with his hair standing up, and kissed the side of my head.

"Good morning," he said.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?" he said.

"Say I'm still here," I said.

He smiled.

"You're still here."

"I am," I said.

I put a mug in his hand.

I waited until he had taken the first mouthful, because I wanted him to taste it.

Then I said, "I opened the thirteenth."

He lowered the mug slowly.

His face did not change, but he went still all through his body.

"I see," he said.

"You said no fire in the bed."

"This isn't the bed," I said.

"No," he said.

"It's the kitchen," I said.

"I'm told it's neutral ground."

"Maite."

I took the paper from his shirt pocket, which I was wearing, and laid it on the counter between us, smoothed flat.

"I read your six lines in the transcript the second year.

"I knew them by heart before your letter came.

"I never answered you because I couldn't."

"I know," he said.

"No, you don't.

"You've thought about it for five years, and you think you know.

"I'll tell you."

I could hear my voice rising, thin and fast.

I had planned to say it calmly, and calm was not what came.

"You came to Carson City every month for five years, and you sat outside the gate, and you wrote me sixty letters about the weather.

"You wrote about the hay and the ewes, and a dog you found on the road.

"You never wrote 'I can't be sure.'

"You never wrote that you knew I ran at it.

"You wrote about the weather."

"Maite."

"You told them you couldn't be sure.

"You stood at your kitchen table and you said I might have been carrying something.

"I would have walked out in two years if you had said it the other way."

I heard how it sounded, the size of it, in that small clean kitchen with the lilac scratching.

I had never said it to anyone.

It came out cracked and enormous.

"Every first Sunday I knew you were outside," I said.

"I marked each one, and I hated you for it."

Ansel set the mug down on the counter with a very small sound.

He didn't defend himself.

I had expected him to.

I'd imagined, in the dark, a hundred ways he might explain it, and each of them had a reasonable tone.

He stood in his bare feet with his hands at his sides and said nothing at all for what felt like a full minute.

"The investigator came to my kitchen two days after," he said at last.

"He said a long statement would get me called.

"He said the families remember who stands up against them.

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