He Waited for Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 21 of 48

Chapter 21: Not a Contract

My mother smiled at Shelby.

It was the smile she used on waiters who brought the wrong wine twice.

"We don't drive ourselves anymore, dear," she said. "We have a man for that."

"Of course you do," Shelby said.

She squeezed my mother's arm and went back to the cameras.

My father didn't go up to the forty-first floor after all.

He stood in the lobby looking at the pale square on the marble where the portrait had been.

Then he took my mother's hand and said, "Home."

In the car I sat between them and didn't say anything.

My father thought he'd heard a girl being sweet to an old man.

My mother had heard something else. She kept looking at me.

I was hearing my mother scream my name.

For two weeks Nicholas looked for the mechanic.

He called every hospital and every jail in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

He paid a man in Odessa to watch the bus station.

He called the son in Billings, who hung up on him.

An hour later the son called back and asked, very quietly, whether his father was dead.

"I don't know," Nicholas told him. "I'm trying to find out."

On the last Saturday in June, I went to the townhouse on East 70th Street.

The sheets were off the furniture in the front parlor now.

Somebody had wound the grandfather clock.

I found him upstairs in the room with the cork board.

He was standing on a chair, unpinning things.

The rodeo photo was in his hand. Russell in a straw hat, and a little blonde girl on his shoulders, laughing.

He climbed down and pinned it again in the very center of the board, beside his father.

He drew a red string from it to the photo of the pickup in the ravine.

He stood back and looked at it.

"She held the flashlight," he said, without turning around.

"I know."

"I keep seeing her doing it."

I had brought something in my bag.

I took it out.

Two typed pages, stapled, with the Ferraro lawyer's letterhead on the top.

In April the lawyer had insisted on putting our handshake in the car on paper.

One year. Either party may withdraw without cause. No public statement.

Our two signatures at the bottom. Mine round and careful. His small and square.

He turned and saw what I was holding.

His face went very still.

"Is that what I think it is?"

"Yes."

He nodded slowly.

"All right," he said. "I understand. After Texas, I'd understand."

I tore the pages in half.

Then in half again.

I put the pieces on the table under the cork board.

He looked at them for a long time.

"I don't want an exit," I said. "I don't want a year. I don't want to shake hands and be done, with no scene and no press."

"Christina."

"In my last life, I married a man who never once looked at me the way you looked at that old man's hands in the trailer. Like they mattered. Like I mattered because I was standing there."

He crossed the room in three steps.

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