Cole said. I'll call him. A pause. Then Reeves said with the careful steadiness of a man who has been waiting to ask something for a long time and is choosing this moment deliberately. What now?
Cole. Cole looked at the road at the gray morning light on the Tennessee hills, at the gas station's hand-painted sign and the ordinary, unremarkable beauty of a November morning in a state that had been good to him. I'm going back to Harrisville, he said. Reeves was quiet for a moment. The bar, he said, for now, Cole said.
Patrice kept the job open. And after that, Cole thought about Mara Ellison in the story he'd heard from someone somewhere. A woman who rebuilt something correctly instead of inheriting it broken. He thought about what it meant to rebuild something correctly. To put your name above the door because you'd earned it rather than because someone handed it to you.
I don't know yet, Cole said. But I'll let you know when I do. That's more than I've gotten in 11 months, Reeves said. I know, Cole said. I'm sorry for that, Reeves.
The silence. I needed it, but I'm sorry for it. Reeves said nothing for a moment. Then buy a man bourbon sometime. When you come through Harrisville, Cole said. "
I might do that," Reeves said. And the way he said it simple, unhurried, like a man making a plan he intends to keep, told Cole that the conversation was ending the way good conversations end with something forward in it, something that was still alive rather than just concluded. Cole put the phone down and finished his cold coffee and sat in the gray morning and felt for the first time in a long time like a man standing at the beginning of something rather than hiding from the end of it. He started the truck. He drove back toward Harrisville and he did not look in the rear view mirror because the road behind him was finally, genuinely clear.
He got back to Harrisville at 8:41 in the morning. The drive took longer than it should have because he stopped twice once to call Danny Faulk, which lasted 11 minutes and contained more silence than words. The way conversations between men who have been through things together often do. and once at a gas station outside of Springfield where he sat in the parking lot for 20 minutes doing nothing in particular. Just letting the morning happen around him, just being still in the way that only becomes possible after something difficult is genuinely finished.
Danny Faulk had cried again when he heard Cole's voice. Brief, as advertised, 4 seconds, maybe five, and then he'd said something profane and then he'd said, "I knew it was you." Reeves said he didn't know, but I knew it was you. And Cole had said, "I'm sorry it took so long." And Danny had said, "Don't apologize to me, you idiot.
Just don't disappear again." And Cole had said, "I hear you." And Danny had said, "That's what you always say before you disappear." And Cole had almost laughed, which was the first time in a long time that the impulse had arrived that quickly and that naturally. And he'd said, "Come through Harrisville sometime."
And Danny had said, "Count on it." That conversation sat with Cole the whole drive back. Not the words exactly, but the quality of it, the ease of it. The way 21 years of knowing someone moves through a telephone line without effort, without performance, without the managed distance he'd put between himself and everything that mattered. While he was trying to be small in a small town, he'd been protecting himself from the weight of those connections by limiting his exposure to them.
And what the last 12 hours had demonstrated with the particular clarity of things that become obvious only after they've already happened was that the connections were not what weighed on him. The absence of them was. He pulled into the Rusty Spur parking lot at 8:41 and sat for a moment and looked at the building. The sign was still unlit. The gravel was quiet.
The November morning had the particular pale gold quality of late autumn sun on a cold day, and it fell on the hand-painted sign and the old wood siding and made the place look exactly like what it was simple and worn and genuinely itself without pretention or performance. He got out of the truck. The front door was unlocked, which meant Patrice was already in, which he expected. He pushed it open and walked into the bar, and she was behind the counter with a coffee pot and two mugs, and she looked at him when he came through the door with the specific attention of a woman who has been waiting to to assess something important. She looked at him for three full seconds.
Then she said, "You look like you didn't sleep." " I didn't," he said. Sit down," she said. He sat on Darnell's stool because it was the closest one. And Patrice set a mug in front of him and poured without asking.
And he wrapped both hands around it and let the warmth move through his palms and up into his forearms. And it was such a simple and ordinary thing that it caught him slightly offguard, the plainness of it, the uncomplicated goodness of a hot mug of coffee in a familiar place on a cold morning after a long night. " Is it done?" Patrice said, "It's done." Cole said.
She nodded. She didn't ask for details. She was a woman who understood that unsung information belonged to the person carrying it and not to the person asking, and she had always understood that about Cole, and it was one of the reasons he trusted her with as much as he had. " Are you all right?" she said. "
Yes," he said. Then, because she deserved the fuller version. " I think so. I'll know more when the tired wears off." Patrice leaned against the back counter and looked at him with the frank, appraising attention she'd been giving him for 11 months.
Cole, she said the vest. He'd forgotten he was still wearing it. He looked down at it. The leather, the markings, the weight of everything it represented and then back up at her. Is that going to be a problem?
She said, for here it was a real question and she deserved a real answer and he gave her one. I don't know yet, he said. But whatever I am, whatever version of me exists now, it's not going to bring trouble to this place. I can promise you that. Patrice considered that.
The man who came last night, she said. Reeves. Yes, he's a good man, she said. I could tell that he's the best man I know, Cole said. And I know some very good men.