She said, “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.Once it’s said out loud, some people will just believe the worst.And there’s nothing you can do to ..."
She caught herself the way she had a dozen times, right at the edge of saying more about wherever she’d come from.
“Maybe,” he said.“But the lie got said out loud in my house.And in my house, it got answered.”
She looked at him a long moment.Then she did go back to her desk, and the set of her shoulders on the way was a little different than it had been.Hank counted that a fair day’s work, whatever it ended up costing him.
Ruth Sanger came in Friday for her annual checkup that Hank suspected she scheduled mostly for the conversation.
Ruth was in her eighties, healthy as a horse, and sharp as a tack.She knew more about everyone in the Stillwater Valley than the census did.She wasn’t unkind.And that was the trouble with her.A town could arm itself against an unkind gossip.
She handed out her information as if she were doing folks a favor, and half the time she was, The other half, she lit fires that she didn’t seem to know she’d lit.
He listened to her heart, which was sound, and her lungs, which were better than a woman who had smoked until a few years ago had any right to expect.While he was writing a prescription for mild pain pills to combat her arthritis, he said, as easy as he could, “Ruth.I need to ask you a favor.”
“Anything for you, Dr.Steele.”
“There’s a story going around about my bookkeeper.That she’s doing something crooked with the town’s accounts.It isn’t true.I know that for a fact and it’s the kind of story that does real harm.She’s a good woman who came to this town with four children and no soft place to land.You hear most rumors in this town before they’ve got their boots on.I’d take it as a kindness if you’d step on this one.Tell folks it’s false.They’ll believe it from you faster than from me.”
Ruth patted his hand.“Oh, Doc.I never start those things.I only ever pass along what’s already out there.There’s a difference.”
“I know there is,” Hank said, though he was less sure of it than he had once been.“So pass along the truth, then.That’d be a new thing under the sun.”
She laughed, delighted, and promised that she would, she surely would.
Hank knew before she had her sleeves re-buttoned that she would not.Not because she wished him or Sunny any harm, but because the truth, that Sunny was an honest hardworking woman, was no kind of story at all.
The lie had a villain in it, and a rich dying mayor, and a beautiful, mysterious widow newly come from California.He could no more expect Ruth Sanger to carry the truth in place of that than he could ask the lake to run uphill.
“It’s a shame, is what it is,” Ruth went on, gathering her purse.“A woman like that, all those children, and no husband to speak of.Folks do wonder how she manages.And then they see her over here every day, and they see the way you look at her ...”
She stopped, and smiled, and didn’t finish her sentence, which was a good deal worse than finishing it.“Well.People wonder.You can’t stop people from wondering, Doc.”
“You can stop telling them what to wonder,” he replied a shade sharply.
She only laughed again.She paused at the door and turned and gave him a look he liked a great deal less than the gossip.
“You went out of your way for her yesterday,” she said.“Cy Bray’s been telling it all over the feed store.How the doctor came out of his exam room to defend his accountant like she was ...”Ruth tipped her head, bright-eyed and merciless and fond.“Well.Like she was more than his accountant.”
“She’s being lied about,” Hank said.“I don’t care for lies.”
“Mm-hm,” said Ruth Sanger, in a tone that put the entire valley on notice.She let herself out, carrying, Hank knew with sinking certainty, not the story he’d handed her, but a far better one she’d just found.
He sat on the porch, in the aluminum chair that had earned its place all over again, and watched the town go red as the sun set.He’d tried to calm the town all week.He’d protected Sunny the only way he knew how, by stepping between her and a lie and trying not to make a thing of it.And for his trouble the town was going to take the plain, true, decent thing he’d done and spin it into precisely the kind of story he had no defense against.The worst of the new rumor to come was that it wasn’t even a lie.
He’d spent years making himself into a man with nothing left to lose.Into a settled, quiet, self-sufficient man.A good father and a good doctor and nobody’s fool this time around.It had been a great deal of work.
And in three weeks a woman with four children and a paint scraper had walked into his front room and undone every bit of it.And apparently, the whole valley could read it on him plain as day.The only person who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it before now was himself.
Sunny was working inside, moving through his house in the way he had grown used to.He sat out here in his ridiculous chair and let himself feel, for exactly as long as the red sunset lasted, the size of the feelings he wasn’t ready to acknowledge.
Then color faded from the light, the houses and trees and yards turned gray, and he got up, and went inside to heat water for Sunny’s evening tea.She would want a cup before she drove home, and he was, after all, the easiest boss in Montana.
9
Founder’s Day fell on the last Saturday in June, and Apple Pie Creek threw it loud, bright, and a comfortable hour behind schedule.
Sunny stood on the Cobbler Cove dock at eight in the morning and counted children twice through and then a third time to be certain none had slipped away.Presley and Makayla had their heads bent over a shared phone.The twins were conducting some negotiation with a coil of dock rope that Sunny chose, for her own peace, not to investigate.Lily had attached herself to Madison’s hand.And Chloe stood at the very edge of the planks in a life vest so orange and so enormous that she looked like a small, outraged traffic cone, leaning out over the water with the fearless certainty of a child who’d never once been told no by gravity.
