Wednesday, 12:10 p.m.
The hammer was going before I was down the stairs.
It carried across the yard like a bell, one clean note and one light one, steel on steel, the rhythm of somebody drawing out a heel. I stood in the kitchen with my hand on the counter and the whole house quiet around me and listened to a noise so ordinary I could have put my head down and wept at it. I had left a bed empty and a window open, and the noise told me nothing about who was making it. I went out and across the yard with my hands loose at my sides, as you cross to a horse you can't see the head of.
He was on the north side of the shop, where the yard drops out of sight of the lane, at the anvil stand he drags into the shade when the day gets hot. I came around the corner of the shop and saw the back of him first, the shoulders bent to the anvil and the shirt dark down the spine. The forge roared at its blue-white mouth. He had the leather apron on over the gray T-shirt and a row of shoes laid out cooling on the bench, dark and rough, in order of size. He was drawing a heel on the next one, and he looked up at me without stopping.
"You're back early."
"You opened the window."
"Room smelled like the back of a bar." He gave the shoe a turn and a tap. "Somebody had to."
"I thought you'd gone."
The hammer stopped. "Gone where? I've got no keys. I'd have to thumb it." He said it lightly, and then he looked at me longer and put the hammer down on the anvil face. "Hey."
"I'm fine."
"Sure." He looked at the tongs in his other hand as if he'd forgotten them. "My head's clear, Han. First time all day. Don't ask me about yesterday, I'll only get it wrong. But I thought, the Brenners' colts want shoes in the morning, and I can't get at my stock in the truck, since the house has eaten my keys, so I dug the ends out of the shop and made a start." He tilted his chin at the bench. "My hands wanted a job."
That was all it was. I stood there and took inventory, because it's what I have instead of prayer. The boots laced. The reading glasses pushed up into his hair, where he swears they aren't. The burn scars up both forearms the color of weak tea, from every time he's tested a hot shoe against his skin instead of walking to the water. The salt at his temples with sweat in it. The color of him, which was his own.
In my jacket I had a spare key on a loop of orange twine and a flip phone that had never sent a word.
"Cal. What did you say to me the day we met?"
The shoe went from orange to dull gray on the anvil face while he looked at me. "Is this a test?"
"Humor me."
"You've been saying that since last night." But he wiped his hands on the apron, and thought about it honestly. Then he dropped his voice a little and said it flat, to nobody, to a pony.
"You've got iodine on your eyebrow."
"I know," I said.
"Just checking you knew."
* August, twelve years back. A rescue barn outside Cadott, a dun Shetland cross named Pickle who had foundered on spring grass she should never have been let near, and me, twenty-nine, thirty-one hours awake on a calving and a colic and a dog that had eaten a sock. I'd painted the sole of her foot with iodine and wiped my forehead on the back of my glove. A man had come in with a rig to build her a pair of shoes, a big quiet man with salt already at the temples at thirty-two. He stood in the aisle with the foot in his hands and studied it for twenty minutes without a word, and then he looked up at me, straight-faced, with the pony's whole weight balanced on his knee.
You've got iodine on your eyebrow.
I hadn't known. I'd sooner have died than say so. I know, I said.
Just checking you knew. And he went back to the foot, and I stood there with my whole face on fire. Pickle lived nine more years on the shoes he made her.
That was the story. I've told it at parties. It was a poor test: anyone who'd been in that barn could have said the words. But I wasn't listening to the words. I was watching his mouth. At iodine the left corner pulls, always has, and the scar goes white against the brown, a pale thread drawn tight. It went white. It was the face I had eleven years of. If it was a copy, someone had studied one man's mouth for a lifetime, and I was out of ways to think that.
"What is it?" he said. "You've got a look."
"Which look?"
"The one you get when a horse has done something you can't explain, and you've decided to be polite about it."
There it was, the whole sentence, ready at the back of my teeth like horses bunched at a chute. Somebody phoned. He says you aren't you. I had my mouth open.
"I'm tired," I said.
"You're a lot of things." He picked up the tongs again. "Tired's the smallest." He fed the shoe back into the fire, and the light came up on his face, and he didn't look at me. "Whatever it is, it'll keep. I'm not going anywhere. I've got no keys."
I laughed. It came out of me in one piece, like something coughed up, and he smiled at the forge. He'd made it easy on purpose, and I had his keys in a bin of beet pulp forty yards away, and I said nothing.
We worked side by side for the next hour. I sat on an upturned bucket and rasped the burrs off the shoes he finished, and handed him nails, and he talked to the colts he'd be building them for in a low voice, telling them things about their own feet. Two-year-olds. You think you've got it all figured. You've got no idea.* He worked with his head tilted and his tongue in the corner of his mouth on the hard part, and made the small grunt he makes when a nail bends, and I rasped and handed and kept the inventory going in the back of my head. Nothing missing. He held nails between his lips, and took each one out only when he needed it, and once he caught me watching and took one out early to say, "What?" and I said, "Nothing," and he put it back. The forge ticked and ran. Iron dust settled in the little hairs on his arms.
Some of it I even heard. I remember a story about the Brenners' hired man and a wheelbarrow. I remember the smell of scorched coal, and the water in the slack tub saying hiss every time a shoe went in.
I asked it at the end of the hour. Lightly. I had practiced lightly in the truck.
"I never asked how Monday went. I was at the Moens' till nine with that colic, and you were dead asleep when I got in."
"Monday." He held a shoe up to the light and squinted down the branch of it. "Fine. The Aunes'. Trimmed the four, and reset the old mare's fronts. She's got a crack coming in the left."
It was the other voice. Easy, sunny, half a notch louder than his own. Everything's fine here.
I put my hand in my jacket pocket, past the key and the phone, and closed it on a square of pink paper.
Aunes called Monday from Canada. Marit's block letters, over my own thumb. I'd stood in the front office that morning with that slip in my hand, hearing none of it, hearing the register, and it came back to me now word for word, the way a lab result comes back: up at her brother's till the 25th, Cal needn't come out.
He was still holding the shoe up to the light. He set it on the bench with the others. He'd said it to my face with a hammer in his hand and his own scar white in the sun. He'd lied to me, and I had watched him do it, and I didn't know why.
I had a list. I'd been keeping it since the loft, and it had a card drawer on it, and a sister, and three thousand dollars in cash, and a phone in a glovebox, and now a Monday. A list like that fits an affair, or a debt, or a habit, or a man ashamed of something small. It also fits a man who isn't who he says. It was the same list.
"Good," I said. "Good, that's good."
The phone buzzed in my left pocket. Mine, not the flip. 1:50.
Check your mailbox.
"Client," I said. "Sorry. I'll be a minute."
"Take your time." He was heating another shoe. "Nobody's stealing the truck."
* It is a hundred and sixty yards from the shop to the mailbox at the end of the lane. I walked it with my hands in my pockets, the way you walk to a horse that hasn't decided about you, past the pasture gate and the pipe fence and the blackberry canes, and up the lane the hammer rang on behind me, one and two, one and two, until I dropped over the grade and it fell away and there was only the road, empty in both directions, and the heat coming up off the gravel.
The box was the old rural kind, the flag rusted down. Inside: a seed catalog, the co-op bill, a flyer for a fireworks tent, and lying across them, a stiff brown envelope, longer than a letter and narrow, with cardboard in it. No stamp. No address. Nothing on it at all.
I stood in the road with my back to the lane and slid my thumb under the flap.
A paper sleeve, cream-colored, the kind X-rays live in. The top of it had been torn off, a strip of the printed heading ripped away in one ragged pull, and over the tear someone had pasted a white label. REEVE, C., and a date, November 1996, in neat, upright block capitals, small as print. The hand of someone who labels a great many things and has never once been in a hurry.
Inside were three films.
The long one I drew out first and held up against the sky. A human jaw, in one sweep, the whole curve of it, the dark ghost of the spine on either side and every tooth standing in its socket like fence posts. I read teeth for a living. I read them in horses, where a mouth is a ledger of how old and how fed. This was the same alphabet in a language I couldn't speak, a lot of small teeth in a small mouth, and somewhere among them was a thing that mattered. I couldn't find it. The other two were bitewings, each the size of a matchbook, gray on gray.
The phone buzzed in my hand.
Compare them. Then you will know what is sleeping in your bed.
I read it twice. A truck went by on the county road a mile off, and the sound of it rose and thinned and was gone. Beyond it, over the pasture, the sun stood straight up in a white sky.
There was only one way to look inside my husband. To compare them I would need his mouth. I would need it open and lit and held still, with a plate behind it, by someone who would never say yes to that and could not be asked.
Up the lane, the hammer stopped.
I slid the films back into their sleeve and the sleeve into the envelope and the envelope inside my jacket, against my ribs, and went back up to ask him nothing.