Lena Voss

Lena Voss came back into Roy's life the way weather comes over the plains — visible for a long way off, and faster than you think. She arrived at the Wagon Wheel on a Tuesday, asked for Roy Calloway's table, and sat folding and unfolding a letter in her hands while she waited, an old letter gone soft at the creases. She had known him in New Orleans, in the fourth year of his oath, the winter he went down to the levee to buy a bankrupt elevator and stayed the season: a bad hotel, a woman running convention bookings, a grain man who had not yet learned what a loss was, and between them something that had run its course and ended with that letter and others like it. She had married since, done well, buried a husband, and come back to the plains with money, a rented place at the top of Mulberry Street, and the specific energy of a woman who has decided the second half will be better managed than the first.

She and Roy had ten years of distance and no reason at all to be tender with each other, which is, of course, the ideal conditions for it. She thought his ruin had improved him — took the brass off, she said. He thought she was the one person in the county who had met him before the monument was put up. They went to dinner at the Wagon Wheel, where the town could see them and talk, and Roy proposed in the parking lot because he was fifty now and had no patience left for waiting to be happy, and Lena laughed and said she'd think about it for a week, and thought about it for four days.

But the engagement cooled in a way Roy couldn't chart, and the reason had a face and worked across the river. Lena had met Theo Marsh at a benefit for the hospital wing — Theo on the committee because Theo was on every committee now — and had found, in the boy she assumed was a junior partner, a man who talked to her as if the conversation were the point, and who had opinions about her that were not mainly calculations. She told herself it was nothing, the way you tell yourself weather is nothing, and then June Calloway — the wife, the wedding, the whole quiet arrangement — was dead before the leaves turned, and there was nothing left to tell herself.

She met Roy at the Starlite lot to end it — the old drive-in out past the stockyards, screen fallen years back, the lot the town used for everything it didn't want at home. It was where secrets went to park. She said what she had to say, kindly, which made it worse, and Roy took it the way he took all losses now, standing very still, as if stillness were a kind of dignity.

What he did next came out of the part of himself he had never renovated. That night he wrote to Lena — she had written him, over the New Orleans years, letters no married woman should have written and no man should have kept — demanding to know why, and quoting two lines of her own sentences back at her like exhibits. Her reply was a refusal to be blackmailed by the past, and a caution: some things, once out, don't go back in the drawer. Roy read it as a challenge, because everything read as a challenge when a man's whole ledger was red.