The Return

Dane had been gone three years, and when Pearl asked him years later where he'd been, he said, "Away." When she waited, he said, "Working." What came back had money in it. He'd gone west and then down, done well out of oil, gas and mineral rights while the county's hands were all shaking, and had come home with the patience of a man who had spent three years doing nothing but compound interest and keep his teeth together.

He bought Windrow within the year. Not by force — that was the beauty of it, from his point of view. Vic had gone to pieces after Lenna died, drinking and gambling on drill sites, and Dane sat across the table from him with papers and the money Vic needed, and Vic, who understood at the last moment exactly what was happening to him and who it was happening at, signed anyway, and became a tenant in the house where he'd been master, drinking in the room where his father had beaten a stolen boy for existing.

The county called it a comeback. Pearl called it what it was: an instrument, being tuned.

Dane came to Fairhill often, and his presence there was a draught nobody could close out. He was courteous to Alden with a precision that was worse than insult. He brought news of mineral leases to discuss over brandy. He watched Cass. And Cass — married, three years settled, and no child yet, though the county had stopped pretending not to count — came apart in slow motion, the way ice goes out of a river: surface still whole, everything underneath moving.

Pearl watched the two of them in the same rooms, saying things to each other in a language made entirely of old wounds, and understood that neither of them loved anybody present. Cass loved a seventeen-year-old autumn. Dane loved the same autumn, plus its betrayal, compound interest on that too.

Junie Frost was the collateral. Alden's sister was nineteen that winter, pretty, light-hearted, sheltered to the point of starch, and she fell for Dane Corso the way you fall for a story you were never allowed — the darkness of him, the county's disapproval, the danger like cologne. Pearl warned her, gently, and got laughed at. Alden forbade the match and thereby signed it. And Dane courted Junie Frost on schedule, in front of her brother and in front of Cass, and one night in February they were gone, eloped in the truck over the pass, and Cass took to her bed in a fever that was three illnesses wearing one coat — the insult, the image, and the fact that Dane had found the exact shape of her own worst choice and had made it with someone else.

She stopped eating, four months along with Alden's child and didn't know it at first. She broke — that's the only verb Pearl would stand behind — talking to people not in the room, opening the window in hard frost, begging a cold little hand to let her in places she had never in her life been locked out of. The baby came early, a girl, and Cass held her once, said her name was Wren and that she hoped she'd never stand on a fence rail with her arms out, and by the second morning of the girl's life Cass Murrow Frost was gone, at twenty-one, with the window open and the snow coming through it.

Alden never recovered and never once said so. And Dane, Pearl said — and here her voice went flat, because this was the part she could not forgive, and she had tried — Dane did not come to the funeral. He sent word to the graveside, through Amos Partlow of all people, that he was well and hoped she was.