Micah plucked his hat from the rack by the front door, stepped out onto the boardwalk, and locked the door behind him. He had not been outside his new office in a day and a half. That both infuriated and frightened him.
He would not allow the blue devils to take him over again. There was a time when the melancholia would lay him so low he couldn’t get out of bed for days. It was like falling. Slipping and falling into a well, tumbling deeper and deeper down. But lying in bed had not been an option in his years with Judge Pullum. In time, Micah discovered that forcing himself to perform regular activities would usually help some. Not always, but usually, and not a lot, but some.
It did feel better to be outside. It was warm but breezy, so the heat wasn’t bad. A million stars salted the black sky, and there was no reason—not one in all the world—that he should feel low.
But he did.
He set out down the boardwalk, and the clomp of his boots drummed a hollow cadence.
Was it Fay, he wondered, who brought this spell on? He knew it would be unfair to blame his depression on her. Over the years he’d suffered hundreds of bouts with low spirits that had nothing to do with Fay. But he couldn’t discount the effect she always had on him, both good and bad. Even long ago when they would see each other, there was never a time when the sight of her didn’t cause something inside him to move. They might be separated by a crowd of people, and with a sidewards glance she could cause his internal geologic foundations to shift—collide like tectonic plates in an earthquake.
Fay Charbunneau was an intoxicant to Micah; that was a fact he’d learned to accept. He was certain this effect was not something she plotted, although he was also certain she made no attempt to lessen its impact. He had tried to explain it to her once, and she’d laughed. She didn’t laugh in an unkind way, but she’d laughed nonetheless, so Micah had never brought it up again. He had devoted many hours to pondering this ability of hers to make him drunk, but he didn’t understand it any better now than he had the first time one of her smiles had caused his head to swim.
When he turned the corner on Main, he could hear the piano music coming from Buck’s. It sounded as though the town revelers were having a fine time. Any other night, Micah might have joined the fun. Tonight, though, he kept walking. He wandered all the way down Main, across the tracks to the river. In the darkness, the North Platte looked like a channel filled with paint, black and viscous. He continued north along the river’s east bank. Occasionally he’d stop long enough to toss a stick into the water and watch it turn lazily, as though it was reluctant to begin its long journey to Nebraska and beyond. He’d spent many summer afternoons sitting on this bank. He would jam the butt of a fishing pole into the rocks and lay back and watch its line strain against the current.
He continued upriver a ways, climbed the rise, and walked toward the station. His father used to say every major event for the last seventy-five years, in one way or another, had begun at a train depot. Micah expected things to continue that way forever, but now the station was as quiet as stone.
That was when he saw them, Lottie and Fay, side by side, walking from the café toward their small house on North First Street. His inclination was to step back down the rise toward the river, but he didn’t.
Later he tried to lie to himself. He pretended not dropping out of sight had been a conscious decision, that doing so would be childish and would merely delay the inevitable. But he knew the real reason was much simpler than that.
Though Fay was at least fifty yards away and the night was a dark one, already Micah was too drunk to move.
“Micah McConners, is that you over there staring at us from the darkness?” Lottie bent forward and squinted into the gloom.
“Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Charbunneau, it is.” Micah was doing his best to keep his eyes on Lottie, but it wasn’t easy. Like metal shavings to a magnet, they were drawn to the young woman by Lottie’s side.
“Well, I’ll swun,” Lottie said. “Jackson Clark was in to the café t’other night, and he said you was back in town.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve been here a few days now.”
“And you haven’t been in for some of my pie?” They were beside him now and she reached over and smacked his hand. “Shame on you, boy. Did you take on some of them strange Cheyenne ways since you’ve been gone?”
“Now, Momma,” Fay said. There was a faint tinge of the South around the edges of her voice.
“I tried my best not to become too strange,” Micah said. “And I did miss your pie, Mrs. Charbunneau. There’s none like it anywhere that I know of.”
“So what’s been keeping you away, boy?”
“I opened an office, and I’ve been fixing it up.”
“Ah, yes, you’re an attorney-at-law now, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, good for you, Micah. Good for you.” She turned to her daughter. “I’m headed on now, girl,” she said. “I’m tired to death. Are you comin’ or are you goin’ to stay and visit?”
Before he could catch himself, Micah said, “Please, Fay. Could you stay for a bit?” He’d been avoiding her for at least as long as he had been back in town, and if this situation were a case at bar, any lawyer worth his salt could argue that Micah had been avoiding her for the last three years; but now, when faced with watching her walk off into the night with her mother, Micah stopped her before he could even think.
“All right, Micah,” she said. “A while.”
“Don’t you be too long, now,” Lottie said.
“No, Momma, I won’t.”
“And don’t you be makin’ yourself so scarce, you hear, Micah?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Micah and Fay watched without speaking as Lottie walked off. Once her mother was out of earshot, it was Fay who broke the silence. “I missed you, Micah,” she said.
And with that, Micah wanted to grab her. He wanted to pull her to him and crush her into his chest. He wanted to smother her with kisses, and in a torrent of words tell her how he’d spent every waking moment thinking of her, and how every sleeping moment, she had filled his dreams. He wanted to shout that for three years he had missed her too, that he ached with missing her, that there had been times when he thought the pain of missing her was going to drive him insane. Those were all the things he wanted to say. What he said was, “Yes, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?”
But Fay would have none of it. “You are such a fraud, Micah McConners,” she said with a laugh, and she turned and flounced down the embankment to the river.
“A fraud? What do you mean?” he asked, following along behind.
“Exactly what I said.” She stopped at the bank’s edge and looked out over the dark water. What little moonlight there was soaked into her and made her glow.
“I am not a fraud,” he said, but when she turned and fixed him with her smile, he had to laugh. He was laughing not at his own absurdity—although that was funny enough—but he was laughing at how this woman amazed him. He was amazed by her beauty. He was amazed by her intellect. But most of all, he was amazed by her skill at reading him. “All right, damn you, Fay. You’re right. I’m a fraud. I am the most fraudulent man I know.” And he pulled her to him and kissed her. He kissed her long and hard. And as he held her in his arms and pressed her lips into his, he felt as though he were falling into the sky.