42. Declan #2
Then I write the safehouse, because it belongs in the same paragraph and I have known that since the disclosure room.
My phone was on the counter when a message from Avery came in about the week she was in, and Sasha read it upside down and said my wife had me on a schedule.
I laughed in that kitchen and then drove home to a woman tracking her own body to the tenth of a degree so we could have a baby.
The box in the safehouse bathroom was mine.
I bought it, I used it with Sasha, and the receipts don’t cover every date on the timeline, which means on the nights they don’t I carried that home into the middle of what she was charting.
I get one more sentence down before the rule stops me.
I start explaining why we never went to the fertility clinic, and it comes out fast and clean the way the lies always came out fast and clean.
A clinic means forms and a clipboard and a nurse standing there while a man reads and answers questions about himself with his wife in the room, so I said we should give it more time.
Every word of that is true. I read it back off my own recording and hear it turning into an excuse.
I draw one line through it and leave the strike where she can see it. That fact is mine to carry around.
My mother made me say the name of every part out loud before I touched it, back when we were putting the blue bike together in her garage, because I’d run the sequence backward otherwise and she got tired of buying the same gasket twice.
Say it, then do it. I told the instructor about that in October and she said fine, keep doing it.
My mother has been dead four years and the bike belongs to a man in Bloomington who paid certified funds for it.
Selling it took one phone call and four hours.
This letter has taken thirteen weeks and runs one page, and I would load that bike onto a trailer every Saturday for the rest of my life before I wrote number ten again.
At ten past eight the instructor goes through the whole thing with the green pen and fixes fourteen words. She stops on the last line, where I wrote that I’m asking her forgiveness and it isn’t a way to buy her back.
“Buy or earn,” she says. “You’ve said both to me. Which one is on the page?”
“Buy.” I look at the word to be sure it’s the one I wrote. “Earn makes it a bill. If I earn it, she owes it to me when I finish the work, and then I’m another man in her kitchen acting as if she owes me payment.”
She writes nothing on that line. She never tells me whether a page is a good apology, and I stopped wanting her to around week five, because the only person who can grade it is the woman who has the box under her desk.
She stacks my folder, tells me the room is mine Monday at six, and turns the lights off behind me while I’m still in the hall.
The clubhouse apartment is two rooms over the office with a window that faces the lot.
I make coffee I don’t need, put the marked copy on the left side of the table and a clean sheet on the right, and copy the letter out in my own hand.
Every piece of paper that ever mattered in my marriage came to me through Avery’s mouth first, contracts, hospice forms, the insurance pages after the hail, and I let her do that for six years and then handed the same job to a woman who used it to get inside the club.
This page is going to be one thing in that house nobody read to me.
It takes until two. Halfway down I put an r where an r doesn’t go and I want to start over on a fresh sheet, and I leave the strike through it instead, because starting over to hide one letter is the same instinct that had me signing whatever Sasha slid in front of me at the safehouse table.
One page. Everything past one page turned out to be me talking about myself.
Then I put the strip under the first line and read it out loud to an empty room, all the way through, twice.
I get stuck in the same place both times, ten lines from the bottom, on the word temperature.
There’s a box of envelopes in the drawer under the microwave.
I take one out and set it on the table. Mailing it would put the page in her hands whether she wants it or not, and she has spent six months being handed things about her own life she never asked to receive, starting with whatever she saw when she pushed that safehouse door open.
So the envelope goes back in the drawer.
I fold the letter along one crease and slide it into the inside pocket of my cut, behind the reading strip.
It’s the pocket that held the burner for six months, I notice which pocket it is and keep the thought to myself.
I set the alarm for five thirty so I can have the Benton column rebuilt before Gage is up.
If she asks, I’ll read it to her, and I’ll read every word of it myself even if it takes me an hour and she has to watch me lose the same word twice.
If she never asks, the page stays in the pocket and goes where I go, and she never hears a line of it.
Out in the lot a truck turns over and idles, one of the prospects leaving late.
I hang the cut over the back of the chair with the letter in it, put the driver schedule under the lamp where I’ll see it first, and lie down in the clothes I’m wearing.