21. Killian #2
“I said it like a man who doesn’t know the right way to say it.” He held out his hand for the pliers. “Is it helping?”
“She told me I’ve found a nicer thing to disappear into and that nobody’s going to stop me because it looks like devotion.”
My father laughed. It came out of him rustily, the way it always does, a sound with a whole season’s dust on it.
“Well,” he said. “That’ll be a hundred and fifty an hour well spent.”
We got the chain seated. He tested the swing with his hand, watched it move, and adjusted a link for reasons I couldn’t see.
“The summer you were nine,” he said, “I didn’t come to this island at all.”
I looked up.
“You came every summer.”
“I came for the last weekend in August and I let all of you believe I’d been coming and going.
” He kept his eyes on the chain. “The firm was in trouble. Real trouble, the kind that doesn’t get talked about at dinner.
I decided the honorable thing was to fix it before anyone had to know, and the fixing took eleven weeks, and I did it alone in an office on Federal Street because that was easier than sitting in a kitchen being no use. ”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You were nine. You remember the summer you built the pulley off the garage roof and Sully broke his wrist.”
“The same summer as what?”
“As the eleven weeks,” my father said, “and your mother drove him to the hospital and set the whole thing up with the doctor and got him home and put you both to bed, and then she called me at eleven at night, and I let it ring, because I was in the middle of a column of figures and I thought, I’ll call her back in twenty minutes. ”
The swing moved a little on its new chain. Neither of us touched it.
“Did you call her back?”
“At one in the morning. She’d stopped waiting by then.
” He straightened up and wiped his hands on a rag, and for the first time all afternoon he looked at me directly.
“She didn’t leave. I want to be honest with you about why, because you’re about to give me too much credit.
She didn’t leave because she had three children and a mother who would have died of the shame of it.
She stayed, and then afterward we spent about six years being polite to each other, and I have never been more frightened of anything in my life than I was of that politeness. ”
“What fixed it?”
“Nothing fixed it. That’s the part nobody tells you.
” He folded the rag. “I stopped, is all. I stopped being the man who was going to sort it out first and come back after. I stopped at the wrong times, in the middle of things, when it cost me. And it cost me plenty, and I lost the firm two years later anyway, and your mother has never once brought that up.”
I sat down on the step because my legs wanted me to.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because you’re doing the good version,” he said.
“The spreadsheets and the pillow and the pantry. You’re working very hard, and it will feel to you like proof.
” He put the pliers back in the bag. “It isn’t proof.
Proof is the day you stop in the middle of the good version because she asks you to, and you’re annoyed about it, and you stop anyway, and nobody claps. ”
“That’s more or less what Okafor said.”
“Then she’s worth the hundred and fifty.”
He picked up the bag. I stayed where I was on the step.
“Dad.”
“Mm.”
“Do the Kerrington men just do this? Is that what this is?”
My father stood on my path in the flat gold light and thought about it for longer than I expected, and when he answered, he had the wording ready, which meant he’d had it ready a long time.
“The Kerrington men marry women who are cleverer than they are,” he said, “and then spend the marriage trying to earn it, and earning it looks a great deal like leaving. That’s the whole disease. You didn’t invent it and you won’t be the last one to have it.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It isn’t meant to be comforting. It’s meant to be useful.” He glanced up at the window over the porch, where the curtain was drawn against the afternoon and my wife was asleep behind it. “Go and sit in the room with her while she sleeps. You’ll want to be doing. Don’t.”
He was halfway to the car when I got there.
“Thank you,” I said.
“What for, the chain?”
“Sure. Let’s call it the chain.”
My father nodded once and got into his car, and didn’t say anything else, because he had already said more that afternoon than he generally says in a season.
***
The timer went off again the next afternoon, mid-problem, deep in it.
I heard it, and I felt the jaw of my own attention clamp down and insist, and I looked at the card, and I said a word I was glad Ivy didn’t hear, and I got up.
I walked into the kitchen where Sabrina was fighting a jar of pickles one-handed, braced against the counter and losing, and I took it from her and opened it and set it down, and she looked at me like I’d done something extraordinary instead of the bare minimum a husband does.
“You got up,” she said.
“I got up.”
It wasn’t a cure. I’d prove that again and again in the months to come. But she’d seen me fall and she’d seen what I did in the falling, and that, it turned out, was the only thing that had ever actually mattered.
***
That evening I asked her the question I’d been asking, in one form or another, since the hospital.
“Can I try again?” I said.
She was quiet for a second, her thumb marking her place in her book. “Not tonight,” she said. “But ask me tomorrow.”
So I asked her tomorrow. And the day after that, when I asked, she didn’t answer with words. She just held out her hand across the couch cushion and let me take it, and we watched the end of some movie neither of us was following, and I held on in case she changed her mind.
She didn’t change her mind.