Chapter 29 #3
There was another one on the shelf that night, a different title, and I knew the hand before I had it open.
Same blue ink, same slanted capitals, same habit of numbering his objections in the margin.
I took it to the counter and asked, and the owner said his father had bought a whole estate lot in the nineties, four boxes of them, and that they surface two or three a year and always sell.
“Same man,” I said, back at the shelf, showing him a numbered note.
“He accused the wrong character for two hundred pages in the last one.”
“You read every note in that book before I did. You called it vandalism and then you argued with three of his conclusions in the margins.”
“I needed to know how much damage he’d done.”
For a moment we were the couple who had that fight the first time. Then my thumb stopped on a line where the dead man had written it can’t be the husband, he was in the car, and I was somewhere else entirely.
“Jess had a clinic envelope on her lap,” I said. “You drove and she held it like there was an appointment in it.”
Somebody moved a ladder at the back of the shop. The register drawer opened. A child asked his father for a book in the window.
“The envelope was empty,” he said. “I took it out of the clubhouse office that morning. Jess asked me not to make the trip. You took your ring off before I got in the truck. I saw you do it and I drove anyway.”
“Did you think about our appointments?”
“Yes. I remembered sitting next to you while Aris explained your breathing tests, and I used that to tell myself the envelope would convince anybody watching. I thought about our life while I copied it.”
“I spent a week working out how many times you could have got out of our bed and gone and listened to somebody talk about your baby.”
“There were no appointments. I made you believe there were.”
“I know the facts. I remember what I believed.”
“Ask me every time it comes back.”
“Don’t tell me what to do with it.”
He stepped back from the shelf so I didn’t have to go around him. “You’re right. I’ll answer every time you ask.”
We did not get the earlier conversation back. I bought the book with my own money and carried it myself.
At the conservatory the glass had February pressed against it and the path underneath was warm and smelled like wet earth and citrus leaf.
We talked about a staffing schedule, and about the motorcycle parts Tessa keeps threatening to sell online without knowing what a single one of them is, and about the apartment over a garage where we lived our first year, where the heat cut out every time the owner ran his bench grinder.
I stopped under a lemon tree in a clay pot and read the care card like it had terms hidden in it.
“There’s an empty corner by my front window. Brenda kept a dead plant there for six years and blamed the customers for touching it.”
“You want a tree?”
“I want the window to look like somebody owns the place.” I put one leaf between two fingers and let go before the branch moved. “A small table under it for the order book. Paid orders. Not the club leaving a list and assuming I’ll bake it.”
“Would the table block the front camera?”
I looked at him with the warning already up. He had asked a question and not issued an answer, and concern can still fill a room without crossing any line anybody wrote down.
“It’s my camera. I’ll check the view before I put anything under it.”
“All right.”
“You’re allowed to say you think it’s a bad idea.”
“I don’t know where the camera sits or how big the table is. I think you should put what you want in your own window after you check.”
“That answer is irritating.”
“I have several worse ones.”
I nearly laughed. My mouth was already open when I looked down at my own hand holding the care card, and I closed it.
“I used to like it when you argued with me about stupid things.”
“I used to think winning proved I understood you.”
“Sometimes it proved you were annoying.” I walked into the next room ahead of him. “The table’s going in the window.”
“Then put it there.”
He followed and didn’t offer to build it, which I noticed, and which I am not going to give him credit for.
None of the evening was painless. I asked whether he had considered using that first apartment as an address for Jess.
He said he rejected it because the owner knew us.
I asked what else from our marriage he had used, and he named the clinic, the Kroger lot, the county roads, the house, and the sentence he stole for the burner, one after another, without softening any of them.
He didn’t ask why I would agree to an evening out and then walk him through July.
He didn’t have to. July had come with us before I opened the truck door.
On the way home I held the book flat on my knees and watched the fields go by, and he didn’t ask whether any of it had been good. If he had, I would have made him wait for the answer.
He walked me up after I said he could. The porch light caught the green of the coat and my bare left hand on the key.
“Thank you for coming with me,” he said.
“I haven’t said whether there’ll be another one.”
“I know.”
“And you don’t get to ask tonight.”
“Then I won’t.”
I unlocked the door, and he was off the porch before I had to send him. Inside, I put the new book on the shelf beside the old one, spine out, the two of them the same height, and stood there with my coat still on.