Chapter 3
ELLEN
Jack came home at three on Sunday with a growler of beer from the clubhouse and the easy brightness of a man who was sure he'd gotten away with nothing, because to his mind there was nothing to get away with.
"They fill these right off the tap," he said, and set the growler on the counter like a trophy.
His cheekbones were wind-burned. "Local place near the course.
Thought you'd like to try it." He kissed my cheek.
He smelled of other men's cigars and the outdoors.
"God, what a round. You should have seen the twelfth. Stu three-putted from four feet."
"That's a shame," I said.
He opened the fridge and found the plate of cold roast under its foil, and stopped with his hand on the shelf. I watched him remember — the dinner, the date, all of it a day too late. He put the plate back. He didn't say sorry. He said the thing he always said.
"Listen, El. I feel bad about last night.
Let's do it right — next weekend, just the two of us.
I'll get a reservation somewhere nice. Thirty is a number, we can celebrate it any night we want.
" He said it warmly, like a gift he was handing me.
"Better, even. A weekend, no rushing. We make a whole evening of it. "
Thirty is a number, we can celebrate it any night we want.
I'd heard that sentence before, at other counters, after other missed days, and I knew my part in it.
The weekend after. We'd do it right the weekend after, the way we always did it the weekend after, until the weekend after was the only tradition we had left.
He didn't write it now, but it was there anyway, in that back-slanted hand, at the bottom of eleven cards in a box down the hall. A little late.
"Sure," I said.
He took the yes at its word. He drank his clubhouse beer and told me about the good course, and I nodded in the right places.
He unpacked his golf bag in the mudroom while he talked, and I watched him settle each club back in its slot and wipe every head with the little towel that clipped to the bag — careful, tender, the way he handled everything he'd decided to keep.
He had a system for the clubs. A system for the truck, the garage, the salt and the shovel by the door.
Standing in the doorway, I tried to think of the system he had for us, and there wasn't one.
Then I went into the dining room and cleared my grandmother's cloth. I'd left it out all night, the dead candles' holders still standing on it. I washed it by hand, folded it in the tissue with the cedar block, and put it back in the hall closet on the shelf above the shoebox.
Then I did the thing that frightened me, and I did it with a steady hand.
I lifted the pencil off its string by the kitchen calendar and looked at the second Saturday in October, at the little star I'd drawn there in January.
Then I looked at the empty days ahead. Pete's fiancée's birthday next month.
My mother's death in November. The solstice.
There were stars I always drew weeks out, because that was the whole point of them — to see the good days coming through the dark of the year.
I put the pencil down without drawing any.
I'd draw them later, I told myself. But the pencil hung on its string all week, and every time I passed the calendar my hand stayed at my side. The stars had always been a kind of faith. That faith had gone out, quietly, the way the candles went out on Saturday, with one thread of smoke.
Monday I went back to the flower shop where I keep the books three days a week.
Numbers and a camera aren't so different, whatever people think; both are about noticing what's really there.
The shop is called Petal, and it runs on other people's occasions — anniversaries, funerals, apologies, which are their own kind of occasion and their own reliable revenue.
All morning the phone rang with people marking their lives out loud.
A twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the roses, deliver by four, he wants the card to say I would marry you again. A first date. A new baby.
I entered the numbers in their columns and felt none of it, which was new. Other years, every order had given me a little ache of gladness. This morning they were only figures, and I moved them into their rows, and the rows added up.
A man came in a little after eleven — sixty-five, maybe, in a canvas work coat, holding his cap in both hands the way men of a certain age do indoors.
He stood at the counter looking lost among the buckets of color until Renata was free.
I watched him from the desk, because of the way he held the cap.
"It's our fortieth," he told her. "Saturday. I want to do it right. She likes the yellow ones, the ruffly ones." He gestured, helpless.
"Ranunculus," Renata said kindly. "We can do that."
"She had them at the wedding." He turned the cap in his hands.
"Forty years. I looked it up — forty is rubies.
But she's not a jewelry person, she'd tell me I wasted the money.
She'd rather the flowers. She notices flowers.
" He turned the cap again. "Can you make the card say, I still notice you. That's all. She'll know what it means."
Renata wrote it on the little card, the man paid, and he thanked us both twice and put his cap back on at the door. I sat there with his invoice in front of me and had to set my pen down for a moment.
I still notice you. Not roses, not a speech — just a man who'd spent forty years noticing what his wife liked, wanting her to know he still did.
I entered his forty dollars in the column and thought about Jack.
He noticed my gas tank, my coffee, the ice on the steps.
Everything about the running of me, nothing about the marking of me.
I didn't know which of them had it right, the stranger with his ranunculus or my husband with his salted steps.
I only knew that for thirty years I'd told myself the running of me was enough, and this morning, over a stranger's forty dollars, I couldn't make myself believe it.
Renata, who owns the shop, watched me over the wrapping table around noon. "You're quiet, Ellen."
"Anniversary tired," I said, which was true in a way she couldn't read.
"Thirty, wasn't it? How'd Jack do?"
"He golfed." Her face went to a question, so I added, "It was fine. We're doing something next weekend."
She smiled and let it go. I filed the invoices, and the smell of the shop closed over me like water over a stone — cold water, cut stems, the green bitterness of chrysanthemum.
Pete came by the house that evening. My son is twenty-seven, engaged since spring, getting married in June; he has his father's practical kindness with more words attached.
He sat at the kitchen counter eating the cold roast I'd never thrown out and told me about the venue, the caterer, the guest list ballooning past what Sarah's mother wanted.
"Hey, so." He said it around a forkful. "We're trying to figure out a photographer.
Sarah's got a list, but they're all like three grand for eight hours, it's insane.
" He looked at me with the open, hopeful face he'd worn since he was four asking for a snack.
"You used to do this, right? You knew everybody.
Do you know anyone still working who's, like, good but not insane money? "
Marie, I thought. Marie is still working. And under that, faster than thought, the other thing. You used to do this. Used to.
"Let me think about it," I said, and got up to put the kettle on, so my back was to him. "You want tea?"
"I'm good." He didn't notice. He was twenty-seven and in love, the whole world arranging itself around his June. "You should come to the tasting Saturday, Mom. Sarah wants your opinion on the chicken thing."
"I'll check with your father," I said, and the kettle began to tick as it heated. I stood with my hands flat on the counter and made a decision — though it didn't feel like a decision so much as a line I found I'd already crossed.
Either the thing would be named, all thirty years of it, out loud, to Jack, in words neither of us could file away.
Or I would stop. Stop drawing the stars, stop setting the cloth, stop keeping the shoebox current, stop being the only one in the marriage who believed our life needed witnessing.
I would let the dates go by unmarked, the way he had always, in his heart, let them go by, and I would become the woman he'd apparently been married to all along without either of us saying so.
Those were the two roads. The kettle screamed. I made my tea, and I didn't draw a single star that week. I waited to see which road I was on.