Chapter 15
ELLEN
The first week of January I hung a new calendar in the kitchen, on the same nail the old one had left. The plain hardware-store kind, a covered bridge over each blank month. I smoothed it flat and stepped back to look at twelve empty months, and I stood there a while before I picked up the pencil.
Before I marked anything, I took the shoebox down from the hall closet.
It came off the high shelf heavy in my hands, the cardboard gone limp at the corners, and when I lifted the lid the smell came up, cedar and old paper, thirty years of ink.
The cards stood on their spines like files.
The eleven late ones with the three words at the bottom.
The two candle stubs from the anniversary I'd sat through alone, laid where I'd put them the night they burned down, an inch of one, less of the other, the wicks still black and bent.
I ran my thumb slow along the tops of the cards.
I didn't move the stubs. I put the lid back, squared the box to the shelf, then squared it again.
Marie had asked me about it around Christmas, watching me over her wine.
"You going to get rid of the late cards, now that things are mended?
" I told her no. The break had happened.
Papering over it wouldn't have been mending.
I've spent my whole life keeping the record of what mattered, the good along with the rest, and I wasn't about to make my own marriage the one thing I lied about. The stubs stay. The late cards stay.
Jack had offered once to throw them out for me, gentle about it, thinking it a kindness.
"Leave them," I said. "You don't get to unremember what you spent thirty years teaching me.
" So he left them. He doesn't entirely understand why I keep them, and he's stopped needing to.
He carries the box down when I ask and puts it back when I'm done.
The solstice photograph hangs in the hall where he nailed it in December, out where you pass it coming in the door.
The rest stays in the closet, back on its shelf in the dark.
The Buchanan photographs came out well. Not luck, and not Jack's bag-carrying, honest as that was.
I still knew where to stand and when to press.
The craft had waited for me through all nine years I spent pretending I'd lost it.
Margo cried at the proofs, standing at her own kitchen table with the prints spread on the cloth, moving each one aside as she finished with it, one hand flat on the wood.
She stopped at the one of Del in the doorway, the one Del had told me she cried at every year, and she cried at it.
"Now we've got the fiftieth to set next to the twenty-fifth," she said, wiping her face with the flat of her hand.
"The marriage can watch itself getting old.
" I didn't have to work anymore to understand her.
I delivered the album in January, cloth-bound, heavy the way a good book should be.
I carried it up their front walk in both arms, the same walk I'd come up green and terrified all those years ago with nothing to show them but nerve.
Same porch. Same bell, worn silver where fifty years of thumbs had pressed it.
Inside, Del cleared a space on the low shelf in the front room, and the fiftieth went up beside the twenty-fifth at last, two books now where there'd been one.
At fifty-six I was the thing I'd boxed up at forty-seven, and I was better at it than I'd been then.
Del shook my hand at the door with both of his and held on a moment longer than a handshake, his eyes wet and steady on mine.
Margo wouldn't open the album in front of me.
She'd look at it alone first, she said, the way you read a letter alone, then with Del, then with the family at Easter.
I didn't try to talk her out of it. I knew by then which things a person keeps for the private rooms.
Marie came by early that January with a small flat box, wrapped, grinning the way she does.
"Don't get sentimental, it's a joke," she said, which is what Marie says right before she does something that isn't a joke.
Inside were business cards. Real ones, printed, a hundred of them, my name and a phone number, and under the name, where a tagline goes, one word.
Proof.
Ellen Morrow. Proof.
"Because that's what you do," she said, watching my face. "You always said it. You make proof the thing happened. So." She shrugged, too casual for it. "I had a hundred made. Give them out. Charge people money."
I didn't get sentimental, because she'd asked me not to, but I slid one into my wallet where I'd see it and put the rest in the den, on the shelf next to the Mamiya, at working height, because they were working cards for a working woman.
Then I hugged her hard enough that she said okay, okay, and we both pretended it was about the joke.
"You know the funny part," she said at the door, pulling her coat on.
"All those years the camera sat in that closet, I'd have bet my shop you were changing the desiccant packs every spring.
New packs, right on schedule, on a thing you swore up and down you were done with.
" She winked. "I always knew you kept them changed. "
"How did you know that?"
"Because I know you." She was already halfway out. "Charge people money, Ellen." And then she was gone, off to somebody's big day, the way she's been for thirty years, the most constant witness I've ever had.
That Sunday morning, the new calendar hung and the pencil back on its string, Jack was making coffee.
He stood at the counter in his weekend clothes, the pot ticking and hissing as it filled, the window over the sink gone white with flat winter light.
He poured mine into the cup I like and added the splash of milk without being asked, the way he has for thirty years, and I have never once wanted him to stop.
Del had given him the word for it in the Buchanans' kitchen back in November.
Both. The small days and the big ones. Both.
I stood at the calendar and didn't reach for an anniversary, or a birthday, or my mother's date, or the solstice, though all of them would get their stars in time, the way they always had.
I was after something else. My finger went down the January grid, square by square, past the numbers, past the empty weekends, and stopped on a Tuesday in the third week.
Nothing on it. No holiday, no occasion, nobody's day but ours.
An ordinary Tuesday in the flattest part of winter, the kind that slips past without anyone thinking to keep it, with not one reason to matter except that we'd be alive in it, together, in this house, and that I had decided it was worth marking.
"Come here a second," I said.
Jack came and stood beside me, coffee in his hand. Both cups were there now, mine and his, steam coming off the tops.
"What's that one?" he said, looking at the blank Tuesday under my pencil. He wasn't braced when he asked it anymore. He just wanted to know.
"Nothing," I said. "It's ours. That's the whole reason."
He looked at it, the deadest square on the page. "What happens on it?"
"Nothing," I said again. "That's the point."
He didn't say anything. He'd learned when not to.
He handed me my cup and held his own, and he stood there and watched, present, in no hurry to be anywhere else.
The pencil was sharp; I'd sharpened it that morning against the little blade I keep in the drawer.
Outside the window the yard lay flat and colorless, the maple bare, the light thin as skim milk across the counter.
I set the pencil against the paper beside that ordinary Tuesday, and I drew the first star of the year.
THE END
Thank you so much for giving me another whirl! As always, if you have an opinion, good or bad, I would love to hear it in the form of a review. Here are some books that are similar you might enjoy…
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