CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I got up off the blanket to answer it.
He was standing in the corridor under the fluorescent strip with a plastic grocery bag in one hand.
That is the thing I want to lead with, because it was the whole of it before he said a word.
I have known that man since I was twenty and I have almost never seen him in a public hallway with nothing on him.
There is always something. The polo with the department on the chest. The job shirt.
The badge on a lanyard, the T-shirt from the union golf outing, the jacket with the patch on the sleeve, the boots. Something.
He had on a gray coat and jeans and a pair of tennis shoes.
He looked like a man who had come to fix a dishwasher.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I know I should have called.”
“You should have.”
“Yeah.”
He shifted the bag.
“Can we talk for ten minutes?”
I looked back into 118. Danny was on the far bed with a library book and Ivy was at the table with her headphones on.
“Not in there,” I said. “There’s a kitchen down the end.”
The shared kitchen at the Fenwick Residence is at the north end of the corridor. Four stoves, three of which work, a long table, two chairs that match and four that do not, and a window over the sink with a view of the lot and the fence and the back of a muffler shop.
There was a man at the far end taking something out of the microwave. He looked at us and took his bowl and went.
Mike put the bag on the table.
“I got a few things.”
Milk. A loaf of bread. A box of the cereal Danny will eat and the other box, the one Ivy will eat, which are not the same box and never have been. A package of chicken thighs. Two boxes of pasta.
And a net bag of clementines.
He unpacked it item by item and set each thing on the table and did not look at me while he did it, and I stood by the door with my arms folded and let him.
“Ren, I’m going to ask you something and I’d like you to actually think about it before you answer.”
“Okay.”
“Let me stay here.”
I did not say anything.
“Not, I’m not talking about—” He put his hand flat on the table. “I’m not asking you for anything. I know where we are. I’m asking about the room.”
“There’s four people in ninety square feet and two beds.”
“I know.”
“So where.”
“I’d take the floor. That’s fine, I’ve slept on worse in a bunk room for fifteen years.” He looked up. “Actually, no. That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Then ask it.”
“I’d take the door,” he said.
The refrigerator in that kitchen has a compressor that comes on with a knock.
“Gus told me,” he said. “About the door. He heard it from somebody at the county, I don’t know how, they all know each other. He said you’re sleeping on the floor in the doorway because the closer won’t hold it.”
“That’s right.”
“So let me do it.” He said it quickly, like a man who has practiced it and does not want to be interrupted in the middle.
“I’ll come at nine and I’ll be gone at six.
I’ll be on the floor. He doesn’t even have to talk to me.
I’m bigger than you are, that door’s nothing, and you would get eight hours. ”
I stood there with my arms folded.
And I am going to write down the true thing, because if I leave it out then none of the rest of it counts.
For about four seconds I wanted to say yes.
Not because of him. I want to be exact. It was not tenderness and it was not weakness and it was not one flicker of what I used to feel standing in a doorway with my hands on that man’s stomach.
It was because I had slept on a floor for fifteen nights with a fire door resting on my hip and I was thirty-five years old and my back had stopped being a thing that recovered, and somebody was standing in a kitchen offering to take it, and my body said yes before I had any say in it at all.
Four seconds.
“No,” I said.
“Ren—”
“No.”
“Why?”
And that is a fair question, and he asked it fairly, and I had to stand in a shared kitchen at ten past eight at night and find the answer while he watched.
“Because he’d get used to you being there,” I said.
He did not understand.
I could see it. He was ready for the other thing, for the version where I said something about Tessa or about the twelfth or about what I am owed, and he had answers for all of that, and this was not in the pile.
“That’s—” He stopped. “That’s what I want. That’s the point.”
“I know it is.”
“He’s my son.”
“Yes,” I said. “And in three weeks he’d stop checking whether you were on the other side of that door, because you’d be there, and then one night you wouldn’t be.”
“I’d be there.”
“You’d be there until you weren’t. Something would come up.
A job, a thing, a night. And it would not be your fault, and it would be one night.
” I put my hands in my pockets. “And I would be the one on the floor at eleven o’clock with a seven-year-old who has just found out for the second time that a person can be reachable and then not be. ”
He looked at the table with the groceries on it.
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“No.”
“You know that’s not fair.”
“I know it isn’t,” I said. “I’m not doing it because it’s fair.”
He stood there for a while.
Then he did the thing that I did not see coming, and that I have gone back to more than the recording or the hearing or any of it, because it was quiet and it took four seconds and it told me everything about how this was going to go for the rest of my life.
He said it kindly.
“Ren.” He wasn’t angry. That is the part. He looked at me the way you look at somebody about to sign something without reading it. “You need to think about where this ends up.”
“Meaning.”
“Two kids. That room. Whatever you’re making now, minus whatever I can send you, which right now is nothing.” He held a hand out at the kitchen, at the four stoves, at the window over the sink. “And a boy who can’t sleep behind a closed door and won’t for years.”
“I’m aware of all of it.”
“Who’s going to want you like this?”
He did not say it to hurt me.
I need that understood, because it is worse.
If he had said it in anger I could have put it in the pile with the rest. He said it the way a man tells you the roof has about two years left in it.
He was giving me information. He believed he was doing me a kindness by being the one honest enough to say it out loud, and there was even something in his face that was sorry about it.
I did not answer him.
I have thought of about nine answers since. Some of them are good. I did not have one then and I stood in a shared kitchen and let it land, and it landed all the way, and it has come back up on me at bad hours for a year.
“Take your groceries,” I said.
“They’re for the kids.”
“Take them.”
“Erin.”
He picked up the bag. He put the milk in it and the bread and the chicken and both boxes of cereal, and then he stopped, and he took the clementines back out and set them on the table.
“He likes those,” he said.
And he went.
I stood in that kitchen for a couple of minutes and then I picked up the net bag and carried it down the corridor to the trash room, which is a closet with two barrels in it and a sign about what goes where.
I stood over the barrel with a bag of clementines in my hand for I do not know how long.
And I did not throw them out.
Not because of him. Because of a fact, and the fact was that my son likes clementines, and there were fourteen of them in that bag, and fourteen clementines is four dollars and eighty-nine cents that I did not have to spend that week.
That is what held me together in January. Not pride and not anger and not any of the things people would like it to have been.
My son likes clementines.
I brought them back to the room.
The door of 118 was open sixteen inches, and the blanket was already down across the threshold, folded in half lengthwise with the pillow at the end.
I had not put it there.
That was the first night Ivy did it. She never said anything about it and I never thanked her for it, and she did it every night after that until the day we left.
Danny was standing just inside.
He had his book against his chest with both arms around it and he was looking down the corridor past me, toward the north end, where the kitchen is, and I turned around and looked too.
Mike was still down there, at the end of the hall, with the grocery bag, not moving.
My son took two steps to the door.
He got both hands on the edge of it and he pulled it shut.
All the way. Past the latch. Until it clicked.
And then he reached up and put the chain on.