Chapter Five
Sol
There are four ways to ask a man what he does all day and I have tried all of them, and I can tell you exactly how long each one lasts.
The first one lasts about eleven months.
That is the direct one. You say what happened today and he says a long day and you say I know it was long, what happened, and he says nothing you would want, and you say try me, and he looks at you with real affection and says Sol, and that is the end of it.
Eleven months of that and then you stop, not because he ever said stop, but because you can only stand in front of a kind door so many times before you notice it is a door.
The second one lasts about two years. That is the flanking one.
You do not ask him anything. You ask him about somebody else.
How is Fritz doing, is Hollis alright, and men will tell you a great deal about other men, so you get a lot, and for about two years you convince yourself that what you are getting is the same as being told.
It is not. It is a shape with a hole in the middle of it exactly the size of your husband.
The third one lasts eighteen months and it is the worst one.
That is the one where you get good at it.
You learn to ask at the right moment, which is when he is half asleep or when his hands are busy or when he is happy about something else, and you learn to make it sound like nothing, and sometimes it works and you get a sentence, and then you find yourself lying in the dark at two in the morning grading your own performance.
That is the one that made me feel like a woman running a con on her own marriage, and I stopped it because I did not like who I was becoming at it, which is the only clean reason I have ever quit anything.
And the fourth one is not asking.
The fourth one is what I have now. The fourth one is very peaceful. You would be surprised.
I am not suspicious. I want to put that down plainly because I have gone back over these years since and looked for the moment where I should have known, and there is not one, and that is not me being generous with myself.
You cannot notice a man going quiet when he went quiet six years ago.
Roan Vasquez-Doyle became unreachable in the second year after the gavel and he has been unreachable ever since, evenly, without variation, in the same tone of voice, and a woman does not wake up one morning and think, my husband has been consistent for six years, something must be wrong.
He is home most nights. He is home late most nights and he has been home late most nights since 2019.
He touches me in the kitchen. He remembers that my mother’s ice machine is a lie and that Dale keeps his office at sixty-one degrees.
He put his hand flat on my back a few days ago in a room full of men and left it there while he reached past me for coffee.
There is no version of that man where you go and look in his phone.
Melva Pankhurst calls me on a Thursday at ten past eight in the morning.
“Sol.”
“Melva.”
“He is not answering.” Her voice is doing the thing. “I have called eleven times.”
“Which one.”
“Wade. Wade, my Wade, who else.”
“Melva, listen to me. When did you call him.”
“All morning.”
“When did you start.”
“Six,” she says.
“Six in the morning.”
“He knows I have a nine o’clock.”
I get the coffee pot back on the burner and I sit down at my own kitchen table, which is what you do, because if you stand up you will start moving around and she will hear it in your voice.
“He was on a run last night,” I say. “He got in late and he has got his phone face down and he is asleep with his mouth open like a boy of nine.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know exactly that.”
“You are saying it to make me stop.”
“Melva.” I let it sit. “Do you want me to make you stop, or do you want me to tell you where he is.”
There is a long wet breath.
“Both,” she says.
“Alright. Both.” I move the pen out of my own reach.
“He is at the Yard. He came in at one and there were two of them and Junior does not sleep at the Yard because Junior has a girlfriend in Ivanhoe this month, so Wade will be in the back room on the bad couch, and there is no reception in that room, there never has been, Fritz says it is the roof.”
“He could walk outside.”
“He could. He is asleep.”
“Denny used to be asleep,” she says.
And there it is. Nine words. That is what this call was always about and both of us have known it since she said his name.
I do not say anything for a second. That is deliberate. If you rush in on that sentence you make her think she has said something shameful.
“I know,” I say.
“You do not.”
“I know that Denny was asleep for two days and then he was not asleep.”
“They said he was asleep.” Her voice comes apart properly now.
“They stood in my kitchen and they said give him a day, Melva, and I gave him a day, and I have gone over that day every single week for nine years, and I want you to tell me what I would have done with it. Because I ask myself what I would have done with that day and I have never once been able to answer it, and I still want it back.”
I put my hand flat on the table.
“You would not have got him back,” I say.
“You do not know.”
“No. I do not.” And I let her hear that I mean it. “Nobody does. That is the part that does not heal, and I am not going to sit here and tell you it does, because you would know I was lying and then you would not call me next time.”
She cries for about ninety seconds. I hold the phone and drink my coffee and do not say a single word, because the worst thing you can do to a woman who is finally crying is talk over it.
Then, the way it always goes, she comes back up.
“I have got a nine o’clock,” she says.
“You do. What is it.”
“The Dubberly girl. Roots and a trim.”
“Then go and do the Dubberly girl’s roots,” I say, “and I will call you back before ten.”
“You do not have to.”
“Melva.”
“Alright.”
I hang up and I call Junior, who does not answer, and then I call the landline at the Yard, which is a wall phone in the bar room from 1988 that everybody complains about and nobody will remove.
Hollis picks up.
“Yard.”
“Is Wade asleep on the couch.”
“Yes.”
“Is he on his back or his front.”
“Marisol.”
“Hollis, I have got his mother waiting, and she will want a detail, because a detail is how you know a person has actually looked.”
There is a pause and I hear him put the phone down on the bar and I hear his shoes go and come back.
“On his front,” Hollis says. “One boot on. There is a dog blanket over his legs that I did not put there and I am choosing not to investigate.”
“Thank you.”
“Is this about Denny.”
“Yes.”
“Ah,” he says, and it is not a small sound. “Do you want me to wake him.”
“No. Wake him at half nine and stand there while he calls her.”
“I will stand there.”
“Hollis.”
“I will make him do the voice,” he says. “The one where he is fine.”
I call Melva back at eight to ten and put the boot in and the dog blanket in, and she laughs at the dog blanket, and that is the sound I was fishing for.
Then she says thank you four times, which is three more than anybody needs to, and I say what I always say, which is that I did nothing, which is true in the sense that no money moved and no vote was taken.
Fritz comes by at half past two with a box of pads for a swamp cooler.
“Wrong size,” he says, before I can ask. “Hardware had the wrong ones and I have got to go to Ivanhoe again Friday, and your mother will say I told you the old ones were fine.”
“She will.”
“She will be wrong.”
“She will be wrong loudly,” I say, and give him a glass of water, and he stands in my kitchen and drinks all of it in one go the way he has since he was nineteen.
Then he stands there with the empty glass and does not put it down.
“Sol.”
“Mm.”
“Nothing.”
“Fritz.”
“It is genuinely nothing.” He turns the glass around. “I looked at his bike Monday.”
“Which bike.”
“Roan’s. He had a light out and I said leave it and I will do it, so I did it, and I was in there anyway so I did the oil, because he is nine hundred over and he does not track it, and I wrote the reading on the sticker like I always do.”
“Alright.”
“And I have got the last sticker in the book at the shop.” He sets the glass down at last, very carefully, squared to the edge of the counter. “That is all.”
I am wiping the counter. I remember that. I have thought about this ten thousand times and the thing I remember is that I did not stop wiping the counter.
“That is all what.”
“That is all,” Fritz says.
And he looks at me. He looks at me for about two seconds longer than a man looks at a woman he has known for twenty years, and there is something working behind his face, and I can see him get right up to the edge of a sentence and then walk back off it.
“Do you want a sandwich,” I say.
“I have had four sandwiches this week and every one of them was against my will.”
“Fritz.”
“I have got Dorrie’s tank,” he says. “I am going to go and do Dorrie’s tank.”
He picks his keys up off the counter. At the door he stops with his hand on the frame, and he does not turn round.
“You would tell me,” he says. “If something.”
“Something what.”
“Anything.”
“There is nothing.”
“Right,” he says. “Right. No, that is what I thought.”
And he goes out to the truck, and I stand at the window and watch him sit in it for about eleven seconds before he starts it, which is not long enough to be anything, and I go back to the counter.
Here is what I thought, at the time, in that order.
I thought: Fritz has been strange since Denny’s anniversary, which is this month, and everybody in this club goes strange in August.
Then I thought: he has been on a roof for three hours and he is tired.
Then I did not think about it again, because Wade’s mother had a nine o’clock and Dorrie Voss needs her tank moved before winter and there is a bar list on my counter that says ice and limes and the whiskey Hollis likes, and Sunday is coming, and I have got a room to stock.