22. Jamie
JAMIE
Asecret in Pinewood Ridge is a contradiction in terms, like dry rain or a quiet rooster, and ours had been common knowledge for weeks before either of us had worked up the nerve to call it anything at all.
We kept up the pretense regardless, partly because Zoe found it funny and partly because I had discovered, late in life, that I would do a great many undignified things to keep her finding things funny.
We invented errands. I developed a sudden and suspicious devotion to checking the upstairs smoke detector.
She took to announcing, to no one in particular, that she was going to go over the inventory, and would then be gone over the inventory for a stretch of time no inventory has ever required.
Della logged every absence with the face of a woman compiling evidence she will never need, because the case had closed itself a long while back.
Hank Dooley, who had personally carried the news to the feed store the same morning he wrenched it out of us, had since appointed himself the guardian of our privacy, a duty he discharged by Not Noticing at a volume you could hear from the road.
He would turn up with a hen that had nothing wrong with it, find me standing a touch too close to Zoe, and report his non-findings to the ceiling.
“Don’t mind me,” he would say, minding us with the whole of his body.
“Didn’t see a thing. Couldn’t tell you a thing if you held me upside down and shook me.
” Then he would wink at Asher, who had no idea what the wink meant and returned it with both eyes at once, which is the only correct way to receive a wink from Hank Dooley.
Here is the part I did not see coming. I was happy.
I do not use the word lightly. I have spent five years treating it as a word for other people, a language I could admire without ever expecting to speak it.
But there it was. I woke before the alarm and did not dread the day waiting on the far side of it.
I caught myself humming at the surgical sink, an actual tune, poorly.
I laughed at things, out loud, in front of witnesses, and stopped checking afterward to see who had seen.
I had not felt anything close to it since before the funeral, and the strangeness of it made me dizzy, the way you go dizzy standing up too fast in a dark room.
And because I am the man I am, the happiness did not come alone.
It arrived with a tenant I have never managed to evict, the old certainty, settled into the corner with its hat in its lap, patient.
I kept finding myself braced. I would be standing in the kitchen watching Zoe wrestle the boy’s cowlick into temporary submission, and some animal part of me would go quiet and begin to listen, the way you listen for a sound you heard once and have spent years dreading you will hear again.
The floor had opened under me before, on an afternoon as ordinary as any of these, with no warning worth the name.
I know precisely how silent it goes, the half second before.
So I listened for the silence. I could not help it.
A man learns the one weather that nearly killed him, and after that he reads the sky every day of his life.
And there was this. Somewhere in the middle of all the good days, I began to feel a weight on her that she would not set down.
It was nothing I could have put a finger on.
She laughed in the right places. But once or twice I caught her looking at her phone the way a person looks at a door they have locked and are no longer sure will hold, and once I came up the stairs and found her standing in the center of the apartment doing nothing at all, only standing, with the particular stillness of someone working a sum they do not want the answer to.
I knew that stillness from the inside. I had lived in it for years. And I knew, the way you know a thing in your own bones, that the worst move available to me was to reach for it before she was ready to put it in my hands.
She had done this very thing for me once, on a trail above a river, when she read what was crossing my face and did not make me say one word about it, and turned her boy gently away from the water, and asked me for nothing in return.
It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in a long time.
So I gave it back the only way I knew how.
I did not push. I made the apartment a place where a heavy thing could be set down the moment she chose to set it down, and I waited, and I told myself the waiting was trust.
I have had a great deal of time, since, to weigh the difference between trust and a door you leave standing open while the person you love walks past it, again and again, and you say nothing, because you are too frightened of the draft to ask why she will not come through.
The matter of the holiday came up the way every matter in that town comes up, which is at Marge’s counter, sideways, with no warning and no mercy.
Marge runs the communal supper the way a general runs a winter campaign, and she had me cornered at the register before I understood there was a corner.
“You’re coming this year,” she said. It was not a question, but she left a small space after it, the way you leave a gap in a fence to see whether the animal bolts.
“I usually…”
“I know what you usually. Four years of usually. You hand the pies out from behind my counter so you never once have to sit down at a table, and every year I’ve let you, because grief draws a long leash in my establishment.
” She set a coffee down hard enough to make the point land.
“But you’ve got a woman and a boy now. That boy is going to be at that supper whether you hide behind my register or not.
Think on what it does to a child to look up from the little table on a day like that and find his person is not in the room. ”
She had me, and she knew she had me, and she had the grace not to look like she knew it.
The truth is that I have spent every holiday for five years finding a corner to put my back against. Holidays are when the missing stands up and walks around the room.
A plain unmarked day I can manage, because nobody expects a plain day to be anything in particular.
But the days with names on them, the ones you are meant to gather for, those are the days the empty chair learns to talk.
So I had my answer ready, the one I have given for years, worn smooth as a river stone. I opened my mouth to hand it over.
“What can I bring?” I heard myself say.
Marge did not gloat. I will owe her for that as long as I live.
She wrote something on her pad and said, “Pie. The store kind, so the rest of us feel superior about ours,” and turned to the next customer, and left me to stand there in the rubble of having said yes to a holiday for the first time since the world ended.
I walked back to the clinic not entirely certain who had been at the wheel.
I had said yes. I had agreed to a table, to a room full of people on a day with a name on it, to being counted by a whole town among the men who show up.
The wall I have kept at my back for years was still there, I could feel the cold of it, and I had just agreed to stand in the middle of a bright room with nothing behind me at all, and the strangest part, the part I kept turning over, was that the thought did not make me want to run.
It made me want to find Zoe and tell her we were going.
Asher took the news that we were all going to the town supper as though I had announced a trip to the moon, and with roughly the same volume of follow-up questions.
Would there be pie? Would there be other kids?
Could Bandit come? Was it true that Mr. Dooley owned a turkey he held conversations with?
The answers, in order, were yes, almost certainly, no, and very probably.
Zoe watched me survive the interrogation with a look I could not fully read, something glad with something heavier folded under it, the weight again, the thing she would not name.
That night, after the boy went down, she stood at the dark window a long while, and I came up behind her and set my hands on her shoulders, and I felt her lean back into me and go, for a moment, completely still.
“You’d tell me,” I said. “If there were a thing.” I made it as easy to step around as I knew how, because I am a coward in the exact shape of a man who does not want to lose what he has only just found. “I’m not asking. I’m only saying the door is open. That’s the whole of it.”
She was quiet a moment. Then she turned inside my arms and smiled up at me, and she said, “There’s nothing, Jamie. You worry like a man who’s only just remembered he has something to lose.”
It was not quite a no. I knew it was not quite a no. I let it stand as one, because I wanted to, and that is the whole of my part in what came after. I had a key in my hand, and I chose not to use it, because the locked room was warm and I had been cold a very long time.
Later, with her breathing gone slow and even against my side, and the boy asleep down the hall, and the two dogs conducting their nightly border dispute over the warm patch by the vent, I did a thing I had not let myself do in years.
I made a plan with other people in it. I thought about the supper, and what a man wears to such a thing, and whether Asher would want me beside him or would be too busy being a citizen of the little table, and whether Zoe took the dark meat or the white, which I did not yet know and fully intended to learn, and somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary planning I caught the word my mind had been using without asking my permission.
Us.
It meant us, the two of us, a single unit. It meant a thing with a tomorrow fastened to it, and a Thanksgiving, and a long row of named days marching out ahead of us where, for five years, there had been only walls.
I lay very still and waited for the panic to arrive and take it back, the way it always arrives, gentle and certain, to remind me what wanting costs a man like me. I waited for the familiar dread to stand up in its corner and read me the sentence.
It did not come.
There was only the dark, and her breath, and the boy down the hall, and a man lying in a bed he had finally allowed himself to sleep in, thinking us, and going unpunished for it.
And that, I understood, lying there in the unfamiliar quiet of it, was the single most frightening thing that had happened to me all year. Not the wanting. I had already survived the wanting. This was worse. This was the wanting beginning to feel like a thing I might actually get to keep.