Chapter 10
ten
ZACH
My grandmother still keeps my grandfather’s reading glasses in an old desk drawer.
They’re in there with a letter opener he was given by a man in Reno and a roll of stamps that expired before I could drive. She got me in there after lunch to go through the box that has to be signed alongside the structure, which is a box of things nobody needs and she isn’t throwing out.
“Sit down. You’re looming.”
“I’m tall, Gran.”
“You’re looming and it’s different.”
So I sat. She went through it with her glasses down her nose, handing me things every few minutes and telling me what they were.
A photograph of the first motel with the sign still broken.
The original deed on paper thick enough to build with.
A napkin with a number on it, which turned out to be what my grandfather offered Dan’s father for the parcel behind the highway, and which Dan’s father wrote a rude word on and handed back.
“He kept the napkin.”
“He kept everything. It was very tiring.”
There was a motel key in the bottom of the box on a cracked plastic fob, from the Grand Junction place, which has not existed since I was at school. She turned it over twice. Then she put it back in the box instead of on the pile for throwing out, and neither of us said a word about that.
Then she handed me something folded without saying anything about it, and I opened it, and it was my father’s handwriting on a compliments slip. A list of paint colors for a room in a motel in Grand Junction. He’d have been about my age.
“He had a rather terrible eye for the look of things,” Magda said. “Shocking. He’d have done the whole place brown.”
She says everything about him like that now. Lightly, with the weight underneath where nobody can get at it.
She was pleased about the design seat. I could tell before she said a word about it, because she went quiet and started squaring things off on the desk.
“It’s the right call,” she said.
“It’s Dan’s call, mostly.”
“No, it’s not.” She looked at me over the top of the glasses.
“Dan asked. You said yes. Don’t hand a man your decisions and then complain about him holding them.
It’s the right call, and don’t let Dan tell you it was his.
” She set the deed down. “That company needs somebody who can look at a room. Your grandfather couldn’t.
I could. Nobody asked me for forty years. I let it go, and I shouldn’t have.”
I nearly said it there. It was right there in my mouth.
My wife can look at a room better than anybody either of us has ever met.
And I didn’t say it, because she was happy and it was the good part of the afternoon, and I’d already worked out I was going to explain the whole thing to Lydia on the drive home.
Then she said, “Shayna will be marvelous. She was always the one with the eye.”
“Mm.”
“Do you remember the summer she redid the boathouse? She was about nineteen and she did the whole thing on nothing and it looked like a magazine.”
“I remember.”
“Your grandfather said—” She stopped and laughed at herself. “Well. He said a lot of things.”
“Gran.”
“He said she’d run this place one day.” She took her glasses off. “He was very taken with her. He liked a girl who argued.”
It went past me almost completely at the time, the way a thing does when you are holding a box on your knees.
She said it the way you say a settled fact. Not wistfully. There was no weight on it at all. She was folding a piece of paper while she said it.
And then she said, “We were all a bit surprised, you know. When you brought Lydia home.”
“Surprised? How?”
“Well, we’d had you and Shayna in our heads for years, darling. Years and years. You can’t just tell a family to stop.” She patted my hand. “And then along came this quiet little thing with the red hair who wouldn’t say boo, and we all had to have a good long think about it.”
“And?”
“And she’s lovely. You know she’s lovely. Don’t make that face at me.”
“Surprised how?”
“Oh, don’t.” She waved it off. “It was years ago and nobody thinks of it now.”
“I’d like to know.”
“Zachary.” She put the lid back on the box. “You brought home a girl none of us had met, six months after the last one, and you married her inside two years. We were surprised. Anybody would have been surprised. Then we all got to know her and we were delighted, and that is the end of the story.”
It came to six months, which to my family, I suppose means nothing. I met Lydia in a warehouse in Denver during one of the coldest Januaries and I knew within a week that I was in love with her, and not one part of that had anything to do with Shayna Lemont.
But it sits differently coming from someone else.
Maybe I should’ve been angry, ready to defend my choice of Lydia over Shayna in the end. It was right of me to say something.
I didn’t get angry. I didn’t say anything about it. I sat in my grandfather’s chair with a napkin from nineteen-sixty-something in my hand and something turned over slowly in my chest, and I put it down to being tired.
What I thought was: that’s just how she talks.
What I didn’t think, and should have, was that my wife has been sitting at tables with these people for four years. Every one of them has had that sentence somewhere in the back of their head the whole time.
“She’s not quiet,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Lydia. She’s not quiet. She’s the loudest person I know. She just doesn’t do it out loud.”
My grandmother looked at me over the top of her glasses for a second, and then she went back to the box.
“Well,” she said. “There you are.”
I went to find my wife.
She was in the great room doing the flowers over, which she does when there are too many people in a house. She had a trash bag and a look on her face and half of Magda’s arrangement on the floor.
“These have been dead since the day we got here,” she said. “Nobody looks at anything.”
She had petals stuck to her forearm. There was a smear of green on the side of her hand from the stems.
“Somebody put lilies in the guest wing,” she said. “Two people in this house have asthma. I’ve written it down twice.”
“Who for?”
“Everybody. Nobody.” She dropped a handful in the bag. “It’s written down.”
She pulled another handful, shook the water off them into the bag, and never once looked up at me while she did it. I didn’t notice that either.
“Hey.”
“Hi.” She smiled at me. “How’s the box?”
It was a nice, warm, easy smile, the one I’ve watched her put on for two hundred strangers at a hundred openings. She used it on me in an empty room and went straight back to the flowers.
“Lydia.”
“Yes?”
“Nothing.” I picked a stem up off the floor and handed it to her. “Come and find me later.”
“I will.”
She meant it when she said it. I could hear that she meant it.
I went back through. Dan got me about the schedule, then Petey wanted my eyes on something wrong with a trailer, then somebody’s child was crying in the mudroom. By the time I came up for air the flowers were done and the trash bag was gone off the floor and so was she.
She didn’t come find me.