28. Willow
— ? —
Willow
He told me about Fairgrounds Road on a Thursday, standing in my kitchen with his coat still on, in the plainest sentence I have ever had out of him.
“Your mother’s house is going on.”
I put the cup down.
“Since when?”
“Ackroyd heard it at the bank. It’s a probate thing. The man who bought it off you has died and his children are in Dallas and they want it gone before spring.” He had not sat down. “That’s the whole of what I know and I have not asked anybody anything else.”
“I’m going to say the next part badly, so give me a clear run.”
“Go on.”
“I want to buy it. This afternoon, whatever they ask, without looking at it, and put it in your name and never mention it again.” His hands went into his coat pockets.
“I have wanted that since Ackroyd said the word probate. I have been sitting in a parking lot since Ackroyd rang, not doing it, and I’m telling you I wanted to, because I am not doing the thing where I do it and then look modest about it. ”
Well, I thought. That’s new.
“And?”
“And I’m not going to. It’s your mother’s house. If I buy it, it stops being your mother’s house inside ten minutes and becomes a thing I did.” He looked at the table with the short leg. “I’ve done that. I did it with a folder. You put it under a table.”
What happened next took the whole winter and was extremely boring and I would like to describe every part of it to anybody who will sit still.
I went to a bank.
I sat in a room in town with a man younger than me who called me Mrs. Folger twice and Ms. Sutton after I corrected him twice, and I put in front of him a paying-in book from an account opened the week before my wedding, a contract with Dee Coffin’s agency with my name on it, and a set of figures I had done myself at Ruth’s table with a pen and a cup of tea, four times, because I did not trust the first three.
He took two weeks to say no, which I think was meant to be kind and was not.
I sat in the parking lot afterwards and let myself have it, once, with the radio off.
You could ring him, I thought. He would do it this afternoon and never mention it and be perfectly lovely about it for the rest of your life, and every single time you stood in that kitchen you would know.
The other sentence was in my mouth as well. I want to be honest about that. Do you know who my husband is. It was fully formed and I could feel the shape of it and it would have worked.
I rang Boston instead.
“They will not be as nice to you,” said Alicia Harvey, “and they will not care who you are married to, and they will ask extremely rude questions about January.”
“Can they say no as well?”
“They can. Then you go to a third, and by then you’ll be very good at the answers.” A pause on that line. “Mrs. Sutton, you have been married for years to a man who could do this with a phone call. It will take you until spring and it will be worth about four hundred times more than the house.”
It took until spring. There was a survey and a thing about the roof and two weeks where it nearly went because the children in Dallas fell out over a different property entirely.
There was also an afternoon in February when I sat in that kitchen with a letter and worked out I could not do it, and rang Dee Coffin instead of ringing my husband.
Dee said, “Right,” and came around with a folder of her own and went through it line by line at that table until nine o’clock at night, and at the end said, “You’ve undercooked January, everybody does,” and rewrote two numbers, and it went through on those two numbers.
I have not told Michael which two. He has not asked. Dee has told about nine people.
He did not do one single thing all winter.
I know precisely what that cost him, because Pia told me, with dates.
He rang her instead of ringing the agent.
He drove past the house once in February and did not stop.
On the day the second bank came back Levi says he went into the shed and shut the door for a while and came out and said nothing at all.
He asked me one question that whole winter.
“Do you want me to not ask?”
“Yes.”
“Right,” he said, and never asked again.
And he was at that gate at six o’clock in the dark from November, in the rain, in a coat that was wrong for it, and never said one word about being there, and I never said one word about him being there, and we did the entire winter like that.
I got the keys on a Tuesday in the spring, from a woman in an office, in my own name. She said, “Congratulations, Ms. Sutton,” and got it right first time.
I did not take anybody with me. Pia offered and Dee offered and Michael did not offer, which was the correct answer and which I noticed.
Same front, same hall, same door I left standing open behind me one off-season with a man’s engine going in the lane. I stood in that kitchen for a while.
Kristina came at the end of the week and stood in the garden in the wrong shoes.
“You bought it.”
“I bought it.”
“With what? I am not asking to be unpleasant. I am asking because there is only one interesting answer and I would like to hear you say it.”
“With a mortgage, in my own name, on the back of a job, with the account I opened the week before I married your son.”
Kristina looked at that house for a long moment.
“Good,” she said.
And then, because she has never once in her life left a room on the right note: “He wanted to buy it. He came and sat in my sunroom and asked me whether I thought he could get away with it, and I said no, and he said he knew, and then he sat there for a considerable time not drinking a cup of tea.” She got her sunglasses out.
“I have not enjoyed anything that much in years.”
Alicia Harvey discontinued it on a Wednesday, charged me for it, and sent a letter that said nothing except that it was done.
“Is that it?”
“That’s it. There is no ceremony, Mrs. Sutton. There is a form and a fee, which I have taken, and now you are a woman who was never divorced, and the whole of it will fit in one line of your life if you ever have to explain it to anybody.”
“It feels like it should be bigger.”
“It is bigger,” said Alicia Harvey. “It just is not paperwork.”
We went to the courthouse on a Friday morning in the spring. Not for anything. I had to explain that to Pia four times.
The room is smaller than I remembered and it smells of floor polish and the window looks at a parking lot.
The clerk is a woman called Bernadette who has been there since before either of us was born, and she looked at the pair of us once and said, “Sutton.”
“You remember.”
“I remember because I got it wrong twice and your husband took my pen off me. I have thought about that a great deal over the years and I have never once decided whether I was cross about it.”
“You were cross about it,” said Michael.
“I was livid,” said Bernadette. “Are you here for anything?”
“No.”
“Right,” she said, and went back to her screen, and let us stand in a municipal room for as long as we wanted, which turned out to be hardly any time at all, and turned out to be enough.
Michael said one thing in there.
“I had a call.”
“I know you did.”
“That’s it. That’s the whole apology and I’m not dressing it up, because it isn’t the size of a speech. We stood here and it was done and I had a call, and I have thought about it ever since, and I would now like to go and have the lunch.”
The lunch took the afternoon. There was nobody else at it and I had to defend that to two separate members of that family.
We had a table with a wall on one side and nobody behind me, which he did not mention and which I noticed the second I sat down.
He put his phone on the table face down, then picked it up and turned it off, properly off, holding the button down while looking at me with such enormous self-satisfaction that I had to put my napkin over my face.
“Don’t.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You are radiating.”
“I have turned a phone off,” Michael said. “I’d like a moment.”
We were there until the light changed. Bread, the thing after the bread, and two puddings because we could not decide. He told me about Prentice, who has retired, and who sent a card that said well done and nothing else, which Michael has kept and cannot explain.
“What did you do with the letter?”
“It’s in a drawer.”
“Right.”
“It’s in the drawer with the clipping,” I said, “and I put the clipping in the range in November, and the letter is staying where it is, and that is the whole of what you’re getting.”
He looked at the tablecloth for a moment.
“That’ll do,” he said.
And nobody rang, because nobody could.
Pia had put a marquee in my mother’s garden.
Nobody asked her to do this and she had been told specifically, by me, in a kitchen, that we were not having a thing.
The garden was full by the time we got up the lane.
Levi had done something to a barbecue that the fire service would want to see.
Dee Coffin had brought a cake and was telling everybody it was nothing.
Owen and Marie Rand stood by the hedge like a pair of lighthouses.
Sal was in a chair with Archie asleep across him, having done a great many laps of that garden first.
“You said no thing,” I said to Pia.
“You said no wedding. There is no wedding. Look around. Is anybody wearing a hat?” She handed me a drink. “This is a garden with some people in it and I have documentation.”
Levi found me by the hedge with two drinks and gave me both, which is how that man says things.
“You’re all right, then.”
“I’m all right.”
“Right.” He looked at the marquee for a while. “The radio works.”
“Levi.”
“It works, and I’ve had it looked at twice, and I’m telling you again,” he said, and went off to do something criminal to the barbecue.
Nobody made a speech. I had been braced for one the entire way up that lane, and Levi got as far as tapping a glass, and then looked at his brother and said, “Nah,” and put the glass down, and everybody carried on, and that was the best thing anybody did for us all year.
He got me into my mother’s kitchen at about ten o’clock on the grounds that somebody had to find more ice, which was a lie, and everybody in that garden knew it was a lie.
“There’s no ice.”
“There’s a whole bag of ice, Michael.”
“There is a whole bag of ice and I have hidden it,” he said, and shut the door with his back against it, which is a thing that man has been doing to me since I was seventeen and which has worked every single time.
“There’s a garden full of people out there.”
“There’s a garden full of people out there and every one of them watched us come in here, and not one of them is going to knock, because my sister has been running an operation all week and I’m not going to insult her by wasting it.”
Oh, I thought. She’s in on it. Of course she’s in on it.
“You’ve only just shut that door.”
“I’m aware of how long I’ve been holding the door.”
“You planned this.”
“I planned about half of it, and the half I planned was the ice.” He got both hands on my face. “You said ask me in the spring.”
“It is the spring.”
“I’m aware. I’ve had a calendar out. I have been extremely restrained about a calendar.”
And then he stopped talking, which is his best quality.
It was slow, and it was in my mother’s house, and it was on a coat on a floor, because there is no furniture in that place yet and neither of us cared.
He got me out of that dress with more patience than any man has ever shown about a zip, and took his time the whole way, and when I tried to hurry him he said no, once, in the wrong voice, and I stopped trying.
There was nothing careful in it and nothing owed in it and nobody was being managed.
He said things in the dark I am not going to write down and would not change one word of, and he said my name against my shoulder in a house where he used to knock on the back door with a bag of yesterday’s doughnuts, and I had one hand flat on a floor my mother mopped for years.
Somebody in that garden started singing at about midnight. It was appalling and neither of us moved.
Afterwards we lay on a coat in an empty room and I could hear my son not being asleep somewhere in the vicinity, because Sal had him, because Sal always has him.
“Ask me, then.”
“Now?”
“You’ve had a calendar out, Michael.”
So he asked me on the floor of my mother’s kitchen with nothing in his hands and no ring and no plan, badly, in one breath, with no punctuation anywhere in it.
I said yes. And then I said, “You’ll want to know I was always going to.”
“I know you were.”
“You did not know that.”
“Willow, I have been at that gate at six o’clock in the dark since November,” he said, “and you have never once said a word about it, and neither have I, and I worked it out around February.”
Next season, then.
The house on Fairgrounds Road has a table in it and it wobbles, because Archie stood in a shop and refused to consider anything that did not, and when I asked him why it had to wobble he looked at me as though I had failed a basic examination and said, “Fix it.”
So I shim it with a folded seed catalogue and swear about it roughly twice a week.
There is a boat in the water with a name on the transom now.
Archie chose it, Archie painted it, and the second letter has gone wrong again, which his father says is now the house style.
It says DUCK. That makes four of them. The rabbit, the snail, the little one in the shed, and thirty feet of teenage folly at a mooring.
When I pointed out that we could not keep running a fleet on one name, my son looked at me the way he looks at people who have failed a basic examination.
Michael says it out loud in front of the harbormaster with a completely straight face.
And on the Sunday, in that kitchen, with the phone face down on the side and nobody having him at all, my husband made his grandmother’s johnnycakes and handed our son his fourth egg.
Then in the afternoon Archie went around that house and collected everything he loves. The truck. An orange spoon. A sock. The book with the terrible dog in it. The whale, still wet, from the bath.
He carried them one at a time across the room and put them on the seat of his father’s chair, and stood back after each one to check the arrangement, and went and found another.
Duck went last.
“Dada sit,” he said.
And my husband put down the pan and crossed that kitchen and did not move one single thing.
He sat down on top of the entire afternoon, with the truck against his spine and the whale going through his shirt, and Archie climbed up over the arm and settled into the middle of it all and put Duck on his father’s shoulder, and stayed.
Nobody’s phone rang.
And if it had, it could have gone on ringing.
THE END