Vera #2
Somewhere past the county line he says, “Tell me a liquidator story. A good one. Not sad.”
“They're usually sad.”
“One that isn't.”
“Okay.” I think. “Estate out past Milford, four years ago.
Ninety-one-year old widower, kids want everything gone in a week.
In the garage, under a tarp, is a box with a 1961 wedding dress, preserved, museum grade.
Kids have no idea. Turns out he'd been married before their mother, one year, she died young, nobody ever spoke of her again. And pinned to the box, in his handwriting, recent handwriting, shaky, it says: she would want it worn.”
“What'd you do?”
“Found a bridal charity that dresses girls who can't afford it. Sent it with the note still pinned. The kids wanted to know what it appraised at, and I told them it appraised at somebody would want it worn, and billed them extra for the hour.” I look out the window.
“He'd checked on it, Caleb. The tarp was recent. Ninety-one years old, climbing on a stepstool every so often to make sure she was keeping.”
Caleb's quiet for a mile. Then: “That's not a not-sad story.”
“No. But you didn't want a not-sad story. You wanted to know if things stay loved when nobody's looking.” I say it before I've decided to, straight into the windshield, and feel him glance over. “They do. That's the whole trade secret. They keep.”
The coffees go cold in the cupholders. Neither of us drinks past the first inch.
There's a console between us, his hand on it doing nothing.
At some point outside Ferris, my hand is on it too, doing nothing, two inches of molded plastic between our little fingers, and both of us are extremely calm about it, and neither of us moves for forty miles.
I have never been so aware of two inches in my life.
I could appraise those two inches. Provenance: unknown.
Condition: dangerous. Estimate on request.
He is in my head when he is not in the room now. I know he takes the first sip too hot on purpose. I know what his hands do when a fact changes shape, and what they do when I stand too close.
Last night I lay in my marriage bed replaying a man saying driveway's honest, and the replay had better production values than the original.
I resent every single second of the timing, because I am nine days into investigating my husband and my body has apparently decided this is the moment to come back on line.
There should be a form you can send it. A hold-harmless. Not now. We're working.
We stop for gas outside Halstead.
I gather my coat to get out, and he's already around the truck, opening my door before my hand's on the handle.
He doesn't perform it, it's not a bit in a show.
He's just there, holding the door and the cold rolls in and I step down into the space between him and the door frame, and it's a smaller space than either of us planned.
And I stand in it for one second on purpose, close enough that his breath moves my hair. He locks his knees and lets me choose the distance. Then I step past him toward the pumps like a woman with normal blood pressure.
“Windows,” I say. “I'll get the squeegee.”
“Yep,” he says, one syllable, gravel all the way through it, and I hear him not move for a second before he does.
Neither of us mentions it. Both of us know exactly where it's shelved.
Halstead announces itself with a fiberglass walleye and a state-road strip of the businesses that survive on towns like this: bait, tackle, a pharmacy with a hand-lettered sale sign, two motels arguing about vacancy, and a diner.
The diner's called Patsy's. It's got geraniums in the window boxes even though it's March, plastic ones, hopeful, and a sandwich board out front, and a specials board behind the register, whiteboard, the big kind.
We're not even parked yet when Caleb makes a sound I've never heard a grown man make, low, involuntary, like something under the sternum coming loose after years.
Because we can both read the specials board from the street.
WALLEYE BASKET. HOTDISH OF THE DAY. RHUBARB CRISP WHILE IT LASTS.
Round hand.
Quick.
All caps. No lowercase anything, no g's, no little balloons. Doesn't matter. I've spent a week with that handwriting in a freezer bag, and Caleb has spent a lifetime with it in birthday cards, and neither of us needs the g's.
He gets the truck parked on the second try. His hands aren't fully his either.
“That's her board,” he says, staring through the windshield. “Vera. That's my sister's handwriting on a specials board in Halstead.”
“I know.”
“She might be twenty feet from me right now, behind that register, and if I walk in there wrong, she's gone.
She's got a go-bag by the door, guaranteed, she'll be out the back before the bell on the front door stops.” He's white around the mouth.
All that time and twenty feet. “How do we do this?
You're the one who knows how people run.
How do we walk into that diner so my sister doesn't run?”
I look at the geraniums. Plastic, in March. Hopeful anyway. Somebody in there writes RHUBARB CRISP WHILE IT LASTS in the best handwriting in the world.
“We don't stop her from running,” I say. “She's earned the running. We just make sure that when she runs, the first thing chasing her is a word only two people alive know.”
His breath goes out slow. His hands come off the wheel one at a time.
“Stovepipe,” he says.
“Caleb.” He looks at me. I take his coffee out of the cupholder and put it in his hands, cold, pointless, something to hold. “Whatever happens in there. However she is. The missing years ran through her too.”
“Yeah.” He looks at the door of Patsy's like a man looking at open water. “Let's go be somebody's worst morning.”