The Bucket List He Hid From His Wife

Chapter 1

IRIS

The coats came down the third week of August every year, whether the weather agreed with me or not, and that Tuesday it did not.

Eighty-eight degrees at four in the afternoon, the window fan in the kitchen pushing warm air around like it was doing somebody a favor, and me up on a step stool in the hall with both arms in the dark of the closet.

It smelled the way it always smells in there — cedar block and wool and dust, plus the ghost of Doyle's winter jacket, which has had the same peppermint wrapper in the pocket since the Clinton administration.

My mother did the closet in August, and her mother before her.

The reasoning has never changed: wait until you need a coat and you'll find the moth holes on the day you need it, standing in your own driveway in the cold, cussing.

So August it is. Everything out, everything checked, summer things down into the cedar chest, wool things hung with the shoulders all facing the same way, because a closet where the shoulders face different directions is a closet nobody can find anything in. I have a lot of systems.

"You want help?"

Doyle in the doorway with a glass of tea, shirt untucked, co-op cap still on, because the cap comes off at bedtime and not one minute before. Fifty-six years old and he still stands like a man who could pick up the heavy end of something if you asked him to, which he could.

"I want you to not help," I said. "Last time you helped, the good gloves went in the church box."

"Those gloves had a hole."

"Those gloves had a thumb. There's a difference."

He grinned into the tea. "You want a sandwich?"

"I want you to check the traps in the garage."

"You want me out of the hall."

"I want the traps checked."

"Already did. Two. Both of them regrettable." He said it with real sorrow, which is how he says everything about mice — Doyle sets the traps because you have to, then apologizes to the results.

He went off toward the garage and I listened to the whole sequence without meaning to: screen door, four seconds of truck radio while he checked something out there, screen door again. I could pick that out of a hundred houses.

"Three," he called.

"Doyle."

"That one was old."

"Doyle, I don't need the running total."

"You asked me to check them."

Summer jackets first, then the two good wool coats, his and mine, both of them fine.

Then the row of things that live in a closet without belonging to anybody in particular — the barn coat with the ripped lining, the hunter orange vest nobody in this house has hunted in since Nate was in high school, a raincoat I've been meaning to give away since I bought a better one.

Nate called on speaker partway through, from thirteen hundred miles off, on his lunch break, which is a different hour there.

My son can carry an entire conversation while eating. It's a gift.

"You doing the closet?"

"I'm doing the closet."

"It's ninety degrees."

"It's eighty-eight, and that's how they get you. Are you eating a sandwich standing up?"

"I'm eating a sandwich standing up."

"Sit down, Nathan."

"There's nowhere to sit."

He told me about a coworker who'd made a mess of a job, in the way men tell those stories, with a great deal of technical detail and no ending, and I said mm-hmm in the right places and kept my hands moving. When we hung up I noticed I'd folded the same fleece twice.

Wednesday I did the kit instead, which is a hard-sided rolling case, black, dented at one corner from the afternoon it went down Mr. Kelso's porch steps ahead of me.

Combs in the sleeve, shears in the roll, two capes washed and folded, the little battery clippers, the mirror with the taped handle, the cheap towels I don't mind bleaching.

Wednesday night, always, because Thursday is the route and Thursday has no room in it for a comb I can't find.

Eleven standing clients, all of them on that one day.

I started the route the year Nate went to kindergarten, when a woman named Peg with a walker asked whether I did house calls and I said yes before I'd thought about it, and it grew the way those things grow.

By now it's a shape in the week everything else has to bend around.

Doyle knows it. The elevator knows it. Nobody in this county tries to schedule me on a Thursday twice.

That Thursday I was out of the driveway at seven-forty.

Miss Odette first, the way it always goes, because she's ninety-six and sharpest between eight and ten, and because if I put her last I'd never get out of there.

Her kitchen is yellow, the paint is from 1974, and she'll tell you it's from 1974 inside the first ten minutes of any visit.

Wash and set. She takes the same kitchen chair with a towel across her shoulders and her chin up like a woman getting her picture made.

"You're late," she said.

"I'm four minutes early."

"You're late compared to what I was hoping."

I put the basin in the sink and ran the water warm.

She has a good sink for it, deep, with a high faucet.

Her hair's thin now and white as the inside of an apple, but there's a lot of it yet, and she wants it set.

Not blown out. Set. Rollers, net, the dryer bonnet she's had since her husband was alive.

"How's the shoulder," I said.

"It's ninety-six years old. How's yours."

"Sore."

"You want my chair?"

"You're sitting in your chair."

"I'd get up," she said. "It'd take a while."

"Fifty-four."

"Baby." She let a second go by. "Is it your back or your feet?"

"Feet."

"It's always the feet with women who stand."

I did her wash. Her hands stayed folded in her lap the whole time, thumbs still.

I read hands. Thirty-one years standing behind people will teach you that a face lies constantly while a person's hands go right on telling the truth, busy mouth or not.

Odette's go still when she's content and pick at the seam of her housedress when she isn't, and that morning they were still.

Mr. Tibbs at ten-fifteen, eighty-eight, a widower, a shave and a trim with the radio going the whole time to the station that runs swap-and-shop at eleven.

He apologizes for his ears. Every week I tell him his ears aren't the problem, the problem is that whoever cut him last had a personal grudge, and every week he laughs like it's the first he's heard of it.

By four I was home with my back talking to me and the kit parked in the hall.

Doyle makes supper Thursdays — that started six years back or so, and it's nothing fancy, pork chops or the chicken thing with the rice or breakfast for dinner when he's worn out — but it's on the table when I come in, and after eleven houses that isn't a small thing.

He had the chops going and he'd cut up a tomato from the garden, because we were at the part of August where you deal with tomatoes daily or you find soup on the counter.

"How's the ninety-six-year-old?"

"Told me I was late. I was early."

"She's a menace."

"She's the best client I've got." I got the plates down. "Tibbs's hearing aid was whistling again."

"The right one?"

"The right one."

"Tell him to bring it by. Wax in the port, probably, takes a minute.

" He's fixed half the hearing aids in this county and nobody can tell you why he's able to.

Thick fingers, no patience for anything else that small, and he'll sit at that table forty minutes with a paperclip and a flashlight and hand it back working.

We ate, and he told me about the load-out that morning, a driver named Denny who'd backed into the scale house post for the second time in a year, then climbed out of the cab and stood there studying the post like the post had moved on him.

"He said — and I want to get this right," Doyle said, holding up his fork. "He said, 'That wasn't there in June.'"

"It was there in June."

"It's been there since 1961." He was laughing before he finished, that low wheeze of his. "Iris. It has a plaque on it."

I laughed until my eyes watered and had to put my fork down.

He did the dishes. I went back to the closet, because the boxes were still stacked in the hall and I hate a job that sleeps overnight in the middle of itself.

What was left was the shelf — high one, above the rod, where the hats live and where things go to be forgotten in a legally binding way.

I had to get up on the stool with my arm all the way in, feeling along the back edge past the wool hats and a shoebox of gloves, then past something that turned out to be a single snow boot.

Then my fingers found a coat I'd forgotten about, his old canvas chore coat, folded up there instead of hung from the year he got the new one.

I pulled it down and the weight was wrong, stiff across the chest, and something slid out of the inside pocket and hit the floor by my foot with a soft little slap.

I got down off the stool with the coat over my arm and hung it on the doorknob.

An envelope, cream, foxed at the corner, gone soft the way paper goes when it sits. His name on the front in my handwriting.

An anniversary card. I knew it before I picked it up, having bought that card or one just like it thirty-three times. My knee didn't want the stool anymore, so I sat down on the closet floor with my legs out in front of me and opened it, expecting to smile.

Inside the card, folded in thirds along creases worn nearly through, was a piece of yellow legal paper.