Chapter 2
IRIS
Iknew what it was from the fold, before I'd seen a word of it — three panels, softened at the seams, the yellow gone pale along the creases the way paper does when it's been opened and shut and opened again by hands that cared about it.
I sat there on the closet floor with the card in my lap and my chest went ahead of my brain, the way it does.
It came apart in three moves, and the third crease stuck and I had to work it with a thumbnail. Two handwritings, alternating. Mine and his, line for line down the page, twenty numbered items in blue ink and black.
The list.
I smiled. For about ninety seconds, sitting on the floor of my own hall closet with my back against the door frame and dust on my slacks, I was happy.
My fortieth birthday, fourteen years ago.
February, and the furnace was fighting us that winter, so we were in bed by nine-thirty under two quilts with the space heater running in the corner like a small angry pet.
Doyle had given me a card and a wristwatch I still wear, and I'd said — propped up on one elbow, in that stupid way you say a thing you've been thinking about for a week — "I don't want a party. I want a list."
"A list of what."
"Things we're going to do."
"We do things."
"Things we haven't done, Doyle."
He got the legal pad off the dresser, because the legal pad lived on the dresser, and a pen with it, and handed me both. I handed the pen back. No, I said. Both of us. You write one, I write one, all the way down. Which is what we did. His first, because he wanted to go first.
1. Ride a mule down into the canyon.
Mine. That was mine — no, wait. I looked again at the page in my hands and it was blue ink, and blue was me that night.
Number one was mine. I could hear myself writing it, and Doyle saying, "A mule," and me saying down to the bottom, not the rim, the bottom where the river is, and him saying I'd be sore for a week, and me saying I'd be sore at the bottom of a canyon, Doyle.
He wrote two. See a big-league game. Whole weekend, not a day trip.
I wrote three, the caving tour, the real kind where you have to duck.
He wrote four, learn to fly-fish, not one afternoon, the whole school.
I wrote five, the hot-air balloon at sunrise, and he said I was scared of ladders and I said there's no ladder in a balloon.
And on down, all twenty. Some of them his, big and loud and physical.
Some of them mine, which were also physical, because I have never once in my life wanted a quiet weekend — a tractor pull at the state grounds, because my grandfather had a Farmall and I never got to see one run against another; a night on a boat; the swinging footbridge upstate, the century-old one my mother walked me across when I was nine, and the overlook out past it.
The last was his. 20. Get old doing all this.
I read all twenty sitting on that floor with my eyes stinging and thought, we've got some catching up to do, mister.
Then I came back to the balloon. Number five, my handwriting, go up in a hot-air balloon at sunrise, and something moved sideways in the back of my head — not a thought yet, more like the pressure you get halfway up the stairs when you remember the burner.
Lonnie's refrigerator.
Doyle's brother keeps a refrigerator door like a bulletin board.
Coupons, a fishing calendar, his grandkids' school pictures in those cardboard frames.
And in the middle of it, under a magnet shaped like a walleye, three men in the basket of a hot-air balloon with the sun coming up orange behind them, all of them squinting, all of them grinning like idiots.
Doyle in the middle. I have stood in front of that refrigerator for three years.
I have gotten ice out of that freezer at Thanksgiving.
I have looked at that picture and thought look at them and gone back to the living room.
I put my hand flat on the floor. The floor was cool, and I stayed with that a second — the cool floor, the dust along the baseboard, the one snow boot lying on its side by my knee.
He went up in a balloon.
And I had known that. Somewhere I had known it, the way you know a thing that got mentioned once at a table with six people talking — somebody's charity deal at the fairgrounds, rides for donations, Lonnie's idea, three years ago, on a day I was out on the route.
I'd heard about it afterward in the car, laughing.
Nobody had said the word list.
I flattened the paper wider against my thigh and started down the twenty again, and this time I wasn't reading a memory, I was reading a ledger.
2. See a big-league game. Whole weekend, not a day trip.
Seven years ago — four of them from the elevator, Friday through Sunday, a hotel by the interstate, tickets somebody's cousin came up with.
Doyle brought home a cap for Nate and a story about the man in their row keeping a scorebook by hand, and I remember thinking, good, he never gets a weekend.
I packed a cooler for that drive. Sandwiches for five men, cut in half on the diagonal, which I do without deciding to, ice packs laid on top so the bread wouldn't sweat.
He hugged me in the kitchen at four-thirty in the morning and said don't wait up Sunday, we'll be late, and I waited up Sunday.
That Sunday I had a chicken in by four so it'd be ready whenever they rolled in, and when he finally came through the door at nine he was red across the nose and so pleased with himself he could hardly stand up straight. He told me about the man with the scorebook twice.
3. Take a caving tour, the real kind, where you have to duck.
Six years ago. He'd called it a work trip, and it was one — two days at a regional co-op thing four hours south — but there'd been an afternoon in there, and he came home with a flashlight keychain from a gift shop and told me the guide turned all the lights off.
I said that would've scared me to death in a voice that meant take me.
I sat there and did not move while the rest of them came up off the page. The boxes were still stacked around me. The cedar block had rolled out of somebody's pocket and was lying by my ankle, and I picked it up and set it down twice.
The tractor pull at the state grounds, five years ago, with Lonnie, on a Saturday when I had eleven heads.
The fly-fishing day, two years ago in May, on water that belongs to a family named Ferrin — he came home sunburned in a stripe across the back of his neck and I put aloe on it at that same sink while he told me the man teaching them said he had a good arm for it. I was pleased about that.
The canyon.
The canyon was nine years ago, the fall the elevator shut down for the belt replacement, and he went west with Lonnie for eight days, and I packed his bag.
I bought the moleskin for his heels. He came home with two hundred photographs on his phone and I sat on the couch and swiped through every one and asked good questions.
Six.
I counted them twice out loud, sitting on the floor of an empty hallway with the boxes around me.
One, two, three, five, seventeen, four — and the canyon, which is one, which I'd already counted, so I started over and got the same six.
Six of the twenty, done, and not one of them with me, and not one of them ever mentioned in the same breath as this piece of paper in nine years.
The refrigerator kicked on. Out front a car slowed for the curve and went on. I heard the water shut off in the kitchen, so he was finishing the dishes, and he'd have the towel over his shoulder, and he'd come looking for me in about four minutes.
I turned the paper toward the hall light, wanting to be sure again about whose ink was whose, and that's when I saw them. Little marks at the left margin, ahead of the numbers.
Checkmarks. Six of them, ballpoint, in a black that didn't match the black of the original writing — a newer pen, and not all at one sitting either, because two of them pressed harder than the others and one had the dry start a pen makes when it's been lying in a drawer.
One beside the canyon. One beside the stadium, the cave, the tractor pull, the balloon, the fly-fishing.
He hadn't just done them. He'd come home. He'd gone to the closet, or wherever it lived before the closet, and taken this paper out of this card and unfolded it on some flat surface in this house, and ticked it.
It wasn't rage. Whatever it was came up my arms instead of my face, cold, and my hands started shaking on the paper while I watched them do it like they belonged to a client.
The dish towel. Water running, then not running. The floorboard in the kitchen doorway.
"Iris? You fall in?"
I didn't answer. He came around the corner drying his hands and stopped when he saw me on the floor, and his eyes went straight to my lap, to the yellow paper.
I was watching his face, but it was his hands that told me — the right one quit moving in that towel, just quit, mid-motion, like somebody cut the string.
He knew what it was from six feet away. From the fold.
"Oh," he said.
Not what's that. Not where'd you find that.
"Six," I said, and he didn't ask six what.
I sat on the floor and let the quiet run, because thirty-one years in rooms where people talk to fill it will teach you exactly how long a man holds out. Nine seconds.
"Iris," he said. "You never really wanted those, honey."
It landed in the hall like something dropped.
Out in the kitchen the icemaker let go of a batch.
And he'd said it gently, the way you'd tell somebody the store was closed — not defending himself, because it hadn't occurred to him yet that he was in a position that needed defending.
He believed it. He stood there with the dish towel and handed it to me like information.
I looked down at line one. Blue ink, my hand at forty years old, in bed, laughing, with a space heater going in the corner. Ride a mule down into the canyon. To the bottom. Where the river is.
"Okay," I said.
I folded the paper back along its old creases, and it went easy, knowing the way.
Panel, panel, panel, into the card, and the card into my purse on the bench by the door, and I zipped it shut.
Then I got up off that floor a piece at a time, which took a while, and he didn't offer me a hand and I wouldn't have taken one.
The boxes were still stacked in the hall. I stepped around them.
"Iris."
"I've got Marcy Vaughn at nine tomorrow. I need to be up at six."
I went to bed. He stood out in that hall a long time, and I lay there and listened to him not come.