Chapter 3
IRIS
Friday morning I said, "You're at the elevator until six?"
He was at the counter with the coffee, which he'd made, which he does not do, and it was too strong. He'd also been up before me, which he is not.
"Iris."
"Six or six-thirty. I'm asking because of supper."
"We should talk about?—"
"Six or six-thirty."
He looked at the pot like the pot had the answer in it. "Six."
"Then I'll put it on at five-forty. It'll be ready when you come in."
He stood there holding it. I got my keys off the hook and went out to the truck twenty minutes earlier than I needed to.
That's how it went for eleven days. I don't yell — never once at Doyle in thirty-three years, because I watched my father yell and decided around age eleven that I wasn't going to sound like that.
What I do instead is get formal. I confirm times.
I state durations. I turn into the woman on the phone at the dentist's office, and Doyle would rather be hit with a shovel.
"I've got the Hutchins ladies at ten," I'd say. "That's two heads, so it'll run long. I'll be back by one."
"Okay."
"If you need the truck out of the drive before then, you'll have to move it yourself."
"Iris, I don't need the?—"
"I'm just telling you the schedule."
He tried, those first days, in the way a man tries when he doesn't yet know the size of the thing.
He brought home a rotisserie chicken Saturday like an offering.
He asked me twice if I wanted to sit down.
Sunday night he stood in the bedroom doorway with his hand on the frame and said, "Are we going to talk about the paper? "
"Not tonight."
"When?"
"I'll let you know," I said, and turned the lamp off, and that was cruel and I did it anyway.
I wasn't stalling because I hadn't decided what to say. Every time I opened my mouth, the thing that wanted out was a question I couldn't afford the answer to. Are there more than six?
The list rode in my purse. Eleven houses on Thursday and it sat in the zip pocket the whole route, and twice I parked between clients and took it out and read it, which is not something I care to admit.
That first read had been shock; every read after was arithmetic.
Fourteen items left. Twelve we'd never touched, as far as I knew.
Two I wasn't sure about. Number eleven is spend a night in a fire tower, and somewhere back there, four or five years ago, he and Lonnie had gone off for a weekend, and I could not for the life of me remember whether he'd said tower or cabin.
I sat in Della Pruitt's driveway with the engine off trying to reconstruct one sentence from a Sunday four years back.
The six were done. The checking was new.
My own book emptied out, and I didn't notice at first, which is the embarrassing part.
The route ran fine. Odette got her set, Tibbs got his shave, the Hutchins ladies got their color and their gossip and their sixty dollars' worth of me listening.
Nobody got canceled, nobody got shorted a minute, and if anything I ran long, because I wasn't in a hurry to come home.
What stopped was everything with my name on it.
The dentist called about the cleaning I was due for and I said I'd call back and did not call back.
Sherry from the shop in town — the one with actual chairs, where I go twice a year to have somebody else's hands in my hair for an hour — texted me twice about September, and I typed let me look at my week and never looked at my week.
My own trim went past due. I stood in the bathroom on the second Wednesday and pulled a piece of hair forward past my chin, and I'm a stylist, I know exactly what I'm looking at. I looked at it and put it back.
Doyle's mother's birthday was in there. I didn't book the drive.
Sherry texted a third time on the Sunday.
2 weeks out, I can hold Thursday the 11th at 6, say yes.
I read it at a stop sign with my blinker going and a man behind me who could have honked and didn't. I typed let me look, put the phone in the cup holder, drove to Della Pruitt's, and did a perm.
Della talked the entire two hours about her son-in-law and never once noticed I hadn't answered her.
There's a woman on my route, Mrs. Ivey, who hasn't left her house except for doctors in six years, and she keeps a calendar on the wall with my name on one square a month.
Everybody's booked. Mine empty from the third week of August forward.
I noticed that on a Wednesday night while I was cleaning the kit, and I sat down at the kitchen table with a comb still in my hand.
Thirty-one years of being the woman who shows up — eleven houses a Thursday in ice storms, the week after my gallbladder, the January Nate had the flu at nineteen and I ran the route and then came home and sat up with him.
I have never once canceled on Miss Odette.
And there was my own name nowhere at all in a book with a hundred and forty other people in it.
I put the comb in the roll, zipped the case, and did not book the dentist.
Then the mail came. Tuesday, twelve days after the closet, a long white envelope from a place with a trout on the return address, up in the northeast part of the state, and printed under the trout: SCHOOL SESSION CONFIRMATION.
I didn't open it. I turned it over twice and held it up to the kitchen window, and I could make out the shape of a page inside with a table on it, dates in a column — enough to know it was real.
Item four. Learn to fly-fish. Not one afternoon.
The whole school. There'd been a day two years back, a sunburn stripe across the back of his neck, and that was the tick. This was the next thing.
I stood the envelope against the sugar bowl in the middle of the kitchen table, trout facing the door, and then I made supper.
He came in at ten after six, hung his cap, washed his hands. The table is eight feet from the sink. He dried his hands, turned around, and I watched his shoulders change.
He saw it.
"Chops or the chicken?" he said.
"Chicken."
"Good."
We ate two feet from that envelope. He asked about my day and I told him about Tibbs's aid going quiet again, and he said bring it by, and I said I'd tell him.
We talked tomatoes. We talked about whether Nate was coming at Thanksgiving.
There was a white envelope with a trout on it standing against the sugar bowl the entire time, and my husband ate a plate of chicken and rice and never touched it.
He didn't touch it Wednesday either. Wednesday he wiped the whole table down after supper and worked around it, the way you'd work around a vase somebody left.
Thursday I was gone from seven-forty to four.
When I came in it was still there, bent a little at the top corner now, the way paper goes when it sits in a kitchen where people reach past it.
I straightened it against the sugar bowl before I took my coat off.
Friday morning I was at the sink with my coffee when he came through with his keys.
He stopped at the table, which he does not do on a workday, and I turned my head at the sound of paper.
He picked it up fast, one motion, the way you pick up something you've been walking past for four days, folded it lengthwise into his shirt pocket, and went out the door.
The window over the sink looks straight at the driveway.
He didn't know I was watching, or he forgot, which comes to the same thing.
He walked the way he walks when he knows he's being difficult — faster, chin down.
Then he got in the truck and did not start it.
He took the envelope out of his pocket, unfolded it, looked at it a second with his chin moving down and up.
Then he leaned over and put it in the glove box. Shut the glove box. Started the engine.
The glove box. Not the trash. Not his own hands, carrying it back inside. Not Iris, we need to talk about this, and here it is. The glove box, which is where a man puts a thing he means to keep.
I stood there until the truck was out of sight with my coffee going cold in the cup and my hands perfectly fine. Steady as anything. They go professional on me when it's bad.
I dried them and got my phone off the charger and opened my book — my real one, the appointment app with eleven Thursdays in it and a hundred and forty people who need me.
Then I scrolled up through the empty white weeks with my name nowhere in them.
He had three weeks. Whatever was on that page had a date on it, and the date was coming, and he was going to let it come.
I put the phone down, went into the bedroom, and did the thing I'd been refusing to do since the night I found it, which was take the card out of my purse and the list out of the card and count the checkmarks again.
Not the ones I could see. I held the page up flat to the window light and looked at it sideways, at an angle, the way you look at a table to see if it's dusty.
I was checking for erased ones. There was nothing — six ticks, no ghosts. It didn't matter. The checking was what he'd made.