Chapter 4
DOYLE
Ihad it worked out by Friday night.
More than two weeks of a house where my wife told me what time she'd be home like she was leaving a message with a service, and I'd spent nearly all of it hunting for a door.
There wasn't one. Every time I got near it I hit the same wall — a piece of yellow paper on a closet floor and her face over the top of it — so I quit trying to get through the wall and started building past it.
Something breaks at the elevator during harvest, you don't stand around discussing why the leg went down. You get it turning again.
So Friday night I sat down at the kitchen table with the laptop, and by the time she came out of the bathroom I had four tabs up.
The outfitter that runs the mule trips, the one with the real corral, not the tourist outfit.
A lodge on the south side. A calendar of October dates, half of them grayed out and one week in the middle still blue.
Iris came in with a towel around her hair and stopped when she saw the laptop, because I don't use the laptop.
"Sit down a minute," I said.
She sat, back straight, both hands flat on the table, which was new that August.
"The canyon." I turned the screen toward her.
A string of mules on a switchback, a woman in a red jacket third from the front, the river way down at the bottom of everything, small and green.
"There's a week open in the second half of October," I said.
"It's the shoulder, so it's not booked solid.
I called this afternoon on my break, fella there named Ruiz, and he says the string runs to the end of the month if the weather holds.
We'd fly into the city Thursday, drive out Friday, ride Saturday.
To the bottom." I put my finger on the river. "Where the water is. Like you wrote."
She didn't say anything, so I kept going, because I had it all lined up and lined-up things want out. That's the part I'd get wrong again if you set me back down in that chair — I thought her not talking was room to work in.
"Then that's one. Then in the spring we do the game, whole weekend, hotel downtown, not the interstate one, a good one.
Cave's four hours south, that's a Saturday whenever we want it.
Balloon, I'd have to find out who does it now, but Lonnie'd know.
Tractor pull's every August at the state grounds and it's not going anywhere.
" I had my hands going by then. I could hear myself.
I sounded like a man with a plan, which is the only kind of man I've ever known how to be in a hard room.
"Six of them, Iris. Inside a year and a half, maybe two.
I'll take the time, I'll eat the vacation. All six, done right, with you."
I said the last part like I was handing her something. I even put my hand out on the table, palm up, and watched myself do it while something in my chest let go early. Six weeks, I was thinking. Six weeks and we're fine.
She looked at the screen a while. Then she reached over and turned the laptop back around to face me.
"No."
"It's the shoulder season, they've got room, I already?—"
"Doyle."
"I'll pay the whole thing out of the shop money, you won't have to look at it in the?—"
"Doyle."
I shut up.
"You want me to tour your memories," she said.
She said it quiet, with the towel still on her head, and she wasn't crying, and that was worse than any of the ways I'd braced for.
"That's not?—"
"That's exactly what that is." She put one finger on the edge of the laptop.
"You'd be showing me around. The whole way down you'd be telling me what's at the next turn, because you know what's at the next turn.
You've been. You'd say, wait till you see it from the third switchback.
And then you'd watch my face when I saw it, to find out if I liked it. "
"Is that bad? Wanting you to like it?"
"It's not bad, it's second." She set the word down like it weighed something. "I'd be walking through six places where you decided I didn't exist, and you'd be walking through six places where you already had the best part, and I'd be getting the leftovers, and you'd be watching me eat them."
"That's not how it'd be." I could hear the thing going thin under me even while I said it. "I'd let you have it however you wanted it. You could go first down the whole trail and I'd shut up and follow you."
"And when I asked you what was ahead?"
I didn't answer that.
"Doyle. What's at the third switchback?"
I opened my mouth.
"See," she said. "You've got an answer. You've had it for nine years."
"There's a place where the wall comes back on itself, and the trail runs under an overhang, and it's cold in there, and then you come out of it and the whole—" I stopped.
"Go on."
"No."
"Finish it."
"The whole thing opens."
"Right." She sat back. "That's the sentence you'd feed me at the second switchback so I'd be ready for the third one. You'd be curating it. I'd be on a tour with my husband for a guide, and at the end I'd have to say something about how it was worth the wait."
"That's not what I'm?—"
"Item eight is unspent."
I sat there.
"The footbridge," I said.
"You know what eight is."
"I know what all twenty of them are."
"Yes, you do, and don't you ever tell anybody different. Eight. Nobody's been. Nothing's happened to it yet, so it's still worth the whole amount." She stood and squared her chair under the table, because she squares chairs. "We start where the theft stops."
The word went in sideways.
"Theft," I said, to the tabletop, not to her.
"Do you have another one?"
"It's not like I sold something."
"You spent something." She had her hand on the chair back.
"There were twenty and now there are fourteen, and the six that are gone are gone in a way nobody can replace, because a thing you do the second time isn't the thing.
And I didn't get any of it. Not the trip, not the telling, not even the knowing about it after.
You brought home photographs of the canyon and I sat on that couch and looked at every one and asked good questions, Doyle.
You let me sit on my own couch and ask good questions. "
"I didn't think of it that way."
"I know you didn't. That's not the defense you think it is."
I didn't have another word for it. I sat at my own kitchen table turning words over like a man going through his pockets on the side of the road, and every one I came up with was worse — mistake was a lie, selfishness was a discount.
She'd picked the one that fit and set it down and walked out of the room with her hair still wet, and left me holding it.
The bedroom door went. Not hard. She has never once slammed a door in this house, and there have been nights when I'd have preferred it.
The water ran in there a minute for her teeth. Then the closet door. Then nothing.
I shut the laptop, then opened it and closed all four tabs one at a time, which took longer, and did it anyway.
Sat there with the lid down and both hands on it.
Two and a half weeks of a kitchen where my wife told me what time she'd be home.
I'd got a plan up in five hours flat and been proud of it in the truck coming home.
I'd said the word canyon out loud in my own house like it was a present.
The mule picture was the last one to go. Woman in a red jacket, third from the front. I'd been looking at that photograph off and on for a week without once letting myself notice I'd picked it because the jacket was the color Iris wears.
I put the laptop back on the shelf by the bread box where it lives, then wiped down a table that didn't need it and set the salt and pepper back where she keeps them.
The house went quiet. The bedroom light went off under the door down the hall, and I sat in the kitchen with the stove clock and the icemaker and got my phone out.
Everybody's got a phone note they'd rather not explain. Grocery lists, a man's passwords, the name of a movie somebody told you about. Mine's called list.
I opened it. Hadn't looked at it in seven months, which I know because the last thing in it has a date on it, the same as everything else in it, that being what it's for. I read the top entry a while. Then I went up to the corner where the little trash can sits and put my thumb on it.
That's all it takes. Thumb, then it asks if you're sure, then it's gone. Fourteen seconds start to finish, and nobody on this earth would ever have known. She hadn't asked about it. She didn't know there was anything to ask about.
I sat there with my thumb an inch off the screen long enough that the phone went dark on me twice, and both times I woke it with a knuckle and the note came back up, top entry first, with its date.
Then I locked it, put it face-down on the table, and went to bed.
I didn't ask myself why. I lay down next to my wife in the dark and listened to her breathe and did not ask myself one single question about what had just happened at my own kitchen table.
The phone was still face-down on the table in the morning. She'd made the coffee.