Chapter 5
IRIS
Sunday I put the list on the kitchen table while he was at his mother's, so it would be there when he came in.
Flat, unfolded, the creases fighting me, corners weighted down with the salt and the pepper and the sugar bowl and my coffee cup.
Fourteen years of being folded in thirds does something to a piece of paper.
It wanted to close, and I made it stay open, and then I sat down in front of it and waited an hour and ten minutes.
I'd worked it out the night before, lying next to a man who sleeps like a fallen tree.
Not what I was going to say — what I was going to do.
Better than two weeks of talking to him in my appointment voice had taught me that Doyle can survive anything you say to him as long as he's allowed to be sorry about it.
Sorry is a place he can stand, and he'd been standing in it since the closet, hat in hand, offering me mules.
So I wasn't going to talk about what he did. I was going to make him look at the paper.
He came in at four with a plate of his mother's zucchini bread that neither of us wanted. She sends it whether you've asked or not, wrapped in foil, and it goes hard by Tuesday. He saw the table from the door and stopped with the plate in both hands like a man who'd walked into the wrong house.
"Sit down," I said.
He set the bread on the counter and sat across from me with the list between us and put his hands in his lap, out of sight, which I noticed.
"I'm going to read you something."
"Iris—"
"You'll get your turn. This is mine."
He shut his mouth. I'd expected an argument and got obedience instead. I hadn't planned for that, and it made the next part harder, not easier.
I put my finger under line one.
"'Ride a mule down into the canyon,'" I read.
"'To the bottom. Where the river is.'" I don't have a reading voice; I read it the way I'd say it in that kitchen on a Tuesday.
"That's mine. Blue ink. February, my fortieth, and you had the space heater going because the furnace was out and the bedroom was fifty-eight degrees.
You said, a mule. I said down to the bottom, not the rim. Do you remember me saying that?"
His throat moved. "Yes."
"Number three." I moved my finger. "'Take a caving tour, the real kind, where you have to duck.
' Mine. You said I'd get stuck and I said I'm five foot four, Doyle, you'll get stuck.
" I looked up. "Number five. Balloon at sunrise.
Mine. You said I was scared of ladders and I said there's no ladder in a balloon. "
"There isn't," he said, very quietly. "You just step in."
I didn't let that land anywhere. "Number eight. 'Walk the swinging footbridge upstate, the old one, and go on out to the overlook.'" I sat back. "Mine. That one I wrote without saying anything out loud, and you asked me what it was, and I said my mother took me when I was nine."
"I remember."
"Number twelve, the sunflower fields, the ones they grow for seed.
Mine. Number fifteen, ride a train somewhere overnight, in a bed.
Mine. Number seventeen, the tractor pull at the state grounds, the real classes, not the exhibition — that's mine, Doyle, that's my grandad's Farmall, and you sat there and told me you didn't know they still ran them. "
I stopped. The kitchen clock did its thing. Out back a dog two properties over was working on something.
"Do you want to hear yours?"
"Iris."
"Number two, the ballgame. Four, the school. Six, a night on a boat. Seven's the covered bridges — eleven's the fire tower." I ran my finger down. "Nine. Ten. Thirteen. Fourteen. Sixteen. Nineteen. Twenty."
"'Get old doing all this,'" he said.
"You remember that one."
"I remember writing it."
"It's the only one of yours with both of us in it.
Every other one of your eleven is a thing, which isn't a criticism, it's just what a list looks like when a man writes it.
Twenty is the only line on this page with people in it, and it's in your hand, and it says all this, and this was the twenty things, and get old was going to be the two of us doing them.
" He didn't say anything. "I've read that line about forty times in the last two weeks. "
He put his hands on the table then, flat, on either side of the paper. Big knuckles, a nick on the left thumb from something at work. His were shaking and mine weren't, which felt like the last unfair thing on the list.
"Nine of the twenty are in blue," I said. "I counted. Nine mine, eleven yours. Seventeen days ago you stood in that hall with a dish towel and told me I never really wanted those."
"I know what I said."
"So here it is." I turned the paper a quarter turn toward him and set my finger on line one, on the blue. "Read my handwriting and tell me it's politeness."
He looked at the page.
"Out loud. Look at the ink and say it. Say, 'Iris wrote to the bottom, where the river is, because she was being nice to me.' Go ahead."
"Don't do this."
"You already did it." My voice came apart a little and I let it. "You did it somewhere I wasn't, and you never had to say it in front of me, and now you're going to, or you're going to sit there and not be able to. Either way I'll know."
He looked at the paper for eleven seconds.
I counted, because I count things when I'm scared, and I was scared enough right then that my back teeth ached.
His mouth opened and nothing came out. He tried again and got as far as you, and the rest of it wasn't there.
Then he leaned forward and put both hands over his face, and his shoulders went.
I sat across the table from thirty-three years of a man and watched him fail to say out loud a sentence he'd been living inside for nine years.
That's when I knew it wasn't forgetting. You can't be unable to say a thing you forgot; forgetting has no weight to it. He'd have said I don't know, Iris, I guess I stopped thinking about it, and felt awful, and said it. He couldn't say this one because it was holding something up.
I let him sit. I didn't touch him — thirty-three years of reaching for that head is not nothing, and my arms came up off the table an inch before I put them back down.
After a while he sat up and wiped his face with the flat of his hand like a kid.
"They're your handwriting," he said.
"I know."
"They're yours."
"Say the rest of it."
"I can't."
"That's the first true thing you've said since August." He nodded, and kept nodding a few beats past when it meant anything. "So we're going to sit here, and you're going to tell me whether there are more than six."
"There's six."
"Think carefully."
"Iris, there's six, I'd tell you?—"
"Number eleven. 'Spend a night in a fire tower.' Four, five years back you and Lonnie went off for a weekend, and I have spent two weeks trying to remember whether you said tower or cabin."
Whatever went across his face then wasn't guilt. It was the other thing, the moment a man gets the dimensions of the hole he put in somebody.
"Cabin," he said. "Lonnie's buddy's place, on the Fork. There's no tower. Iris, there's no tower, I've never—" He stopped. "You've been checking."
"Every day since the closet."
"God."
"That's mine now. That's a thing I do now. You built it."
We sat there a minute. Out in the yard the neighbor's boy was running a mower, and it kept cutting out and catching again, and both of us listened to it the way you listen to anything that isn't yourselves.
"I want to say something about the ticks," I said, and he shut his eyes.
"The doing them, I can almost get my arms around.
A man goes somewhere. He's swept along, there's a truck leaving Friday, everybody's going.
I can see how a person ends up at a fence at the state grounds without having planned on it. "
"Iris—"
"But you came home." I put my finger on the margin, on the first small black mark. "You came into this house and got that paper out of that card and unfolded it and found a pen and made a mark. That's not being swept along. That's four separate decisions with walking in between them."
"I know."
"Where'd you do it?"
"What?"
"Where in this house did you stand. I've been picturing it in four different rooms and I'd rather know."
He looked at the table a long moment. "Here. This table. Every time."
We sat again, and then he said, "Ask me anything you want. Any of them. I'll go down the list one at a time."
And I believed him. He'd have sat there until midnight and gone twenty for twenty, all of it true. And all of it another version of him managing me: him and me and a piece of paper, one very long night that ended with me feeling like I'd been given something.
So I got up instead and went to the counter for my purse and took out the envelope.
I hadn't opened it. I'd gotten it out of the glove box Saturday afternoon while he was mowing, which took me four minutes of standing in my own driveway working up to it.
Then I'd left it sealed in my purse for a day and a half.
I opened it right there in front of him with my thumb under the flap and ripped it crooked.
One sheet. A logo with a trout. A table.
SESSION: Sept 24–27. PARTICIPANTS: 3. BALANCE DUE ON ARRIVAL. DEPOSIT RECEIVED — THANK YOU.
And a date on the deposit line. July.
The paper was warm from being in my purse against the window all afternoon, which is a foolish thing to notice and I noticed it.
I read it twice standing at the counter with my back to him, then came back and laid it on top of the list, square across the middle, covering both inks.
He looked at it and didn't reach for it. He knew every word on it.
"That's three weeks out," I said.
"Iris."
"Participants: three." I sat down. "That's number four, isn't it. The whole school. Not the afternoon — the afternoon was two years ago, that's the tick. This is the real one."
"Yes."
"Whose money?"
He didn't answer. He looked at the trout on the letterhead like it might have something to add.
"It's a joint account, so I know whose money.
I paid part of that deposit in July, I just didn't know I was doing it.
I did four heads on a Thursday in July and some of it went to a trout.
" I put my finger on the paper. "And whose list, Doyle?
Because item four's in your handwriting, but it's on my paper, in my card, that I gave you, on my birthday, and it's got your tick on line one where my ink is. "
The refrigerator kicked on behind me. That's the sound I remember out of that whole hour.
"Whose money and whose list," I said. "Take your time. It's Sunday."
He sat there with his hands on either side of a piece of paper he had checked six times, and he didn't answer me, and I got up and washed dishes that were already clean.