Chapter 6
DOYLE
Monday I didn't go in until nine. Sat in the truck in my own driveway a half hour first with the engine off and the phone in my hand, fifty-nine degrees out, the first cool morning, windshield fogging from the inside. Then I went back in the house.
Iris was at the table with the appointment book open, doing Thursday. She looked up at the sound of the door with an expression I hope I never see again — not anger. Bracing. My wife braced herself when I came into a room.
I stood there a second with my hand still on the knob. She had her pen going and a Thursday half written, and she waited, and she didn't ask why I was home.
I sat down and put the phone on the table between us, screen up.
"There's something else."
"All right."
"You need to see it before I do anything else, because if I do the other thing first you'll think I did it to keep you from seeing this."
She didn't answer that. She closed the book. I turned the phone around and pushed it across.
It's a note. Title's one word. I made it in a motel in the town outside the canyon, on the drive back, second week of October nine years ago, at some hour I couldn't tell you, with Lonnie asleep in the other bed.
Iris picked the phone up the way she'd pick up a comb.
"There's dates," she said.
"Yes."
"There's — what is this. There's little notes."
"Read it. All of it. There's nothing under it, that's the whole file."
"Is it long?"
"Seven lines."
"Seven," she said. "There's six."
"Read it, Iris."
She read down it, fast at first and then not fast at all.
"Canyon."
"Yes."
"Ballgame. Cave. Tractor pull. Balloon. Fishing."
"Yes."
Then she stopped, because at the bottom there's a line four years newer than the ones above it, in a different hand of typing.
4. SCHOOL — Sept 24-27, 3 spots, L + Pug, dep. paid 7/9.
She read that one twice, and I watched her mouth move on the date.
Then she looked past me at the wall above the stove, at the calendar from the propane company, at September, and set the phone down very carefully, face up, the way you set down a hot dish.
She got up and went to the window over the sink and stood with her back to me a while.
The truck was in the drive with the tailgate still down from Saturday. Neither of us had put it up.
"There's more in there," she said. "Under the item names. There's words."
"Yes."
"What are they?"
"They're what it was like."
"You wrote down what it was like."
"Some of them."
"How many words."
"Two or three. It's not — Iris, it's not a diary."
"I didn't say diary." She came back and put her hand flat on the table beside the phone. The screen was still lit. She didn't pick it back up. "Not this morning."
"Iris—"
"Don't hand it to me. I've been handed things." She pushed it into the middle of the table. "Nine years ago. The dates are in order. The first one's nine years ago."
"Week after."
"Week after what?"
"After I got back from the canyon."
She nodded, slow, and I sat there waiting for the next question and she didn't ask it.
"You kept books," she said.
"I did."
"On a thing you told me I never wanted."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know." That was the truth that morning. I had a better answer somewhere in me and it took until November to get it up where I could reach it.
Iris looked at the clock over the stove. "What's the other thing?"
"What?"
"You said before you do anything else. What's the anything else."
"That's mine to do, and it doesn't get done to make you feel better about it, so I'm not telling you ahead of time."
"Is it something I'll hear about from somebody else?"
"Probably today."
"From who?"
"That'd be telling you ahead of time."
She looked at me a second. "Fine."
I got to the elevator at ten. Harvest hadn't hit yet, so the yard was slow — one truck on the scale, corn coming in early off a couple of the sandy fields, everybody standing around the shop with coffee waiting on the world to start.
Lonnie was there, because Lonnie is always there the two weeks before harvest, tinkering with the auger he's been tinkering with since spring.
Pug was up on the loading dock with his boots hanging off.
I could have done it on the phone. Called Halbert's outfit from the truck, canceled in ninety seconds, mentioned it to my brother sometime in October, easy, sideways — ah, they had a conflict.
Instead I got the number up and walked out to the middle of the shop floor where the both of them could hear me and put it on speaker.
Pug looked over. Lonnie kept on with the auger. A woman answered and I gave her my name and the dates.
"I need to cancel all three spots."
She said something about the thirty-day window, deposit's nonrefundable inside of thirty days, was there another session I'd like to move it to.
"No, ma'am. Keep the deposit. Cancel it."
Lonnie had stopped with the auger. I hung up and Pug came down off the dock.
"What was that," Lonnie said.
"That was the school."
"That was six hundred dollars is what that was."
"Six-fifty."
"Doyle."
"Sit down a minute. Both of you. This'll take four minutes and I'm only doing it once."
Pug sat on an upturned bucket. Lonnie stayed standing with the wrench in his hand, which is how my brother listens. Denny was out on the scale with his window down, so I waited for him to pull off. I wanted it said to two men, not four.
"Fourteen years ago Iris turned forty," I said, "and we sat up in bed and wrote a list of twenty things we were going to do together. Both of us. Her handwriting and mine, every other line. It's on a legal pad page. It was in a card in the coat closet till two weeks ago."
Pug's face was already going. Lonnie set the wrench across his knee.
"That fishing school is number four on it.
Number four's mine. Numbers one, three, five, eight, eleven, twelve, fifteen, seventeen and eighteen are hers, in her ink.
" Lonnie started to say something and I went on over him.
"The canyon's number one. That's hers. I did it with you.
" I looked right at my brother. "Ballgame's two.
Cave's three. Balloon's five — that's the one on your refrigerator.
Tractor pull's seventeen, and that's hers too, that's her grandad's Farmall, and I stood next to you at a fence and watched them run. "
The shop was quiet enough that I could hear the leg running on an empty bin out in the yard, that hollow rattle. Pug had his cap off. I hadn't seen him take it off. Lonnie hadn't moved the wrench.
"Six of them. Nine years. I've been doing my wife's list with you clowns because I didn't have the guts to do it with her.
" Nobody said anything. "School's off. That's not a gesture, it's just off, it can't happen.
And here's the part I want out loud in front of both of you.
" I looked at Pug, then at Lonnie. "If I ever book another one of these without her — anything on that paper, any of the fourteen left — you take my keys. "
"Doyle, man," Pug said.
"Say okay."
"Okay."
Lonnie didn't say anything at all. He set the wrench down on the auger housing very gently, like he was afraid of the noise it would make, and walked out the shop door into the yard and stood by the leg with his back to us for about ten minutes. I let him go.
Pug stayed on the bucket. After a while he said, "The balloon one. The fire department deal."
"Yeah."
"You asked me on a Tuesday. I remember because I'd just had the tooth out." He turned his cap over in his hands. "I'd have said no if I'd known. You know that, right? Doyle, I'd have said no and told you to take her."
"I know it."
"So don't do that to a man." He got up and went back to the dock.
Six hundred and fifty dollars. One morning standing in the middle of a shop floor. Whatever those two used to think about me. None of it buys back a Saturday in August at the state grounds. Lonnie was still out there by the leg when I left at noon, and I didn't go get him.
That night I came in at six and Iris was at the stove.
"Your brother called me," she said, without turning around.
I stood there with my cap in my hand.
"He was crying. I've known Lonnie thirty-five years. I've seen him cry at his own wedding and at your dad's funeral, and that's the list until today." She turned the burner down. "He said, 'Nine years I thought I was the brother he liked.'"
I couldn't get anything out.
"He said, 'Turns out I was the hiding place.'" She turned around then and looked at me. "And then he said, 'Tell him I said do the list.'"
"He say anything else?"
"He asked whether I'd known about the balloon picture. On his refrigerator." She stirred the pot once. "I said I'd been looking at it for three years."
"What'd he say to that?"
"Nothing. Made a noise and got off the phone."
I put my hand on the back of a chair and stayed standing, because sitting down felt like something I hadn't earned yet.
"That's from him," she said. "Not me. I'm not there yet."
Then she went back to the stove and we ate, and she asked me about the yard, and I told her about the corn coming in early off the sandy ground.