Chapter 7
IRIS
He lasted five days, and I'll give him the five.
He spent them looking for something to do with his hands.
He cleaned gutters nobody had asked him to clean.
He fixed the latch on the back gate that's been broken since Nate was in college.
Saturday morning he was up at six pressure-washing the whole south side of the house, four hours of it, and as far as I could tell the accomplishment was the removal of some green.
Then Saturday afternoon he came in wet to the elbows, stood in the kitchen doorway, and said, "I've been thinking."
"Okay."
"I don't get to have it."
I put down the dish I was drying. "Have what."
"Any of it." He had the list in his hand.
He'd gone into my purse and gotten it, which is its own separate item I have not finished being mad about.
"Not the fishing. Not the fire tower. None of the fourteen.
Not the sunflowers, not the train, not the — I don't get to.
" He came in and set the paper on the table. "It's yours. All of it. I'm out."
"Doyle."
"No, listen." His voice cracked on it. "I've been out there trying to figure out what a person does.
And there's not — Iris, there's nothing I can give you.
I can't give the canyon back. There's no way to give it back.
The only thing I've got is I can not have any more of it.
" He put both hands flat on the paper like he was holding down something that might get loose.
"So I don't. That's what I've got. You take the list and do whatever you want with it, go with Nate, go with Sherry, go by yourself.
I'll drive you to the airport. I'll stay home. "
He was crying by the end of it. He wasn't performing, either — Doyle has never been shrewd a day in his life. He'd washed a house for four hours and come back in with the only idea he had, which was to burn down the thing that got him in trouble, and he meant every word of it.
"Sit down," I said, and he sat. "Do you know what you just did?"
"I'm trying to?—"
"You stole it twice."
He looked up.
"Once alone. Nine years, six items, out there where I couldn't see it.
That's the first one." I pulled a chair out and sat across from him.
"And now you've come in here and taken the other fourteen off the table, and you've done it in a voice that makes me the one who has to say, no, honey, you can have some.
You've fixed it so that if I ever want to do number twelve, I have to talk you into your own joy. That's the second one."
"That's not what I?—"
"That is precisely what it is. You just canceled the list in both directions." I put my hand on the paper and slid it back to my side of the table. "The list isn't dead, Doyle. Your solo career is."
He stared at me. "That's a distinction."
"It's not a distinction, it's the whole difference.
You don't get to have any of it without me.
That's the rule, and it's forever, and I'm not kidding, we'll write it down.
But you don't get to sit in a corner not having things and call that paying me back, because there's nothing in it for me.
Nobody gets anything. I'd have a husband who won't go up in a balloon out of penance, and I'd still be a woman who wasn't in the balloon.
Two of us on the ground instead of one. That isn't payment, it's just more empty basket. "
He wiped his face with his forearm.
"You want to know the worst part? You'd hold up," I said. "That's what kills me. You'd go three years without one thing off that paper, cheerful as anything, telling people it's what you deserve. You'd get good at it. And every August I'd have to decide whether this was the year I let you off."
"I wouldn't put that on you."
"You just did. You walked in here and put it on the table." I pulled the paper another inch toward me. "And you went in my purse."
He blinked. "What?"
"To get that. It was in my purse."
"Iris, I wasn't?—"
"I know you weren't snooping, that's not the point.
That paper's been in my purse since the night I found it.
On the route. In driveways. It's been the only thing in this house that was mine since August, and you went and got it so you could hand it back to me in a grand gesture.
You even took the giving-it-back away from me. "
He sat there with his mouth open. "I didn't think about it like that."
"No," I said. "You wouldn't."
"Which one do you want." He leaned in. "Tell me the one and I'll do it. I mean it. Anything on there."
"No."
"Iris—"
"You don't get to pick, and you don't get to be handed it either." I folded the list, panel, panel, panel. "Item eight is mine to choose, on my timeline, and it happens before the leaves turn. That's the only thing I've said out loud since August that I'm not moving on."
"I thought you wouldn't have gone," he said.
I looked at him.
"The route." I could hear him hating it as it came out of him. "Your Thursdays. Your clients. You don't cancel on Odette. You've never canceled on anybody in your life. I told myself you'd say no."
"Did you ask me?"
"No."
"Then that isn't what I said. That's what you needed me to have said.
" He opened his mouth and I kept going. "Nine days.
The canyon was nine days. I have gone nine days without that route exactly twice in thirty-one years, and both times I got somebody to cover me, and both times it took one phone call.
One. To a woman in town who'd have been glad of the work.
" I sat back down, because my legs wanted it.
"You didn't test it. You didn't even test it, and the reason you didn't is that if I'd said yes you'd have had to take me. "
"That's not — I did think you'd?—"
"Before the leaves turn," I said. "Item eight."
"Iris, that's five weeks."
"Six, if it's a late year."
"That's—"
"Say the rest of the sentence."
"October's harvest," he said, and then his mouth shut like a trap.
Neither of us said anything for a good five seconds.
"I know," he said. "I heard it. I heard it coming out."
"That's what I mean." I got up and left the room, because if I'd stayed I'd have said something I'd have had to walk back, and I have not walked much back in my life and didn't want to start.
I sat on the edge of the bed with the list in my hand. What I did next took an hour, and I'd do it again.
Doyle and I have texted every day for eleven years, which is eleven years of pick up milk and running late and did you feed the dog before he died and Nate called — a wall of nothing.
But I have a habit, and I know I have it, and Nate makes fun of me for it: I send things at night from the couch.
Little floated things. Ooh, look at this.
I searched the word cave. There it was, four and a half years ago, a Thursday in March: we should finally do the cave this fall. Judy went, she said it's an hour and a half and they turn the lights off. And underneath, forty minutes later: someday when the elevator slows down.
I sat very still, then searched balloon.
Almost four years ago, in the spring, a picture I'd forwarded off the internet — six balloons over a river at sunrise, someday, look at that — and his answer, when the elevator slows down.
that'd be something. The charity ride at the fairgrounds was eleven months later.
The photograph on Lonnie's refrigerator has the date printed in the corner because it came out of one of those machines at the drugstore. June.
I searched train. I searched sunflower. I searched tractor, and found a text from an August six years back, me from a client's driveway: the state fair grounds has the pull this weekend!
!! grandad had a farmall. Doyle, at 4:12 that afternoon: someday.
this weekend's shot. He went the next year, with Lonnie, in August, and the note in his phone says Farmalls ran.
I sat there with the phone in both hands and did what you do when the ground tilts, which is check it one more time to be sure the tilt is real.
Cave: floated in March, done the following September, eighteen months.
Balloon: floated in the spring, done eleven months later.
Tractor pull: floated in August, done twelve months later.
The ballgame was his own item, but I searched anyway and found myself in a March — the Vaughn boy went to a whole weekend of games, that sounds fun honestly — and him: someday when the elevator slows. Fourteen months out.
Every one. Every single time I'd floated one of those things, in the harmless, hopeful, don't-make-a-fuss way a woman says it from a couch at nine o'clock, he'd said someday and then gone and done it inside a year and a half. Without me. In the order I'd brought them up.
I put the phone down on the quilt, because there was one more thing in it and I could feel it coming the way you feel a sneeze.
He wasn't ignoring me. Ignoring me would have been a man who didn't hear. He heard every time. Every time I opened my mouth about that paper, something in my husband went oh, right, and picked it up, and carried it off, and did it.
I was the one reminding him.
I sat in that bedroom while the light went orange on the wall and did not cry. Out in the kitchen I could hear him putting dishes away one at a time, too carefully, the way a man does in a house where everything he does is being weighed.