Chapter 9
IRIS
Thursday was the first cold morning of the year — forty-one degrees at seven-forty, frost on the windshield in patches, the kind you can scrape off with a credit card.
Miss Odette had the storm door propped and the heat already on, which she does the second the temperature drops below sixty, because at ninety-six you're allowed.
"You brought the weather," she said.
"I brought the good shampoo."
"Same thing."
"It's not the same thing at all, Odette."
"At my age it is."
Her kitchen is a yellow I could pick out of a lineup.
She had the chair pulled out from the table, the towel folded on the counter, the pink rollers in their bag, coffee going.
Odette's daughter is dead. Her son's in Arizona and calls on Sundays.
A girl from the county comes Tuesdays for an hour to check on her.
And there's me — Thursdays, nine to ten-thirty, wash and set, thirty-two dollars, thirty-one years.
She sat down and I put the towel across her shoulders and got her hair wet under the faucet, and she talked, the way she always talks in the wash.
The neighbor's fence. The girl who comes Tuesdays, who is very sweet and cannot make coffee.
The price of a chuck roast. I didn't say much, which isn't like me in that kitchen, and she caught it on the second rinse.
"You've gone quiet on me."
"I'm listening."
"You're doing something else with your face." Her eyes were shut against the water and her hands stayed folded in her lap, thumbs still. "Two weeks now."
"Four," I said, before I'd thought about it.
"Mm."
I got her sat up and towel-dried and started sectioning off. Her hair's fine as milkweed and there's still plenty of it. She watched me in the little mirror I prop against the sugar canister — my hands, mostly. She's always watched my hands.
"How long you been married," she said.
"Thirty-three years."
"That's an ugly number."
"It's a fine number."
"It's the number where they've quit trying to impress you and haven't started being scared of dying," she said. "Nothing to hide behind."
I rolled a section and pinned it. "Doyle did something."
I hadn't meant to say it. Four weeks of not saying one word to one living person — not to Sherry, not to my sister, not to Nate, God knows not to Nate. Then a ninety-six-year-old woman with wet hair says an ugly true thing about marriage, and out it comes.
"There a woman?"
"No." I heard how fast I said it, and I heard that it was true, and something let go about a half inch, because it had never once occurred to me to wonder. Not for a second in four weeks. I'd been so taken up with what he did do that I never had to lie awake over what he didn't.
"Good," Odette said. "Then it's the other thing."
"What's the other thing?"
"He went and had his life somewhere you weren't."
My hands stopped, and I got them going again. "We wrote a list. Fourteen years ago, twenty things we were going to do, both of us, half of it in my handwriting. He's done six. All of them with his brother or the crew, and he never told me, and when I found it he told me I never really wanted them."
Odette didn't gasp. Ninety-six-year-olds don't gasp. She breathed out through her nose. "Which six?"
I told her — the canyon, the ballgame, the cave, the tractor pull, the balloon, the fishing. "The balloon's on his brother's icebox," I said. "Photograph. Three years. I've stood in front of it at Thanksgiving twice."
"Oh, sugar."
I rolled two more sections. The radiator ticked.
"My Albert had a list too," she said.
"Did he."
"Fishing spots. Kept them in a little book, the kind with the rubber band around it.
Places up north, mostly. He'd say, we'll take the camper up and do the whole book, Odie.
" She did it in a man's voice, an old imitation worn smooth from use.
"Thirty-one years. He took his brother Vern to every one of them. "
I stood there with a pink roller in my hand. "Every one?"
"Every one on the list, and some that weren't." She shifted her hands in her lap. "I used to think Vern was the lucky one."
"And now?"
"Now I think Albert was the coward." She said it plain, the way she says the price of a chuck roast. "Vern didn't matter enough to be afraid of. You can go anywhere with a man who can't disappoint you. That's not a trip, that's a hiding place with a boat on it."
I had to put my hands down on the counter. "Odette."
"I'm ninety-six. I've had a long time to work out what that was. Took me till about eighty to quit thinking it was fishing."
I finished her rollers without remembering doing it. "There's a part that's mine," I said.
"Mm."
"I want to say it to somebody who won't repeat it, and you're the only person in this county who can keep a thing."
"I've kept worse than yours, and half of them are dead."
I put the net over the rollers and pulled the dryer bonnet down off its hook.
"I floated the items. That's what I did, for fourteen years.
I'd send him a picture of a balloon at nine o'clock at night and say someday, look at that.
We should finally do the cave this fall.
The pull's at the state grounds, Grandad had a Farmall.
Little bits, off the couch, in that voice. You know the voice."
"I know the voice."
"I never once said, book it. Never once said, put it on the calendar or tell me no to my face.
" I got the bonnet fitted. "I made my wanting easy to relocate.
That part's mine. He shouldn't have taken it and he did, and the taking is his.
But I handed it over in a way that let it be taken quiet, and I did that on purpose.
If I'd said it hard he might have said no, and then I'd have had to know. "
Odette reached up under the bonnet and got hold of my wrist. "Fifty-four?"
"Fifty-four."
"You've got thirty years of Thursdays left in you. Don't spend them floating."
"I'm done floating," I said. "I don't know yet what I'm doing instead. But it isn't that."
She let go of my wrist and patted the table twice, which means turn the dryer on, so I turned the dryer on, and for twenty minutes neither of us said anything because you can't over that racket.
She read the church bulletin. I cleaned my combs.
And sitting in that yellow kitchen with the dryer going, I chose it.
It wasn't a lightning bolt. It was the calmest twenty minutes I'd had since August, because I'd been carrying the question around like a hot pan and all at once there was nowhere to set it but down.
Item eight. The footbridge upstate — the old swinging one they built in nineteen-and-something, that my mother walked me across when I was nine years old in a windbreaker two sizes too big.
And the trail past it out to the overlook, an hour and change on the ridge, three counties in view, the whole thing going in the first week of October.
Not the canyon. Not a place he'd been. A place I'd been, with a woman he never got to meet.
Mr. Tibbs at ten-fifteen got the most cheerful trim of his life and never knew why. His right hearing aid was whistling again, so I got him to take it out and looked in the port with my phone light. There was wax in it. Nothing I could do about that, because I cut hair, I don't fix machines.
"Bring it by the house Saturday," I said. "Doyle'll do it."
"I hate to bother him."
"Mr. Tibbs, that man will sit at my kitchen table forty-five minutes with a paperclip and be happy the whole time."
"He's a good one."
"He'll want the whole aid, not just the one part. Bring the case."
"I've got the case."
"Bring the little brush too." I put the cape on him and got the clippers out. "He's a complicated one."
"Well," said Tibbs, who is eighty-eight and has buried a wife, "that's the same thing after a while," and turned up the radio.
Six clients after that, and I couldn't tell you one word any of them said.
Mrs. Ivey asked me twice whether I was feeling all right.
Both times I told her I was fine. The second time she patted my arm, the way you do when you've decided not to press a thing, and asked me instead about the weather coming.
I got home at three-forty, which is early, and Doyle wasn't due till six, so I called the ranger station from the kitchen with my coat still on.
A young man answered. I asked whether the footbridge was open and walkable, and he said yes, ma'am, it's open, there's a weight limit and they only let so many on at a time, the deck had work done in the spring.
I asked about the trail to the overlook: an hour and fifteen going out, a little more coming back, a climb in two places, a bench about two-thirds along.
I asked when the color was.
"First week of October, usually. Second, some years. It's been dry, so I'd say first."
"If I brought a man with a bad knee," I said, "what am I looking at?"
He thought about it, which is more than most would have. "Take four hours for the whole thing and you won't hurt anybody. It's not the distance, it's the two pitches. If he can do stairs, he can do it."
"One more. Is there any place on that trail where a person could turn around and go back and still say they'd done it?"
He took longer on that one than on any of the others. "The bench. Some folks do the bridge and the first pitch and turn at the bench. It's a nice view from the bench."
"That's not what I asked."
"No, ma'am," he said. "If you want the overlook you've got to go to the overlook."
"That's what I thought."
I wrote it all down on the back of a receipt and read it back to myself out loud, standing up, with my coat still on.
Bridge. Two pitches. Bench I wasn't stopping at.
Four hours. Then I got the calendar off the wall — the paper one from the propane company, hanging by the phone jack we don't use anymore — laid it on the counter, and got a pen.
Not a pencil. We keep pencils in the drawer under the phone. I took a pen out of my purse.
Saturday, October fourth. ITEM 8 — FOOTbrIDGE. LEAVE 6 A.M., in ink, in the square, in capitals big enough to read from the doorway. Then I hung it back on its nail and started supper.
He came in at six-ten, hung his cap, washed his hands, turned around drying them — and I watched him see it, and watched him work out what the ink meant. He didn't say is that all right if I — didn't say let me check the yard — didn't say one word about harvest.
He said, "Six o'clock leaving, or six o'clock up?"
"Leaving."
"Then I'll be up at four-thirty."
That's the whole thing he said. He got the plates down and set the table.
I'd had a sentence ready since three-forty that afternoon, warm in my mouth, in case he made one sound in the wrong direction.
I was going either way. If he'd said harvest, if he'd said next weekend, if he'd bent by one syllable, I'd have driven up alone on October fourth with a thermos and my mother's memory and walked that bridge by myself, and it would have been mine, and it would have counted.
He'll never know how close that was. Or he will, because he isn't stupid, and that's fine too.
The next Thursday, under the dryer, Odette got hold of my wrist again when I came to check her rollers.
"You pick one?"
"I picked one."
"He going?"
"He's going."
She nodded once and patted my hand where it rested on the back of her chair. "Make him carry the pack, sugar. Albert never carried a thing."