Chapter 11
IRIS
He told me on a Wednesday night in the last week of September, ten days out.
I'd washed my hair and I was at the table with the towel around it, which is how I sit at that table at nine o'clock, and Doyle came in from the front room and set the frame on the counter, still in its brown paper. He hadn't taken it out since the store.
"Can you sit up a minute," he said.
"I am sitting."
"Yeah." He pulled his chair out and sat down without looking at me. "I've got to tell you about the rim."
"All right."
"You asked me why I started keeping that note. Back on the Monday. And I said I didn't know."
"I remember."
"I knew."
The furnace came on for the first time that fall right then, that noise it makes in the ductwork like somebody dropped a wrench in the basement.
"Go ahead," I said.
"It was the third day. We rode down on the second day and camped. Third day we came back up. There's a place about a half mile from the top, on the switchbacks, where the trail comes out on a shoulder and you can see the whole of it at once. Down and across. Both walls. The river."
"Okay."
"Lonnie went on ahead. He does that on a climb, gets a rhythm and won't break it.
So I was standing there by myself with a mule breathing on the back of my neck.
" He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn.
He hadn't drunk any of it. "And it came up in me.
Same as always. Same as the ballgame, same as the balloon later on.
That thing where you're standing in the best part and the person who's supposed to be there isn't."
"You've said that."
"I've said it about the others. This one's different, and you need to hear the difference, because the others come out of this one."
"Then say it."
"I stood there and I thought, Iris wrote this down."
I put both hands around my cup.
"Not, I wish Iris was here," he said. "That's what I'd have said out loud if Lonnie'd come back down. What was actually in me was, she wrote this down in blue ink in bed on her fortieth birthday, and I'm standing in it, and she's at home doing Mrs. Whoever's hair."
"Ivey."
"She was at home doing Mrs. Ivey's hair. And I had about four seconds."
"Four seconds."
"That's what it was. I've been over it enough to know how long it was.
Four seconds, two doors, and I was going through one of them.
" He finally looked up. "One door was, I'm a man who took his wife's dream and did it without her, and there's no fixing it, it's done, and I carry it the rest of my life and I tell her when I get home. "
"And the other one."
"The other one was that it was never really hers."
I didn't say anything. The furnace ran.
"That's it," he said. "I decided, on a mule trail, with a mule breathing on me, that the blue lines were you being nice to me.
That you'd written what you wrote because I was excited and you love me and that's what you do.
That the canyon was mine. That the whole list was mine, more or less, and your half was — " He stopped.
"Say it."
"Politeness."
"Look at me."
"Iris—"
"Look at me and say the word again. I want to watch you do it."
He looked at me. His eyes were wet and he didn't wipe them. "Politeness. I decided your handwriting was politeness. Took about four seconds. Then I got on the mule."
"And then?"
"Then it worked."
"What does that mean."
"It means I got to the top and I felt fine.
" He said it like it was the worst thing in the file, and I think it was.
"That's what you've got to understand about what kind of man did this.
I didn't lie awake. I didn't ride up out of there sick.
I rode up out of there relieved, because I'd solved it.
I'd been in trouble four seconds and then I wasn't in trouble anymore, and Lonnie had the truck running at the trailhead, and we got hamburgers. "
"You got hamburgers."
"We got hamburgers in a town called Tusayan and I ate two of them."
I held on to my cup. "And the note?"
"The note was the next week."
"Why?"
"Because it hadn't taken all the way." His jaw was working.
"That's the answer, and it took me till last Tuesday on the tower stairs to get it up where I could look at it.
If it had really been my list I wouldn't have needed a note.
You don't keep books on your own money. You keep books on money you're holding for somebody else. "
I set my cup down, because my hands weren't going to be reliable much longer. "Say that again."
"You don't keep a ledger on something that's yours," he said.
"I made that note the week after I got back, in this kitchen, at that counter right there, and I typed rim: unreal, and for nine years I've told myself I did it because I like keeping track of things.
I don't like keeping track of things, Iris.
I've never written down one other thing in my life. I keep the whole elevator in my head."
"Then why."
"Because some part of me knew it was yours, and knew I was spending it, and wanted a record of what I'd spent." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. "That's a man settling an estate that isn't his."
"Nine years," I said.
"Nine years."
"You maintained it."
"Every time. That's the part I'm not going to soften, because you'd catch it anyway. It wasn't one decision. Every single time one of them came up — every time you'd say someday, look at that — I had to make it again. Four seconds, every time. And it got quicker."
"How quick did it get."
"By the tractor pull it wasn't seconds. By the tractor pull it was already true. That's how those work. You decide a thing once and then you don't decide it again, you just live in it, and after a while it's furniture."
"You stood at a fence," I said, "and watched Farmalls run against each other, and got out your phone."
"Yes."
"And you thought about my grandfather."
"I thought about your grandfather, and I thought about you, and I put it in the note." His voice went. "And then I went and got a lemonade with my brother."
I sat there a while. The towel had gone cold on my head, so I took it off and put it in my lap, because I needed something to hold that wasn't a cup.
"Doyle. I need you to tell me one thing, and I need it true, and if you lie to me about this you might as well go on and sleep at Lonnie's."
"Ask it."
"In those four seconds. Did you believe it? Or did you decide it?"
He didn't answer right away. A fast answer would have been a comfortable one.
"I decided it," he said.
"You knew better."
"I knew better the whole four seconds. That's what a decision is.
If I'd believed it, it wouldn't have taken four seconds, it'd have taken none.
I had to get there. I remember getting there.
" He put his hands flat on the table. "You wrote to the bottom, where the river is.
Nobody being polite adds a detail. I knew that on the trail and I know it now, and in between I ran nine years on a thing I knew was false when I made it. "
I got up and walked to the sink, which is eight feet, and turned around and came back, because I could not be sitting down for the next part.
"I want to say something, and I want it in the right order."
"Okay."
"First. Everything you just told me is worse than what I thought when I sat down."
"I know."
"When I found that paper I thought you'd been careless.
Then I thought you'd been selfish. It's neither one.
" I stood behind my chair with my hands on the back of it.
"You looked straight at my handwriting nine years ago and you rewrote it, because rewriting me was cheaper than telling me.
That's not forgetting me, Doyle. That's editing me. "
"Yes."
"Second." My voice was climbing and I brought it back down, because I wasn't going to yell in that kitchen even for this.
"I'm not letting you have any of it as an excuse, and I'm not letting you have it as a wound either.
You don't get to be the poor man on the rim.
There was a woman at home whose birthday it was, and she was fine that day, she had no idea, and from where I stood that was the whole story until August."
"That's fair. I'll take that."
"Third, and this is the one." I came around the chair.
"You never once got confused about what I wanted.
Not for four seconds. Not for nine years.
If you had, I'd have something to work with.
If you'd sat there and said, honey, I honestly thought you were doing it for me, I'd be trying right now to figure out how I made myself so small that a man who's known me since I was twenty-one couldn't read me. "
"You didn't."
"I know I didn't." I was crying by then, finally, four weeks late. "But I'd have gone looking for it. I'd have gone back through fourteen years asking which time I sounded lukewarm. And you'd have let me."
"Iris—"
"Would you have let me?"
He put his face down. "Yes. In August I'd have let you. I stood in that hall and told you that you never really wanted them, and I'd have let you take that home and chew on it, because it would have kept me out of this chair."
"That's the monster," I said.
"I know it is."
"Not the canyon." I wiped my face with the towel. "Not the balloon, not the six ticks, not the six hundred and fifty dollars. The monster is that you were willing to let me believe I'm a woman who doesn't want things. For nine years. That's what you were protecting."
"Yes."
"Because the alternative was this."
"Because the alternative was this exact conversation, in this kitchen," he said, "and I looked at it once, on a rim, for four seconds, and decided I'd rather have nine years of you being lukewarm than one hour of this."
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
"I'm not forgiving you tonight," I said.
"I didn't ask."
"I might not this year."
"Okay."
"Do you understand why?"
"Because it's not one thing. It's nine years of things."
"It's worse than that." I put the towel down.
"It's that I've got to find out who I am now.
I spent nine years being a woman whose husband told her everything, and I wasn't. I was a woman who thought that.
Now I have to go back through every good day in that stretch and decide which ones still count, and that's not a conversation, Doyle, that's a job, and it's going to take me a while, and you don't get to ask me how it's going. "
"Can I ask anything?"
"You can ask me what time supper is." He nodded, and I made myself go on, because I wasn't going to leave him with only the hard half.
"I'm not leaving, either, and I don't want you spending three days wondering, so there it is.
I'm not going anywhere. I've been married to you since I was twenty-one and there's a version of us I still want.
It isn't the one behind us. It's a new one, and it's going to cost you, and it's going to cost you in the only thing you've got that I want. "
"Which is what?"
"Time and your feet. Not money. Not sorry."
He nodded again.
"The fourth stands," I said. "Six a.m."
"Six a.m."
"And Sunday the frame goes up in the hall.
" I pointed at the brown paper on the counter.
"Ticks and all. Six checkmarks in your ink where my writing is.
I'm not cutting them off, I'm not covering them with the mat, and if somebody comes in this house and asks what those are, you're going to tell them. "
He looked at the counter a while. "Okay."
"We keep the record of what you did, and we keep the record of what we do next, and they go in the same document. That's the deal. That's the only deal there is."
"That's the deal," he said. "Ticks and all."
"Ticks and all."
Then I said, "Thank you for the whole ledger," and went to bed, and this time he came.