Chapter 12
IRIS
Sunday morning we hung it. Doyle had the paper flat on the table with the mat squared over it, and it took him twenty minutes to get it centered, which is about nineteen more than it needed, and I let him have them.
The list looked strange under glass. Smaller.
Yellow legal paper is not a thing you look at through glass.
He put a nail in the hall between the bathroom door and Nate's senior picture, held the frame up, and I stood back and said left, and he moved it a half inch left, and that was right. Twenty lines, two inks, six little black ticks down the margin like a man's thumbprints.
"That's uglier than I thought it'd be," he said.
"Good."
We went and sat at the table. I had a legal pad out, a new one, because there hadn't been a legal pad in this house in years and I'd bought one Friday at the drugstore.
"We're going to write down the terms," I said.
"All right."
"Not a talk. Terms. Things a person could point at."
"All right."
I wrote 1. and then stopped, because I'd been composing it in my head for three days and the actual writing of it is different.
"One," I said, and wrote it while I said it. "No item on that list gets touched alone. Ever. By either of us."
Doyle's head came up. "Either of us?"
"Either of us."
"Iris, you didn't do anything."
"I know what I did and didn't do." I kept writing.
"Here's why. If it only binds you, it's a punishment, and punishments run out.
Every punishment in the history of the world has run out.
Men get good behavior. Four years from now you'd be a man who'd served his time, and I'd be the warden deciding when to let you off, and I don't want that job. "
"So you're?—"
"I'm making it a law. Laws don't run out. If it binds me, then it isn't about what you owe me, it's about what the list is. The list is joint property, neither owner spends it alone. That's a rule about a piece of paper, not about your character."
He sat with that.
"If Sherry called me tomorrow and said she's got two seats on an overnight train to Chicago, in a bed — that's number fifteen. I couldn't go. I'd have to tell her no."
"You'd say no?"
"I'd say no."
"That's not?—"
"It's exactly fair, and it costs me something, and that's what makes it worth writing down." I turned the pad so he could see it. "I'd rather lose a train than have a rule that only exists because you're on probation."
He read it, then said, "Okay," and I turned the pad back.
"Two. The other fourteen — thirteen, after Saturday. There's a second column."
"A second column."
"On the frame. We take it apart and rule a line down the right-hand side, beside the open items, and it gets a heading, and the heading is in your handwriting." I pushed the pad across with the pen. "Write it here first so I can see it's you."
"What am I writing?"
"With I."
He held the pen a second, then wrote it small, in that squared-off hand of his that hasn't changed since 1989. with I.
"That's where the checkmarks go from now on. Not the margin — the margin has your six and it keeps them. New ones go in the new column, and they don't count unless both of us were there."
"Both of us were there," he said.
"And it gets dated. Every one of them, month and year, right in the column. That's not for you, that's for whoever ends up with this after us. Nate, probably. He'll take it down off a wall someday and be able to read the whole thing."
Doyle looked at the frame on the counter. "He'll see the six."
"He'll see the six."
"All right."
"Three." I wrote it. "At least one item a year, chosen alternately — I pick one, you pick the next. And they get paced honest."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning I'm not going to pretend the elevator isn't real.
Harvest is real. Your knee is real and it's going to get less real every year, which means numbers eleven and nineteen have a clock on them and the train doesn't. So we do it like grown people.
Not October. Not while there's beans on the ground.
But it goes on the calendar in ink in January for the year, and if the year gets away from us, that's a thing we have to say out loud to each other instead of a thing that just happens. "
"January," he said. "All right."
"Four." This was the one I'd gone back and forth on. "The note stays."
He looked at me.
"The one on your phone."
"Iris, I'll delete that thing right now."
"No, you won't." I put the pen down. "That's the second time you've wanted to be rid of it. You wanted to that night at this table, didn't you. After the canyon offer."
His mouth opened and shut.
"I knew it. You had it open."
"I had my thumb on it."
"Why didn't you?"
"I don't know."
"You do." I waited, and he didn't say it, so I did. "Because it's the only true thing you'd made in nine years."
He put a hand over his eyes.
"It stays," I said. "Not to beat you with. It stays because it's the record of what nine years of four-second decisions actually cost, in dates, in your own words. It's evidence, and I don't destroy evidence and neither do you. But I'm renaming it."
"To what?"
"Give me the phone."
He unlocked it and slid it across, and I found the note and put my thumb on the title and cleared out the four letters and typed what I'd settled on Thursday under Odette's dryer.
WHAT IT COST.
I turned it around. He read it and made a sound in his throat.
"Five," I said, taking the pad back. "This one's yours to keep and I can't check it, which is the point. When one of my asks starts turning into someday in your head — when you feel the machinery start — you say it out loud that day. Not that week. That day, before it finds a shape."
"Say what?"
"The rim's talking."
He sat back.
"Those words. Not a paraphrase, not a look. Out loud, in the room, where I can hear it."
"Why those words?"
"Because they're specific and they're ugly.
If it were I'm feeling avoidant, you'd never say it, because that isn't a thing that comes out of your mouth.
And if it were something soft you'd start using it about the water bill, and inside a year it'd mean nothing.
It has to be a place. It has to be the actual place. "
"That's going to be an awful thing to say in a kitchen."
"Yes. That's why it works. If it were easy you'd say it instead of meaning it."
"And what do you do when I say it?"
"Nothing. That's the other half. I don't get to punish you for saying it. You say the rim's talking, and we look at whatever it is, and I don't hold it against you, because the day I make it expensive to say is the day you stop saying it. That's on me, and I know it's on me."
He read the pad a long while — five numbered things in my handwriting on a fresh yellow page. "I want to sign it."
"It's not a contract."
"I want to sign it anyway."
So we signed it, both of us, at the bottom, like people closing on a house. Then I got up and put it under a magnet on our own refrigerator, front and center, where the school pictures would go if we had grandchildren yet, and where anybody who walks into that kitchen can read it.
"People will read that," Doyle said.
"I know."
"Lonnie'll read it."
"Lonnie already knows. Everybody in that shop already knows. That's not my doing, it's yours, and it's the best thing you've done since August."
"There's one thing missing," he said. "There's nothing in there about the six."
I looked at the pad, and he was right. "They don't get a rule. They happened. No rule fixes a thing that happened. That's what the frame's for."
He got up and rinsed the cups.
"There's one more thing," I said. "It's not a term, it's just a thing I want."
"Name it."
"Item nine gets picked at Thanksgiving. Not by discussion. By coin flip."
He turned around with a cup in his hand. "By what?"
"Coin flip. I write two on slips, you write two, we flip." I shrugged. "Heads, then heads again, whatever we come up with. It'll take an hour, there'll be arguing about the rules, Nate will get involved, and it'll be stupid."
"Iris, that's?—"
"That list got written in a bed by two people laughing at each other. It's been a very serious autumn, and I'm not letting it end up a serious piece of paper."
Doyle stood at the sink with the water running and started laughing, that low wheeze. Then he had to set the cup down and hold on to the counter, and about halfway through it turned into something else. I let him do that where he stood and didn't go over.
"Thanksgiving," he said, when he could.
"Thanksgiving. Bring a quarter."
The phone rang at four while he was putting the storm windows on the back porch.
I was elbows-deep in pie dough so I let it go, and it went to the machine in the front room, and the message came into the kitchen the way they do, too loud, a stranger in the house.
A woman from the ranger station: high wind advisory for Saturday, gusts inland in the afternoon, bridge access at the discretion of staff depending on morning conditions, call the office before driving up.
Doyle came in on the second sentence of it with a storm window in his hands and stood there and let it finish.
"That's a week out," he said. "Those things move."
"They do."
"They move all the time." He set the window against the wall, and I watched him not say the thing he wanted to say, which was that it's three hours each way for a maybe.
"The fourth still stands," I said.
"Then we call before we leave."
"That's right."
"And if they've got it shut?"
"Then we stand at the head of it and look at it, and drive home, and go back the Saturday after that, and the one after that."
"The color'll be gone by then."
"I know what'll be gone by then, Doyle."
He picked the window back up and carried it out, and I went back to the dough with my hands not doing what I told them, and rolled it too thin, and had to start it over.