Chapter 15
IRIS
Odette got her verdict in first, because her Thursday came before Thanksgiving.
I'd printed the pictures — not on the phone, printed, at the drugstore machine, four of them, because you cannot show a photograph on a telephone to a ninety-six-year-old woman and expect anything but a discussion about the glare.
She went through them under the dryer with her reading glasses on, one at a time, slow, holding each at the distance she likes.
The bridge. The far wall of the gorge. Me at the rail in the wool hat, looking about sixty in that light and not caring.
And the one the woman took, which she held the longest.
"Who's got the pack," she said.
"He does."
"The whole way?"
"Three and a half hours up, two and a half down. Thirty-two pounds. He wouldn't set it down at the bench."
Odette put the photograph in her lap and looked at the yellow wall of her kitchen a second. "Albert's spinning."
I laughed so hard I had to put a hand on the counter.
"Now that one." She tapped the picture with a fingernail. "You told her to get the bridge in."
"How do you know that?"
"Because it's in it, sugar, and it's the size of a hair, and no photographer alive would leave that in on purpose." She handed the stack back. "Keep that one. Not on the phone. On a wall."
Nate came in Tuesday night before Thanksgiving with a duffel bag and a girl named Priya, which we knew about, and a beard, which we did not. He stopped in the hall on his way to his old room, and I heard him do it.
"Mom."
"Mm."
"What's this?"
I came and stood in the hall doorway with a dish towel and let him read it. He's a smart kid. He had the two inks in about four seconds and the six ticks in about eight, and then he stood there a good long while, which is how I knew he'd gotten all of it.
"Dad," he said, not turning around. "Is this what I think it is?"
Doyle came out of the front room, put his hands in his pockets, and stood beside his son in front of the frame. "Yeah. Those six are mine. I did them without your mother and didn't tell her, and she found it in August in the coat closet."
No shape on it at all. He'd have died before he said that in August.
Nate didn't say much the rest of the night. Around eleven I found him in the kitchen with the refrigerator door hanging open, reading the terms sheet under the magnet like a boy reading a cereal box.
"Number one's both of you," he said.
"That's right."
"Why?"
"Because a rule that only catches your father is a rule I'd have to enforce. I'd rather have a law than a job."
He shut the refrigerator. "That's harder on you than on him."
"It's supposed to be. A little."
Thanksgiving was fourteen people. My sister and her husband, Doyle's mother, and Lonnie — who came, and who hugged me in the doorway too hard and too long, and then went and talked about the auger for forty minutes.
We did the flip at two-thirty, after the pie, with everybody still at the table, and it was exactly as stupid as I'd promised.
Four slips. Mine were number fifteen, the overnight train in a bed, and number twelve, the sunflower fields.
Doyle's were number six, a night on a boat, and number thirteen, which he wrote fourteen years ago and which reads, in his handwriting, Learn to dance the real way. Lessons. Not just at a wedding.
Nate appointed himself the authority on procedure, which took nine minutes and involved a diagram on a napkin.
Lonnie objected to the diagram. Priya, God bless that girl, asked whether the flip was single elimination or double, and my sister said what's double elimination, and it went on from there.
Doyle's mother, who is eighty-four and does not miss, said, "Why don't you just pick the one you want?"
"Because that's not the game, Grandma," Nate said.
"It's a stupid game."
"It's a very stupid game," I said. "That's the point of it."
Round one, twelve against fifteen, my two.
Nate flipped. Fifteen took it, the train, and there was an argument about whether the coin had touched the gravy boat.
Other side, six against thirteen: Doyle flipped his own quarter, Lonnie immediately called it a conflict of interest, Priya re-flipped, and thirteen took it.
That left the train against the dancing.
Nate set the quarter on his thumb and everybody went quiet the way people do over something that doesn't matter at all.
It came up thirteen.
There was a second and a half of nothing. Then my sister started laughing, and Lonnie put his head down on the table, and Doyle said, "No."
"Yes," I said.
"Iris, I can't dance."
"That's what lessons are."
"There's a woman in town teaches it out of the Odd Fellows hall," Doyle's mother said. "Tuesdays. Seven o'clock. Fifteen dollars a couple."
"How do you know that?" Doyle said.
"Because I go, Doyle."
We put it on the calendar in ink for January, which is what the terms sheet says, and Nate wrote DANCE LESSONS — DAD on the propane company calendar in letters an inch high, and it hung in my kitchen for eleven months.
The flinch came at four o'clock, at the sink. I was up to my elbows in the roaster pan and Lonnie was at the table behind me with his coffee, talking to Doyle about spring, the way men do around a table at four o'clock on Thanksgiving.
"Pug's got a place up on the Fork he's been after me about," Lonnie said. "Turkey camp. He's talking a whole week in April, get up there the Sunday before?—"
My hands stopped in the water and my shoulders came up.
Number eleven is spend a night in a fire tower, and there's a tower on state land up on the Fork, and there was a whole week in April coming out of my brother-in-law's mouth in my own kitchen.
I stood there with my back to the room and waited for the machinery to start.
A week's a lot, Lon. I'd have to see where we're at.
And then April, and then a photograph on a refrigerator sometime in the summer.
Doyle said, "Can't speak for that one."
I didn't turn around.
"Why not?" Lonnie said.
"Because it's on the list. Number eleven's a night in a tower, and there's a tower up there, and the two are close enough that I'm not going to sit here and pretend they aren't." A chair moved.
"The list has two owners now. You can ask the other one if you want, she's right there.
I'll tell you up front she drives a hard bargain. "
"Iris?" Lonnie said.
"Ask me in January," I said, to the window. "That's when we do the calendar."
"January," Lonnie said, and then, after a second, "Doyle, what in the hell."
"I know."
"No, I mean — good. I mean good." His voice did something. "I've never heard you talk like that in my life."
I got the roaster pan done. It took me a while; my hands were slow.
That night, after everybody had gone and Nate and Priya had taken the truck into town, I told him about the splinter. We were in the front room and he had his leg up on the ottoman, because his knee gets stiff in the cold now.
"I looked at Lonnie's refrigerator," I said.
He put his book down.
"When I took the pies over Wednesday. It's still up there. The walleye magnet and the three of you in the basket."
"I'll ask him to take it down."
"No, you won't."
"Iris—"
"You will not ask your brother to take down a picture of himself. He gets to have his life. That's not the trade."
"Then what do you want me to do?"
"Nothing. It went in like a splinter, and I stood in his kitchen a second, and it took about a half hour to shake off, and I had a fine time at Thanksgiving anyway.
" I looked over at him. "I'm telling you where the splinter is.
That's all. You know it's there, you don't pretend it isn't, and you don't make your brother pay for it. "
He sat there with the book face-down on his chest. "It's going to keep happening."
"Some falls it will."
"Okay," he said. "Then tell me every time."
"That's the plan."
"That's got to be the worst thing I've ever agreed to," he said, and I said yes, and neither one of us laughed, and it was still all right.
I found the line on Saturday. I was straightening the hall, because the pictures in that hall go crooked from the front door slamming. I had my hand on the frame. The light was coming in low and gold from the front room, the way it does the last week of November at about three-thirty.
Something at the bottom of the paper that hadn't been there before. Small, his hand, under line twenty, in the last inch of margin, no number in front of it.
Take I. back to the bridge when we're too old to do the ridge, just the bridge, and sit.?
I read it three times and looked at the question mark for a while. He was in the kitchen; I could hear him with the coffee. He'd written it a week ago, hung the frame back on its nail, and never said one word to me about it.
He was waiting to be asked.
"Doyle," I called.
"Yeah."
"Come here a minute."
He came down the hall with the dish towel over his shoulder and stopped a step behind me, and I didn't turn around.
"What's the one at the bottom with the question mark?"
There was a pause, and I heard him breathe out. "That's an ask."
"How long's it been up there?"
"Week ago Saturday."
"You didn't say anything."
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because then you'd have had to like it," he said.
I stood there with the low gold light coming across the glass. "Ask me at Christmas," I said. "When the boy's here."
"All right."
He went back to the kitchen and the water came on.
I stayed where I was and put my finger on the glass, down at the eighth line, right-hand side, in the new column — one crooked checkmark, two inks laid over each other in the same stroke, made at that kitchen table on a Sunday morning by both our hands on the same day.
First one in fourteen years.
THE END
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