7. The Comparable
THE COMPARABLE
MARNIE
We lived carefully for ten days. Polite. He made coffee before he left for the shop, which he hadn't done in years, and I drank it, which was my half of the arrangement. Twice he started a sentence at the sink and stopped it, and I let him stop.
I wasn't punishing him. I was doing what I do when a file comes to me with a hole in it, which is wait. A hole in a record is never the only hole. Don't chase the first one. Go get the boxes.
Ostrander's office had sent four of them home with Glenn — Eunice's household papers, unsorted, the kind the executor is supposed to review before the accounting.
Bridget had said she couldn't get to them until April.
So they sat in our spare room a solid two weeks with the flaps folded shut, and I walked past them every day on my way to the linen closet.
I didn't open one of them, because I wanted to be able to say afterward that I hadn't gone in looking for anything in particular.
On the third Saturday of March Glenn said he wanted to show me something. He wouldn't say what. An hour, tops, he said, and held the truck door for me.
By the second turn past the county line I knew where we were going.
Not the cottage road — the other one, the south shore, where the newer places are.
He pulled into a drive with a real estate sign at the head of it, one of those signs with a little box of flyers on the post. The box was empty, which told me he'd taken the last one on some earlier day.
"Glenn."
"Just walk it with me. Ten minutes."
The house was fine, and I want to be fair to it.
Nineteen-nineties, cedar, big glass wall on the lake side, cathedral ceiling with a fan.
Level floors. Vinyl windows, thirty years old, every one of them, which meant the seals were going, which meant they'd all need replacing inside a decade and not one of them could be repaired, only thrown out.
But it was warm, sound, honest about what it was.
The dock was better than ours — wide, aluminum frame, deep water at the end, a real swim ladder.
We stood out on it in the March wind with our hands in our pockets.
There was still ice in the shallows on the north side of the cove, gray with old snow, the way it holds on there every year until the first warm rain.
"Six-eighty," he said. "They've had it since October, so there's room.
House is paid down, my share's coming out of the estate, we'd carry something, but not much.
" He was talking fast, which Glenn does not do.
"Dock's already in, Marn. You'd never have to touch a sash again unless you wanted to.
And it's ours from the first day. No history.
Nobody's Aunt Somebody. Nothing anybody's got a story about. "
I looked at him. Collar up, ears red, and a flyer folded into his coat pocket with the corner sticking out, worn along the fold, which meant it had been opened more than once.
"You've been here before."
"Twice."
"Alone."
"Yeah."
And standing on that stranger's dock, I wanted it.
Not the house. The picture of it — a man getting into his truck by himself, twice, in the worst month of the year, driving out to a cove to stand alone on somebody else's dock imagining a life where his wife wasn't in pain.
Glenn has wanted very little out loud in twenty-two years.
He wanted this, and it was all over him.
So for about a minute I stood in it with him. Warm floors. A season where I didn't know where every valve in a building was. How much easier my whole life would run if I could be a woman who says yes, let's start clean — and she was right there in my coat with me, that woman, close enough to touch.
Then the wind came around the point.
"It's a good house," I said.
"It's a really good house."
"Glenn." I turned so I was facing him. "I don't want a lake house."
"I know it's not the same?—"
"No, listen, because I only want to say this once, and then I want to go get coffee.
" I got my hair out of my face. "There isn't a comparable.
That's not sentiment, it's a technical statement.
In my job, when something's gone, we write demolished, and then we write down what it was, because there's no substitution.
You can't replace a building. You can only build a different one. "
"So we build a different one. That's what I'm saying. Ours."
"You're not hearing the word." I put my hand on the aluminum rail, which was cold enough to hurt.
"It isn't the building I want. If the cottage burned down tonight I'd be sad for a week, then I'd get over it, because I'm fifty and I've been sad before.
What I want is for the record to say what happened. "
He looked out at the water. "It's paper."
"It's paper," I agreed. "You know what else is paper? Your mother's will. Four sheets. Look what four sheets did."
I watched that one get him.
"You've been machining parts thirty years. If a part comes off spec, do you go make a different part and hope nobody notices? If the print's wrong — somebody put the wrong dimension on the drawing — what do you do?"
He didn't answer for a while, and when he did his voice had gone flat and quiet.
"You don't touch the part. You stop the run, you fix the print. Then you re-cut off the corrected print."
"Yes."
"Because otherwise every part after that one's wrong too."
"Yes."
He nodded once at the lake. "Well," he said. "Okay."
We went and got coffee at the place by the boat ramp that opens the first week of March whether anybody comes or not. He kept the flyer in his pocket the whole time; I could see the corner of it every time he reached for his wallet.
"For what it's worth," I said, "you did a good thing today."
"I brought you to a house you didn't want."
"You drove out here twice by yourself in March trying to make my life stop hurting." I put my cup down. "That's the good part. The house is the wrong tool. The hands were right."
He turned his cup around a couple of times. "I'd like a list of the right tools. If you've got one."
"I'll let you know when I do."
"I'd take a short list."
"I know you would. You'd have it laminated."
Neither of us said anything about the property on the way home. Somewhere past the feed store he mentioned that the seals on those windows were probably shot, which was his way of putting the flyer in the trash.
He fell asleep on the couch before nine, which he hasn't done since the funeral, so it was ten before I got the spare room to myself.
That night I opened the boxes.
I did it at the dining room table, methodically, the way I'd run a deed search — four boxes, one at a time, everything out, sorted into piles.
Tax, insurance, medical, correspondence, discard.
Eunice kept everything, which makes a woman either a nightmare or a gift depending on what you've come looking for.
Twenty-two years of utility bills. A folder of Harmon's discharge papers. Receipts for a furnace in 1998.
Box three had a shoebox in it, and not a meaningful one — TAXES — OLD on the end in marker, tax returns inside, in order, rubber-banded by year. I took the bands off anyway. The label on a box is almost never true.
A third of the way down, between two of the returns, there was an envelope.
Cream. Her stationery, the kind she used for thank-you notes, with the little embossed E.
Sealed once and opened, the flap torn a bit at the corner where somebody had been impatient.
Nothing written on the front but two words in that round schoolteacher hand that was on every birthday card I ever got from her.
Glenn & Marnie.
My name. On an envelope out of a house where nothing had ever been mine.
I stood up. I don't know why. I read the whole thing right there at my own dining room table with my coat still over the back of the chair.
Dear Glenn and Marnie,
Your father and I talked about this for a long time.
I want to put it in writing so you can think about it properly, instead of just being polite at me on the phone.
We would like to sell you the lake place.
Not later. Now, while I can still watch you enjoy it.
You two love it best, anyone can see that, and Marnie has done more for that house in eight years than the rest of us did in forty.
We would do it at a family price, whatever you can carry, and I mean whatever you can carry.
Talk it over. Tell me in the spring. Love, Mom.
At the bottom, the date. Twelve years ago, in March.
I read it three times, and on the third time I noticed that my hands were completely steady.
Then I checked whether it was the only one. Sat back down, went through the rest of that shoebox return by return, sheet by sheet, all the way to the bottom.
It was near the bottom, lying flat under the last of them. Same stationery, same hand, four years newer.
Dear Glenn — I'm going to ask you one more time and then I'll let it be. I know what you said last time. I've thought about your reasons, and I don't agree with them...
I did not stand up for that one.