Chapter 6
COLT
I didn't sleep much. I lay in the dark with the taste of last night still on me.
Her hands on my face, the give in my own shoulders when I stopped bracing, the word she said against my mouth and somewhere around four it turned into the thing it always turns into with me.
A need to do something with it. I have never in my life been able to feel a thing without it converting into a task.
Other men, I think, lie there and just feel it.
I lay there and started building a list.
She said: eat your eggs tomorrow and we'll see. She said: ask.
So here's me, asking, the only way I know how to ask.
She hadn't said it to me. She'd said it to Marie during the lunch rush, while I was in the booth with a burger and the B section of the paper.
I can seat sixty, Marie. Father Pete said a hundred.
Where am I putting forty people? Marie said something about borrowing from the church fellowship hall.
Joelle said the fellowship hall tables were too wide for the diner's aisles.
Then she picked the coffeepot back up and the conversation closed over like water.
I'd eaten my burger and filed it where I file everything I hear from that booth, the silent, unexamined part of me where the things she says go and sit and accumulate until, sooner or later, they come out the other end as something I can carry.
Henderson's Hardware has folding tables in the back aisle, the kind with the metal legs and the particleboard tops that weigh about thirty pounds each.
I load eight into the truck bed. Then I stand in the parking lot with the receipt and try to work out how many people fit at a six-foot folding table, which I do not know.
I know how many board feet of pine ride in a flatbed.
I know how many gallons of diesel my truck burns to the Ridge and back. I do not know table math.
Four a side, I figure. Eight a table. Eight tables, sixty-four people, plus the sixty the diner already seats. A hundred and twenty-four. That's enough.
I have no idea if that's right. I buy two more in case it isn't, because a margin is a thing you build when you can't be sure, and I am sure of almost nothing this morning except that I want to put something solid between her and the wall she's always got her back against. Tables are solid. Tables I understand.
The diner lot is half full when I pull in.
The breakfast rush. Through the front windows I can see Joelle moving between the tables with the coffeepot and the egg plates, same as every morning, fast, bright, talking to everybody, the whole machine running with her as the engine. Hank at the counter. Earl on his phone.
I sit a second with the truck running and let myself look at her, which I don't usually allow. Last night comes up hard and physical and I push it back down where I can use it later, when I'm not about to carry ten tables past a window she's standing in. It goes, but it goes slow.
What I let myself look at instead is the cost of her.
She moves through that room like she choreographed it, and under the choreography is a woman who hasn't sat down since 5:30 and won't until close.
I've watched it for two years. I've tipped and left.
That's the whole of what I've ever done about it, put money on the table and leave.
This morning I'm going to do better than money.
That's the thought I have, pulling around back.
That's how sure I am that I'm getting it right.
I unload through the back door, which is propped open with the cinderblock.
The diner's mid-rush and she's out front, so I carry all ten in and lean them against the kitchen wall before she comes through the serving window and sees them.
I want them done. I want it to be finished and standing there, a solved thing, before she can tell me not to.
That should have told me something. It didn't. I noticed I was hurrying so she wouldn't catch me and I read it as efficiency instead of what it was.
She finds me stacking the last two.
Not outside this time. Not in the parking lot in the cold, where the truck was between us and there was somewhere for me to look.
Inside her kitchen. Her space. Surrounded by her prep.
She stands in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room with the coffeepot in one hand and a look on her face that is nothing like the parking lot, quieter than that, and worse.
"I didn't ask for tables."
"You said you didn't have enough."
"I said that to Marie."
"I was in the booth."
She sets the coffeepot down on the counter.
Through the serving window I can hear the rush going on without her, forks on plates, Hank asking for more coffee, the ordinary sound of the place running for thirty seconds in her absence.
And I watch the sentence land on her, the real one, the one I didn't mean to say out loud: I was in the booth.
Two years of her conversations, overheard from eight feet away, converted into action without her knowledge and without her permission.
I hear how it sounds the same instant she does.
I have not been a man who cares. I have been a man who listens through a wall and acts through it too, and never once stepped around to her side of it to say a single word to her face.
Her phone buzzes on the prep counter. She glances at it. Picks it up.
I watch her face change as she listens. The brightness doesn't drain out of it. It snaps off, like a breaker.
"What do you mean, upgraded?" she says. Then: "Anonymous?" A pause. "How much more?"
She sets the phone down on the prep counter. Gently. The gentleness is the worst part. I'd rather she slammed it.
"You upgraded my turkey order."
"The town needs ...”
"Put down the table."
I'm holding a table. I picked it up again without deciding to. My hands do that, reach for the tool, the lumber, the task, anything to be busy so I don't have to stand in a room and just be a man in it. I put it down.
The kitchen is small. I've been in it twice now, and both times it has felt like a space built for one person who moves fast. The prep counter is covered in lists.
Her handwriting, small, cramped, on receipt paper, numbers circled and crossed out and circled again.
Pie quantities. Potato weights. A note that says ask Marie about extension cords with three exclamation points.
The whole staggering weight of this dinner is pinned to that counter, every ounce of it in her hand, and not one line of it has ever had my name on it.
She built all of this alone. She wasn't asking anyone to carry the other end.
She was carrying it, the way she carries everything, and the only thing I did was decide, from across the room, that she shouldn't have to, and then take pieces of it away from her without telling her.
She doesn't yell. I can see her doing the arithmetic instead, last night, and now this morning.
The check. The tables. The turkeys. Different materials.
Same pattern. I can see her recognize the pattern, and I can see her understand that last night didn't change it, that I woke up this morning and did the exact thing I've always done, just more of it.
That's the look that's worse than the parking lot.
It's not anger. It's a woman watching a thing she let herself hope about turn back into the thing she already knew.
"I'm taking the tables," she says. "Because I need the tables, and I'm not going to punish a hundred people because you don't know how to use your words."
She picks the coffeepot back up and goes out to the dining room and keeps working.
I stand in the kitchen with ten folding tables and my upgrade of the turkey order, and I understand that she isn't coming back to finish the conversation, because from where she's standing there's nothing left to say.
I gave her the answer I always give. She heard it.
It was the wrong one. It is always going to be the wrong one as long as it comes out of my checkbook instead of my mouth, and I knew that last night, lying in the dark.
She'd said it to me as plain as a person can say a thing.
And still I got up this morning and bought tables anyway, because tables don't ask anything of me and a sentence does.
I leave through the back door. The cold comes in off the lot and hits me flat, and I pull the door shut behind me and hear the latch catch, and that small sound is about how it feels.
The drive home is twelve minutes. I take the long way, past the gas station, the elementary school, the church where Father Pete first mentioned the dinner back in October.
The town's putting up its own decorations: garland on the lampposts, a plastic nativity in front of the post office with a sheep that's fallen over. Somebody has stood the sheep back up with a brick under it, it’s probably been propped by someone who didn’t know how to actually fix.
I drive past it and I feel found out by a lawn ornament.
At home I sit in my own driveway with the engine ticking. The hundred and sixty dollars she put on my dashboard is still in my shirt pocket, against my chest, where I've left it for days as if it’s evidence of something.
Two folding tables are stacked against my kitchen wall, the two i wasn’t sure she needed, the margin I bought because I can't stand not having one.
The upgraded turkey order she never placed is confirmed and paid for and on its way.
Everything I touched is handled. And I have never in my life felt less like a man who showed up.