Chapter 4
NEIL
Iknew something was wrong on the Wednesday, because the towels were still in the dryer.
Which sounds like nothing. After twenty years, nothing is most of the language.
My wife comes off a night shift, sleeps till two, gets up and empties that dryer standing in the hallway with the TV on for company.
She's done it a thousand times, and a thousand times I've told her to leave it, I'll get it.
She says it's fine, honestly, and folds the towels.
Thursday they were in a laundry basket on the stairs, unfolded, where I'd put them, badly.
Friday she made a joke at dinner. Saturday she went to her mother's, came back, said about nine words, watched a show with me and went up at nine-thirty.
Sunday morning she was awake before I was, out at the kitchen table in her robe with both hands around a cup of coffee she wasn't drinking, looking through the window at the Hollands' fence, and when I came in she smiled at me.
That smile is what got me moving. I got the same one in a hospital corridor outside her mother's room the night of the stroke, thirty-one hours into being awake. It's the smile that means I am fine, do not follow me in here.
What I thought was this: she's hit the wall.
A year of doubles, a year of weekends at Joyce's, a year of filling that little pill thing on a Sunday like a second job, and now a wedding on top of it.
I'd been watching her run on empty since February.
I'd been telling her to drop a shift, telling her to let Rhonda take a weekend.
And I thought: she's found out about the shower, she's hurt, because the invitations went out without her name on them.
So I fixed it.
Monday I had a free period after third, so I sat in my classroom with the lights half off, eating a sandwich over a stack of ungraded quizzes on the Marshall Plan, and called my sister.
"Mon."
"I'm addressing. I've got a hand cramp. If my handwriting goes downhill it's on Ellery House for giving me a Sunday."
"I need a favor."
"Anything, you know that."
"Kathy's name should be on this thing."
Monica went quiet for maybe two seconds, which in our family is a long time.
"The shower?"
"The shower. She's the mother of the bride, Mon. She should be a host."
"Neil." A chair scraped on her end. "Neil, I asked you."
"I know you did."
"Months ago. In my kitchen, you were standing right there by the toaster, and I said?—"
"I know what you said."
"—and you told me she'd be relieved. You said she was exhausted, Neil. You said don't put one more thing on her."
"I know." Nineteen minutes until fourth period, and a man can hold two thoughts at once as long as one of them costs less than the other. "Things change, that's all. She's more up for it than I thought. Can you get her on the invitations?"
"Forty-one are mailed."
"How many are left?"
"Forty-nine, and they're addressed."
"So the forty-nine. Put her name on those."
"Her name goes where, exactly? Under mine? Beside mine?" She wasn't being snide. She was being Monica, who has the mind of a logistics officer inside the body of a woman who cries at other people's christenings. "It'll read strange to anybody who got the first batch."
"Then she co-hosts. It's a co-host thing. People do that."
"People do do that." Paper moving. "Fine. Yes. Of course. God, I don't want anybody thinking I muscled in on?—"
"Nobody thinks that."
"Because I asked you."
"You asked me, Mon."
"I would never, Neil. Twenty years I have loved that girl?—"
"I know."
"—and I'm not going to be made into somebody who?—"
"Monica. Nobody is making you into anything." I put my hand flat on the quizzes. "Give her something to do, too. A job. Something real."
"Like what?"
"I don't know, that's your department. The dessert thing. The favors."
"The favors," she said, thinking about it. "She could do the favors. Little jars. There's a thing with honey and a wooden dipper."
"Perfect."
"And a little tag on each one. Thank you for being here. In her handwriting, not mine — people can tell." Paper moving again. "She'll be good at that. She's got a nice hand when she slows down, and she'll do every one of them properly, which is more than I'd do by jar ninety."
"Then it's fixed."
"It's fixed."
A kid put his head around my door, saw the phone at my ear, mouthed something about a hall pass, and left again.
"You'd tell me if she was upset."
"She's not upset. She's tired. You know how she gets when she's tired, she goes quiet and won't say."
And my sister said, "Oh, I know, honey. That poor woman."
Fourth period was the Berlin airlift, which is my best lesson, because the whole thing is one picture: a city fed by air for eleven months.
They always get quiet at the candy drop.
Twenty-six years of teaching and I still get a charge out of the second where a room full of sixteen-year-olds decides something from 1948 has anything to do with them.
After school I had JV, forty boys and one ball.
A sophomore swore at a referee in a scrimmage, so I put the whole squad on the line for two minutes, which they hated, which is the job.
At five I came home with my whistle still around my neck feeling like a man who'd solved a problem.
I was happy. I made pork chops. I had the good news in my pocket the whole time I made them.
Kathy came down at six with her hair wet, in the sweatshirt from her sister's 5K, and she looked better. Rested. She kissed my shoulder on her way to the silverware drawer.
"Sit," I said. "I've got something."
"That's ominous."
"It's good." I put the plates down, and I even had a little flourish, God help me. "I talked to Mon. You're on the shower."
She stopped with the forks in her hand.
"You're a co-host. Your name's going on the invitations, the ones that haven't gone out yet. And you've got the favors — she's doing these little honey jars with a wooden, the little stick thing?—"
"A dipper."
"A dipper. Right. So that's yours. She was thrilled." I sat down. "Done. Fixed."
Kathy set the forks on the table. Not by the plates — in the middle, in a little pile, like something she was finished with.
"Neil. How many are mailed?"
"How many what?"
"Invitations. She told you a number."
"Forty-one. About forty. The out-of-town ones."
"Forty-one," my wife said. "So forty-one people in this family already have a piece of card stock in their kitchen telling them who's throwing my daughter's shower, and I'm not on it."
"Kath—"
"And forty-nine more will get one with my name written in at the bottom."
"Not written in. Printed. Well — she'll have to hand-do it, but her handwriting's?—"
"Her handwriting's beautiful," Kathy said. "It really is."
I laughed, because I thought we'd landed somewhere.
"So we're good," I said.
"I don't want to be a co-host of my own daughter's shower, Neil."
She said it flat, not loud, the way she reads a blood pressure out to a resident.
"You—" I put my fork down. "Okay. Hang on. Two minutes ago you weren't on it at all, and now you're on it. That's the direction we want, isn't it?"
"You got me added."
"Yes."
"To a thing that already exists. That was already planned, already booked, already paid for. Somebody wrote ninety envelopes, I found out about it from a hyperlink, and now I'm being penciled in at the bottom with a jar of honey."
"It's not being penciled?—"
"Who did you have to ask, Neil?"
I sat there in my own kitchen with a pork chop going cold, and I could not for the life of me see what I was supposed to have done differently.
I'd identified the problem. I'd gone to the person with the authority.
I'd gotten my wife her name back on the paperwork plus a real job, inside one phone call, with a hand cramp on the other end of it.
"I don't know what you want me to do," I said.
"That's honest, at least."
"Kath." I reached across and took her wrist, gently, my thumb over the little bones. "You're running on fumes. You've been running on fumes since February. That's all this is. Let me carry some of it."
She looked down at my hand.
"Say that again," she said.
"Say what?"
"The fumes part. Where'd you get it?"
"Get it? I've got eyes, Kathy. You fell asleep in a chair at your mother's with a fork in your hand."
"I did. In February." She slid her wrist out from under my hand — not fast, no snatch to it, just taking it back the way you take back something you've been holding for somebody. "Who else says it?"
"Who else says what?"
"That I'm running on fumes."
"Everybody who loves you," I said.
She got up, carried her plate to the counter with the food still on it, stood there a second with her back to me. Then: "Thank you for the chops," and she went upstairs.
No light went on for me. What I had was a snag low under the sternum, the kind I get on a sideline when the play worked and the score went up but something about the way a kid came off the field is wrong.
I stood there scraping a good pork chop into the trash, worrying at the word tired like a chipped tooth.
She was tired. Tired people don't take help well.
I loaded the dishwasher and put the radio on low, and at nine I went up. Scrubs over the chair, night bag by the door, her back to me, breathing like a woman pretending.