Chapter 7
KATHY
He lasted five days.
I'll give him those five days, because they weren't nothing.
Monday he came home from school and told me he'd talked to Adam — told him straight, no softening.
Tuesday he took Joyce's returnables in himself.
Wednesday he sat on the end of the bed while I was pulling my hair up for a three-to-eleven and said, "Can I ask you something instead of guessing?
" and then asked whether I wanted him to say anything to Lauren yet. I said not yet. He said okay.
That was Wednesday. I drove to work almost light.
Saturday morning I came down at nine and there was a card on the table, propped against the sugar bowl. Actual card stock. He'd gone to a store for it. Inside, in that handwriting of his that slants so far right it's nearly lying down:
Kath — 11/1, 10 a.m. You and Lauren. Don't say no. — N
Underneath, a printed confirmation page. The Willows Day Spa, two of the ninety-minute things side by side in the same room, robes, lunch included, paid. Then a second page, stapled on: seven o'clock at Baldoni's, the good one out on the county road, the one we go to for anniversaries. For two.
He was in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder, watching me read it. Fifty-one years old, standing in his own kitchen on a Saturday, hopeful.
"I already called her," he said. "She's free. She moved a thing with Sam's mother to do it."
"You called Lauren."
"I called Lauren, I said, your mother and you are going to be alone in a room for six hours, do not fight me on it." He grinned. "She said finally."
"She said finally."
"Kath, she was thrilled. She asked if there's a hot tub.
" He came in and put his hands on the back of the chair.
"And that's it, that's the whole day. You two, nobody else, no Mon, nothing about the shower.
The eleventh — the first, sorry, the first. Then I've got you and me at Baldoni's that night if you want it, or we skip it, whatever you want. "
I looked at the card a long time.
The first thing in me was gratitude, warm and embarrassing, because he'd gone to a store, because he'd spent money we don't especially have, because somebody had thought about me for a whole afternoon.
The second came before I'd finished the first — the drop you get when you realize you're being handled again by the same hands, in a nicer way.
"You moved something of Lauren's," I said.
"I moved a thing with Sam's mother, which she wanted out of anyway?—"
"You called my daughter and made a plan with her about me."
His hands came off the chair.
"I made a nice plan," he said carefully. "For the two of you."
"On the first of November."
"Is that bad? You're off the first, I looked at the—" He stopped. "I looked at your calendar."
"You looked at my calendar."
"To find a day you weren't on shift." His voice went up half a step. "Kathy, come on. What is this?"
"Sit down."
"I don't want to sit down." He sat anyway, on the arm of the chair by the door, which isn't sitting.
"Kath, I have been walking around this house on eggshells for two weeks trying to think of one thing to do that isn't talking.
You don't want to talk. Every time I open my mouth you tell me I'm arranging.
So I found something that has nothing to do with Mon, nothing to do with the shower, nothing to do with a single person in my family. You. Her. A room."
"And a bill."
"Don't."
"How much was it?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Neil. How much."
"Four hundred and ten," he said. "With the lunch. Don't look at me like that."
Four hundred and ten dollars out of a joint account, from a man who buys his own coaching shirts because the school only gives him one.
"That's the part that's going to keep me up," I said. "That you spent it. That you meant it."
And then I heard myself starting to build the sentence that would make it easy for him — it's lovely, honestly, thank you, I just — the whole apparatus coming up fully formed, greased by twenty years.
I put the card down on the table instead.
"You're doing it again."
"I'm doing what again? This is the opposite of?—"
"You're scheduling me and my daughter like a field trip."
He went very still.
"I'm not going to yell at you," I said. "I want you to actually hear this one, so I'm going to say it slowly.
Two weeks ago you found out what happened.
What happened is that you answered a question about me instead of letting me answer it.
Then you fixed it by calling your sister to get me added.
Now you've fixed it by calling my daughter to get me booked. "
"That is not?—"
"What did I want to do with Lauren on November first?"
He opened his mouth.
"You don't know. You couldn't know. You didn't ask.
You went to a store, you picked a nice thing, you put it in a card, you called her.
" I turned the confirmation page around so it faced him.
"Who set up the last two decades of things between me and my daughter, Neil?
Birthdays. The move-in day at school. The thing after her boards. Who made the calls?"
"We did."
"You did. I let you, and I liked it, and it's one of the reasons I married you — you make things happen, you show up, you get the room.
And it turns out that if a man arranges his wife's relationship with her own daughter for twenty years, then at some point he can arrange her out of it and nobody in the family notices a difference. "
He sat down in the chair properly, without pulling it out first, and it barked on the floor.
"Stop arranging us," I said.
"Kathy—"
"Stop arranging us. Me and her. Don't book us a spa, don't book us a dinner, don't get us a room, don't move her plans around so we can have an afternoon you designed.
" My voice cracked once in the middle of it, which I hated, and I kept going.
"If Lauren and I are going to have something, the two of us will make it.
I don't care if it's worse than yours. I don't care if it's a Tuesday at a diner. It'll be ours."
He had his fingers pressed into his eyes.
"Then what do I do?"
"You tell Monica and Lauren the truth about what you did. Yourself. The two of them together."
He took his hands down. "Okay. When?"
"I don't know."
"Where? Here?"
"I don't know, Neil."
"Well, what do I—" He stopped and started again, slower, like a man reading a word he doesn't recognize. "What exactly am I saying?"
"You know what you said in July."
"I know what I said in July."
"Then that's what you're saying."
He waited, and I knew what he was waiting for, because it was the rest of it — the script, the order, the room, who sits where, what to do if Monica starts crying, what to do if Lauren doesn't. Twenty years of marriage, and I could feel him holding his hand out under the table for the thing I always hand him.
"I'm not going to plan it," I said.
"Kath—"
"If I plan it, it's mine. If it's mine, it's one more thing I arranged, and then in four years, when your sister's telling it at somebody's cookout, it's the day Kathy made Neil apologize." I shook my head. "I'm not doing that. You did it. You say it."
"What if I do it wrong?"
"Probably you will. I'd do it wrong too."
The kitchen clock did the thing where it clicks louder on the hour.
"Mon's going to come apart," he said.
"Yes."
"You know what she's going to hear. She's going to hear that she stole a kid's shower. That twenty years of loving that girl was?—"
"I know exactly what she's going to hear. It's going to be terrible, and it isn't mine."
"No," he said. "It isn't."
"Do you want me there?" I said, which surprised both of us, because it came out as a question instead of a term.
He thought about it for a while, which was also new.
"I don't know. I think I want you there. I don't know if that's for you or for me."
"Then work it out," I said. "You've got my number."
He nodded slowly and picked his phone up off the table, and something in me went absolutely flat, because I knew the next sentence. Let me just call Mon and set up a time. I could have said it with him, in unison, in his voice.
He looked at the screen for a long moment. Then he put it face down on the table and left it there, and sat with his hands empty. For the first time since I've known him he had nothing to do about something.
"Neil." I put the card back in its envelope, because I couldn't stand to look at it. "Thank you for the spa thing."
"Don't."
"I mean it. It was kind. Six hours in a robe is the nicest thing anybody's offered me in about four years."
"It was easy," he said. "That's the part I'm just now — it was so easy, Kath. It took me twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, a card, a phone call. And the other thing—" He gestured at nothing, at the table, at the whole month. "The other thing I've been putting off for three weeks."
"Yes."
"Because it's going to cost me my sister."
"It might," I said.
He didn't tell me a day. I didn't ask for one. I went up at ten and lay there a long time listening to him not go anywhere.