Chapter 2
COLLEEN
Iwoke at six-forty because my body hadn't been told yet.
That's the hour his shower used to start.
Four years of the pipes knocking behind the bathroom wall, then twenty more minutes under the covers, which were the best twenty minutes of my day.
Saturday I woke to nothing at all, at six-forty on the nose, with my heart going like I'd slept through an alarm.
Hank's side was empty, the sheet thrown back instead of folded, which meant he'd gotten up early on purpose.
I lay there a while. Then a car door out front. Then another one.
I put on the blue robe. I was three steps from the bottom of the stairs when I saw the balloons.
They were tied to the newel post in a fat bunch, orange and white, our school colors, drifting a little because somebody had the front door open. More of them in the front room. A folding table in the entry with a stack of red cups. Somebody had run an extension cord out through the window.
Through the front glass I could see Ray Faber coming up my driveway with a cooler, Dee behind him carrying a foil pan.
And across the porch rail, zip-tied at four corners, hung so it faced the street:
CONGRATS US!
Gold letters, the kind they sell at the party store on the aisle with the graduation stuff. He'd spelled it out with the little cardboard pennants, which meant he'd strung them himself, one at a time, which meant it had taken him a while.
Hank came around the corner from the kitchen with a bag of ice in each hand, wearing the biggest grin I've seen on him since the day Meg got engaged.
"There she is. Twenty minutes to spare. I was going to let you sleep, except Ray's early to everything."
"Hank."
"Don't worry about the house, nobody's getting past the kitchen." He dropped the ice in the cooler by the door and shook out his hands. "Go put on that blue thing. The one with the buttons."
"What is this?"
"It's a party." He said it like I'd asked him what a chair was. Then he came over, took me by both shoulders, kissed me — ice water and sunscreen, so plainly happy that I let him hold on a few seconds while I got my face into some kind of order.
"For what?"
"For us." He let go, already turning, already hunting the next job. "Twenty-six years, Coll. Since we started. Twenty-six years of somebody else's schedule."
Then Dee was in my doorway with the foil pan saying oh honey, empty nest, hugging me while I was still in my robe.
I went upstairs and put on the blue thing with the buttons. Lipstick too, because I've been the wife at a party on this street for a long time, and because the alternative was standing at the top of the stairs until everybody went home.
By eleven there were nineteen people in my backyard.
He had the grill going, a speaker on the picnic table playing the classic rock station, a case of the good beer instead of the cheap kind, which for Hank is a form of formal dress. He moved through those people the way he moves on a jobsite. Refilling, flipping, laughing, a hand on somebody's arm.
I brought out Dee's potato salad. Got the paper plates from the garage, found a bag for the trash, then a second bag. Then I stood at the edge of the patio, listening to my husband tell the Fabers, the Nowickis, Ray's brother-in-law about the twenty-six years.
"Practices," he was saying. "Swim at five-forty in the morning. Five-forty. For a kid who quit in November."
Laughter.
"Tuition. Braces. That summer with the two cars and three drivers. Curfew — you know what a curfew is? A curfew is a thing you do to yourself. You're the one awake."
More laughter. Ray toasted him with a can.
"Twenty-six years of everybody else first," Hank said. "And we did it. Both of them out the door, both upright, nobody in jail. So." He raised his beer toward me across the yard, and every head turned with it. "Congrats us."
They applauded.
They weren't being cruel. Dee Faber has fed my children. Ray plowed our driveway for twelve winters and never once took a dollar for it. A nice man they like had told them a nice thing had happened, so they stood in my backyard with paper plates and clapped.
I raised my cup. My face did what it knows how to do.
Everybody in that yard was at a different event than I was.
Hank came and got me twice — an arm around my waist, pulling me into the circle, tell them about the trombone — so I told them about the trombone.
He kissed the side of my head. He kept checking my face with this open, expectant look, like a man watching somebody unwrap a gift, waiting for the part where it changes.
Mine didn't change the way he wanted, and every time he noticed, he tried harder.
Dee found me at the drink cooler around noon.
"You must be so relieved."
"Mm."
"Ray's sister did the whole thing where she cried for a month. A month, Colleen. Over a boy who came home every other weekend with his laundry." She was digging under the ice for a seltzer. "I told her, honey, you did the job. Take the win."
"That's one way."
"How are you doing, though. Really."
She meant it kindly. She had one arm in that cooler up to the wrist.
"I'm fine," I said. "Do you want the lime ones? They're in the other cooler."
She went for the lime ones. Nobody asked me twice all day.
An hour later Ray's brother-in-law tracked me down by the grill with a plate in his hand.
"So what's the plan? Cruise? Everybody does a cruise."
"We haven't talked about it."
"My sister-in-law did Alaska. Said the boat's the thing, not the glaciers."
"Good to know."
"You've got to have a plan, though." He pointed his fork at the yard, the coolers, my husband turning meat. "Otherwise you just sit around looking at each other."
Hank laughed at something Ray said, out of context, from over by the grill. Somebody's kid ran through the sprinkler line with a paper plate held over her face.
"I'll write that down," I said, and went in for more ice.
At one o'clock he stood up on the bench of the picnic table.
"Okay, okay. One more thing. Actual reason we're all out here."
"Hank," I said.
He wasn't looking at me. He had his hand in his back pocket, and he came out with a folded piece of paper, opened it, held it up like a permit.
"I put a deposit down on a camper."
The yard came apart. Ray hollered. Somebody whistled. Dee grabbed my forearm with both hands and squeezed.
"Twenty-eight footer," Hank said over them. "It's got the slide-out. It's got the outdoor kitchen. And—" he waited them down, working it, enjoying himself "—six weeks. Starting October first. Blue Ridge, down through the Smokies, over to the coast, home by the middle of November."
I heard the date the way you hear your own name in another room.
"Six weeks," Ray said. "Six weeks with this guy, Colleen. You want a lawyer?"
Everybody laughed. Hank stepped down off the bench and came at me through the crowd holding that paper, lit up. He took my free hand in his, said it loud enough for all of them.
"We got our life back, Colleen."
The paper had a dealership logo across the top and a number written at the bottom in blue ink with three zeros in it.
I looked at my neighbors.
They were clapping on the lawn where, eighteen hours before, I'd walked into a house with no sound in it. Not one of them meant a thing by it.
"Congratulations," I said.
Hank kissed me and went to flip the burgers.
I didn't explode. I didn't go inside. I stayed out there another four hours, refilled the ice twice, told a joke about Hank in a camper that got a bigger laugh than anything he said all day, and sent Dee home with her own foil pan washed.
At four the Nowickis' boy knocked a citronella bucket off the rail, and Ray put it back.
Somewhere in there the good beer ran out, so Hank went to the garage fridge for the cheap kind, which nobody minded by then.
Dee dried dishes at my sink for half an hour, telling me about her hip.
I said all the right things back. Out the window over the faucet I could see my husband with one foot up on the picnic bench, drawing a route in the air with a beer can for somebody who'd already heard it.
The last car pulled out at six-fifteen. Hank came in with two bags of trash in one hand, red-faced, sunburned across the nose, still riding it.
"That went great. Ray's going to look at campgrounds for us. He did the Smokies in '19."
"Mm."
"You want me to make you a plate? There's a burger left."
"I'm not hungry."
"Long day." He kissed the top of my head on the way past. "Hell of a day."
Then, from the doorway: "Hey. You did good today."
"Did I."
"Ray's brother-in-law asked if we cater."
"That's Dee's potato salad."
"Don't tell him." He was working a boot off with one hand against the wall. "You went quiet toward the end there."
"I was tired."
"That's what I figured."
He waited a second, in case there was more coming. I didn't give him more, so he nodded the way he nods when a job's closed out, then went to find the remote. By eight he was asleep on the couch with the television going.
I walked the house.
I didn't cry. I went room to room in the dark listening for what wasn't there, one at a time, the way you'd go down a fuse box.
Upstairs hall, six-forty: no shower. The pipes behind that wall would be quiet tomorrow too.
Kitchen, seven-fifteen: no refrigerator door. Nobody standing in the light of it drinking milk out of the carton in a way I made a point of not knowing about.
Living room ceiling, any hour at all: no bass. Four years of a low thud coming through the floor of his room, so steady that the chain on the ceiling fan used to tick against the globe in time with it.
Side door: no bang. No shoes kicked off right where the door swings, so the door can't open all the way.
Anywhere, any time: no Mom, have you seen?—
That one I said out loud in the empty kitchen, just to hear it in my own voice, then felt ridiculous, then put both hands flat on the counter.
Ten at night in a house that smelled like other people's sunscreen.
I had a job for twenty-four years. I wasn't perfect at it. I was good. I was necessary. I loved it more than I've ever loved anything, including the two people I did it for.
Friday it ended. No notice, no severance, no party, no plaque, no card signed by the department. The whole point of that job is to work yourself out of it, and knowing that didn't put one sound back in my house.
I'd been laid off from the only work I was ever irreplaceable at.
And my husband had thrown himself a party on the front lawn of it.
In the other room the television changed channels by itself on a timer he'd set. Hank breathed. The furnace kicked on for the first time since April.
I turned off the kitchen light and went up to bed by myself.