Chapter 3
COLLEEN
The door stayed shut.
I noticed it Sunday on my way to the linen closet.
Hank had closed it during the party, probably so nobody would wander in, probably without thinking about it for two seconds together.
It was shut Sunday. Shut Monday. By Tuesday I'd worked out that I was the one keeping it that way, because I'd gone past it fifteen times and my hand hadn't once gone to the knob.
Behind it the curtains were still drawn from Friday. His bed was stripped. Two hangers on the floor, a charger left in the wall, a pile by the closet of shoes he'd decided against.
Nine seconds is all it would have taken to open those curtains. I couldn't do it.
So I dusted the hall table instead, put the vacuum away, told myself I'd get to it that weekend.
The pamphlets they hand out at school make it sound like a woman in my position stops functioning.
I went to work. We had four days of teacher prep before the kids came, which meant enrollment packets, immunization records, three families moving in from out of district, the copier repairman, and the annual fight over whether the fifth-grade hallway gets the good bulletin board.
I fixed the copier myself before the repairman showed up.
It's the E-2 error. It's always the E-2 error.
There's a scrap of jammed label stock behind the toner drawer that a man in a van charges us ninety dollars to pull out.
The bulletin board fight got settled Tuesday, the way it gets settled every year.
Fifth grade wants the one by the front doors because of the parade route.
Second grade has had it since before I started.
I put a laminated sign-up sheet on my counter with the months on it and let them work it out between themselves, which took eight minutes, which is nine minutes less than it takes when Dr. Okonkwo decides.
Wednesday I stayed past seven building the emergency contact binders. Dr. Okonkwo came past my door at six-thirty with her coat over her arm.
"Go home, Colleen."
"I've got the K through two."
"Go home."
"If I do them now, I don't do them Tuesday morning at seven-fifteen with a line at my counter."
She stood there a second. Then she put the coat on my extra chair, sat down, took the stack of yellow forms off the top, and started reading me phone numbers out loud so I could type.
We hit the Ws by ten after seven. Somewhere in there she told me about her sister's dog, which has had four surgeries, which she says with a straight face is why she can't retire.
I answered Owen's texts like a normal woman.
they put ranch on the pizza here. RANCH.
Report them, I wrote back. Do you have your ID card yet.
yes mom
Did you take the Zyrtec
going to now
I never texted him first. Not once that week. I'd like credit for that, from somebody, at some point.
What changed was that I stopped talking.
For twenty-four years I'd been the wire between my husband and my children.
Nobody assigned me that. I was the one who took the calls.
Meg told me things at eleven at night with her feet up on the coffee table; Owen told me things sideways, in the car, looking out the windshield.
Every evening of our marriage I came to Hank with the report.
Meg said Daniel's firm is doing layoffs, so don't ask her about it Sunday.
Owen has a thing Thursday, it's not a game, it's a banquet, you need a shirt with a collar.
Look at this picture she sent, look at his face, look.
That Monday Owen sent me a picture of his roommate asleep in a desk chair with a bag of chips on his chest. No caption. Sent at 1:04 in the morning.
I looked at it four times. I didn't show Hank.
It wasn't strategy. Tuesday night I opened my mouth to say Owen sent me a— and something shut like a hand. What came out was, "Did you take your pill?"
Wednesday we ate at the counter. Thursday I read while he watched the ballgame with his feet up. Twice he asked if I was all right, and twice I said I was tired, which was true, which was also the smallest true thing I could find.
He knew something was wrong. Wednesday he came home with a pint of the coffee ice cream I like, the expensive kind with the black lid, and put it in the freezer without saying a word about it, which is his entire vocabulary of apology.
He thought I was mad about the party.
I could see him deciding it had been too loud, or too soon, or too many people. Thursday night he said, "Ray talks too much, that's on me, I shouldn't have had him over so quick after."
"It's fine."
"Because if you didn't want the whole street here?—"
"Hank. It's fine."
He let it go, because I told him to.
Thursday afternoon I went into the supply closet off the front office, the one where the extra chairs are, where the toner smell is worst, and stood in there six minutes with the light off.
Then I came out and laminated the fire-drill route cards, because they needed doing.
That's the entire nervous breakdown: six minutes in a closet.
Friday Dr. Okonkwo sent us all home at three, since Tuesday was the first day and she said we'd need the weekend.
I drove home with the windows down and stopped at the store, where I bought food for two people.
That took twenty minutes longer than it should have, because I stood in the cereal aisle doing arithmetic about a boy who wasn't going to eat any of it.
At home I made coffee I didn't need, sat down at the kitchen table, and got the school calendar out of my bag.
I don't use my phone for this. Every year I buy the big paper one, laid out in a grid, because that's how I see a year. September and October were already inked in. I'd done it in August the way I do every August.
Sept 8 — first day, all hands, 6:30 arrival Sept 9–12 — enrollment corrections, bus route fixes Sept 15 — fall picture day (406 kids, 22 makeups) Sept 18 — open house, front office table Sept 22 — immunization compliance deadline, state Sept 25 — Title I family night Oct 1–5 — MAP testing window, front office covers proctor callouts Oct 6 — fall picture retakes Oct 9 — end of first quarter, report card mailing Oct 13 — parent conference scheduling opens Oct 16 — book fair setup Oct 19–21 — parent conferences, evenings Oct 22–23 — fall break, building closed Oct 27 — Halloween parade route, five hundred parents in a parking lot Oct 31 — costume day
That's not a calendar. That's a season.
Then I went to the counter and picked up the folded paper Hank had left under the fruit bowl since Saturday. The dealership sheet, with his handwriting on the back in carpenter's pencil, all capitals, the way he writes on lumber.
DEPART OCT 1 BLUE RIDGE 4 NIGHTS SHENANDOAH 5 ASHEVILLE AREA 5 SMOKIES 6 NASHVILLE 5 CHARLESTON 5 SAVANNAH 5 OUTER BANKS 7 HOME NOV 15
I laid them side by side on the table. My school year on the left, six weeks of my husband's imagination on the right.
October first. The first morning of the MAP window. Out of every date on the calendar he'd picked the exact hinge of my worst month.
I sat with my hands flat on either side of the two papers.
I'd already started forgiving the party, honestly. A banner's a banner. Balloons deflate.
This wasn't a banner.
Somewhere between July and Saturday my husband had sat down with a pencil to design the first season of our life without children in it. He picked the dates. He picked the states. He picked the number of nights we'd sleep beside a lake in Tennessee.
Not once in all of that had he come into a room where I was sitting and asked me one question about what I wanted.
The truck pulled in at five. Door, tailgate, the low scrape of his boots on the mat.
I put the dealership sheet back under the fruit bowl, closed the calendar, slid it into my bag, and stood up, because I didn't trust the first thirty seconds of anything I might say.
He came in with his lunch cooler in one hand and his hat in the other, the sunburn still peeling across the bridge of his nose from Saturday.
"Job's on hold," he said. "Subfloor's wet. I'm all yours."
"Okay."
He put the cooler in the sink, kissed my cheek on his way to the stairs, and went up them two at a time like a younger man, humming something.
I stood in my kitchen listening to my husband be happy on the floor above me, in a house with one shut door in it, holding the strap of a bag with October in it.