Chapter 4
HANK
By Wednesday I knew I'd stepped in something. I just didn't know what.
The way I find a problem is with my hand flat on the floor, feeling for the soft spot. Find the soft spot, cut a square out of the subfloor, look underneath, find the leak. Nine times out of ten the leak isn't where the soft spot is. Water runs downhill first. That's the whole trade.
So Wednesday night I sat on the edge of the tub with the water running, so she'd think I was doing something in there, and I went looking for the soft spot.
The party. Had to be the party.
I ran it back like a job that came in ugly.
Ray, too loud, too early, in the driveway before she'd had her coffee.
Nineteen people in the yard. Dee hugging her while she was still in a bathrobe — that one made me wince when I got to it.
The music. The banner up on the front of the house where the whole street could read it, which by Wednesday was starting to seem like a lot.
Colleen's a private woman. She sends the Christmas card.
She doesn't hang her business off the porch rail.
Then the announcement. I'd stood up on a picnic bench. In front of people. She found out about a thirty-eight-thousand-dollar purchase at the same time as Ray Faber's brother-in-law, whose name I couldn't tell you with any confidence.
That was my leak. Tacky, loud, public.
I felt better as soon as I had it, because that's a problem with a work order attached.
I called Ferraro's Thursday and got the eight o'clock Saturday, which took two calls, because nobody gets the eight o'clock Saturday at Ferraro's in September by asking nice. Corner table, I said. Anniversary, I said, which was a lie, and which got me the corner table.
I picked up the flowers Saturday at four.
Not the gas station kind — the florist out on Route 9, where the woman with the reading glasses on the chain talked me up to sixty dollars.
I asked for something that wasn't roses.
Colleen thinks roses are what a man buys when he hasn't been paying attention.
Got a haircut. Wore the gray shirt.
And I wrote a toast on the back of a materials list at the shop, then said it twice in the truck with the radio off.
Twenty-six years. Chapter two. To the woman who did the hard part.
I was proud of it.
She came down the stairs at seven-thirty in the black dress with her hair done. Smiled at the flowers, put them in water, stopped at the door to put her hand flat on my chest. "You got a haircut," she said, which is how she says thank you.
The whole drive I thought I had it back. She had the visor down, doing something to her mouth in the little mirror. She asked whether I'd remembered to move the ladders out of the truck bed before it rained. I had, and I told her so twice.
I sat in that parking lot a second after I killed the engine, running the toast through my head one more time while she got her purse together. That should have told me something right there. Nobody rehearses a thing he's about to say to his own wife.
Ferraro's did their part — corner table, low light, the candle in the amber glass.
The kid who brought the bread called us both sir and ma'am, which Colleen hates, which she covered by asking him whether the special was any good.
He said his manager wouldn't let him answer that.
She laughed. He came back twice after that just to check on us.
She ordered the scallops, I ordered too much bread.
She asked about the wet subfloor, then about whether I'd called my brother back, and for twenty minutes it was the two of us out on a Saturday, which we hadn't been in a while.
Which was the point of the whole thing, if anybody had asked me.
Then the plates came. I got my hand around my glass. "I want to say something," I said.
She went still. I kept going anyway, because I had it rehearsed, and a man with a rehearsed thing in his mouth doesn't steer.
"Saturday was a mess," I said. "I made it a circus. I should've done this instead. So." I lifted the glass. "Twenty-six years. To chapter two. To the woman who did the hard part."
She didn't lift hers.
She looked at the candle a second, then at me, and her face wasn't angry, which was worse. It was the face she makes at a repairman who's just told her the part is on order.
"Hank. Put it down."
I put it down.
"Do you know what this is?" She touched the edge of the table. "The flowers, the reservation, the toast. It's Saturday again. It's Saturday with a tablecloth."
"It's not a party. It's you and me."
"It's an event." She said it quietly, the way she says the things she means. "You keep throwing events at a wound."
"Colleen—"
"I don't need a better party." Her hands were folded in her lap. She wasn't crying. In twenty-six years I've never once seen her cry in a restaurant. "I need you to notice there was a funeral."
I sat there with sixty dollars of not-roses standing in a vase at home.
I didn't know what to say, so I said the first true thing that came up, which was, "He's alive, Coll. He's two hours away. He's fine."
I watched her decide not to answer that.
She picked up her fork and got through about a third of the scallops.
Asked whether the Fabers were doing the thing at the lake; I said I didn't know; she said we should find out.
That was the end of it. We ate dinner like two civil people.
She thanked me for the flowers when we got in the truck, and she was being kind on top of something.
She went up at ten-thirty. Said she had to be up early Tuesday, which was three days off, and which was a way to leave the room.
I sat down at the kitchen table with the restaurant check still folded in my shirt pocket and got my phone out.
I didn't have a plan. I was going to see what Ottis said about the Smokies loop, since he ran it two years back — that's what my hands do when the rest of me doesn't know where to go.
The thread came up. My brother's name, and under it the last few months of the two of us.
18 months. Can you taste it
14, brother. 14.
Under a year now
Single digits, baby
There were plenty more, going back up the screen past the summer, past the spring.
I sat there at eleven o'clock at night and read them the way she'd read them.
Once I'd done that I couldn't get back to my own version. In my head those messages had always been about a truck, a lake, a woman I've been in love with since I was twenty-three. In my head, single digits meant soon I get to be alone in a room with my wife again.
On the screen, in that order, in that font, they said something else. They said I'd been marking days off a calendar. And the days I'd been marking off were my kids' childhood, with my wife's whole life inside it.
I put the phone face down.
Then I turned it back over, because I'm not a man who leaves a board half cut, and started scrolling up.
Past the summer. Past the spring. Past 20 months, I'm counting like a convict. Past a stretch where all we talked about was our mother's hip. Past a photo of Ottis holding a striped bass.
The numbers got bigger the further back I went. Twenty-six. Thirty-one. Forty.
Somewhere up there was the first one — the day I typed a number instead of saying something to the only person who could have done anything about it.
My thumb stopped.
I sat in a dark kitchen in a house with two bedrooms nobody sleeps in, the screen lighting up my hands, and I didn't scroll any further. Told myself it was late. Told myself I'd look tomorrow.
I already had a pretty good idea what the number at the top was going to be, and I wasn't ready to hold it.
I shut the phone off, threw out the plastic sleeve the flowers came in, checked the door, went up.
She was asleep, or doing the breathing that passes for it.
I got in on my side and lay there with my hands on my chest.
I need you to notice there was a funeral.
Driving home from that campus I'd been the happiest I'd been in ten years, whistling like a fool, my wife two feet away with her face turned to her window.
I never once looked over and asked her a single question about what that day was.