Chapter 5
COLLEEN
Sunday I made him breakfast.
I wanted the room to be an ordinary room when I said it. Also, in twenty-six years I've never once handed that man bad news on an empty stomach.
Eggs, bacon, the good bread. He came down at nine in yesterday's t-shirt with his hair standing up on one side, and he stopped in the doorway when he saw the table set.
"Well," he said, careful.
"Sit down."
He sat. He got about four bites in, because he could see the folder.
I put the school calendar down between the salt and his coffee, then the dealership sheet next to it, the one with the carpenter's pencil on the back.
"Read them."
He took a long minute over it. He's a slow reader with anything that isn't a spec sheet, and I watched his eyes go left, then right, then left again.
"Okay," he said.
"October first."
"Yeah."
"Tell me what October first is at my building."
"Coll—"
"Tell me. You've heard me say it for nineteen years.
" I put my finger on the square. "MAP testing window opens.
Three days. Four hundred kids. Every proctor callout comes through my desk.
If I can't fill it, a classroom doesn't test. If a classroom doesn't test, it goes to the makeup window in November, which is the week you've got us in North Carolina. "
He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand.
"And this." I moved my finger down. "Report cards go in the mail October ninth.
Conferences are the nineteenth through the twenty-first, evenings.
I build that schedule, Hank — hundreds of families in twenty-minute blocks — and I sit at the table in the front hall from four until eight, three nights running, so no parent walks into that building without somebody knowing their name. "
"I know you work."
"You don't know that I work. You know that I have a job." My voice was getting away from me, so I stopped, drank some coffee, set the cup down. "There's a difference, and you're about to explain it to me."
He sat back and looked at the ceiling a second, which is what he does when he's being fair to himself before he answers.
"I figured," he said, "that you'd take a leave."
There it was.
"You figured I'd take a leave," I said.
"Unpaid, or — I don't know how it works over there, whether you'd have to — but yeah." He opened one hand. "Six weeks in the fall. That's what people do."
"When did I agree to a leave, Hank?"
"You didn't agree to anything. I hadn't?—"
"When did we talk about it?" My hands stayed flat on the table. "Find the conversation. Take your time. I'll wait."
To his credit, he did take his time. I watched him go through the summer in his head, room by room, the way he'd go through a house hunting a shut-off valve.
"There was the thing in the driveway," he said finally. "In July. When you said you couldn't remember the last time we went anywhere in the fall."
"I said that in July because Dee Faber was showing me pictures of Vermont."
"You said it."
"Hank. Look at me." He looked. "Was that a conversation about me quitting my job for six weeks, or was that a woman in a driveway saying the leaves are pretty?"
He didn't answer. He looked down at the two papers instead.
"I can't find it," he said.
"No."
"There isn't one."
"No, there isn't."
The furnace came on, early in the year for it, clicking down in the basement, then breathing up through the vent by my foot. It kept right on breathing while my husband sat across from me, looking at the underside of a floor he'd been walking on for twenty-six years.
"Coll, I know you love that job."
"You know I love it. You've been saying that for nineteen years. You say it the way you'd say it about a hobby."
"That's not?—"
"Do you know what my job is? Not the title. The work."
"You run that front office."
"I know which children haven't eaten since Friday afternoon.
I keep a drawer for that. I know which father isn't allowed at pickup.
I know his face, I know his car. I know which mother will cry if you call her at work, so I call that one at night.
When a bus goes down on Route 12 with forty children on it, I'm the person who gets forty families notified in eleven minutes, because I built the list so I could.
" My voice was doing something by then, and I let it.
"Nineteen years I've been building that.
Four hundred children. Hundreds of families.
When Marla Vance's husband died in March, that school did not fall apart, because I didn't let it fall apart. "
"I know that."
"You didn't know it enough to ask before you booked November."
He was quiet a second.
"You could've had another job any time in nineteen years," he said. "Better money. Cindy Dolan tried to hire you for the insurance office twice."
"Three times."
"Three times. So don't tell me I don't respect it. I know you stayed."
"You know I stayed because it worked with the kids' schedule."
"That's not?—"
"That's what you know." I turned my cup on the table. "And it was true for the first eight years. It stopped being the reason about a decade ago. You've had one story about my job since 2007, Hank, and you never went back to check it, because it kept being convenient."
"Convenient how?"
"If it's a schedule thing, it ends when the schedule ends.
" I looked at him. "That's the whole road to a leave.
If my job is something I do so I can be home at three-fifteen, then the day nobody needs me at three-fifteen, it's finished.
You didn't decide that in July. You decided it years ago and never said it out loud, so I never got to argue with you about it. "
He turned his coffee cup around by the handle, twice, then put both hands on the edge of the table like he might push himself back from it. He didn't.
"You planned my freedom," I said, "the way you plan a flooring job. You measured the room. You priced the material. You picked the dates. You measured everything in that house except the person standing on the floor."
That one went in. He's not a man who hides things well.
"So we move it," he said. "That's all this is. We move the dates, we go in the summer. June, July, whenever you're off — I'll call Monday and change it, it's not a problem, Coll, it's a phone call."
"Do you hear yourself?"
"I'm agreeing with you."
"You're solving it." I was suddenly so tired. "You've got a new work order and you're running it before I've finished the sentence. Yesterday the solution was a restaurant. Today it's June. I'm not telling you the dates are wrong."
"Then what are you telling me?"
"That there was a room. Sometime in July there was a room with a pencil in it, where the next six weeks of my life got decided. I've been married to you for twenty-six years and I wasn't in it."
He didn't say anything.
"I don't want you to move the trip. I want to know why it never occurred to you to come find me."
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed it again.
Then he reached over and squared the two papers against each other, edge to edge, the way he squares anything he can't fix, then pushed them an inch toward me like they were mine to keep.
"I don't know how to answer that," he said.
"I know."
I got up and started clearing plates, because my hands needed a job. He got up to help, and I let him, so we did the dishes side by side without talking, the way we've done ten thousand times, which was a strange thing to be doing right then.
He washed, I dried, because that's how it goes in this house, and he handed me the pan last the way he always does even though the pan should go first. Neither of us said anything about that either.
When the sink was empty he dried his hands, hung the towel on the bar, and said, to the window, "I'll call the dealership tomorrow."
"It's Labor Day. They're closed."
"Tuesday, then."
"Hank."
He turned around.
I picked my calendar up off the table, held it against my chest, looked at him. Sunburned, gray at the temples, forty pounds of remorse in his shoulders, no idea in his head what to do with any of it.
"October isn't booked," I said. "Not the first week, not the last, not any of it. Not by you, not by me."
"Okay."
"Not until I'm in the room where it gets decided."
He nodded slowly. I could see him trying to turn that into an instruction he could go carry out, failing at it, standing there holding it anyway.
"Okay," he said.
I went upstairs and sat on the edge of our bed a while, in the quiet, across the hall from a shut door.