Chapter 6
HANK
Labor Day I went out to the garage at seven in the morning to find the camper paperwork.
I wasn't going to wait for Tuesday. I wanted the folder in my hand the minute the dealership opened — deposit number, VIN, the salesman's card — so I could do the whole thing in one call. That was the only currency I had on me.
It wasn't in the truck. It wasn't in the cab pocket where I keep permits. Then I remembered carrying the whole packet in from the dealership back in July in one of those plastic envelopes with a snap, and putting it somewhere in the house so I wouldn't lose it.
Colleen was in the kitchen when I came in, coffee already going, still in her robe with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, working through the mail basket on the counter, which is where the mail lives until one of us cracks.
"Looking for the camper stuff," I said.
"The blue envelope?"
"You've seen it?"
"It's been in this basket since July." She said it flat, the way you say a fact you're not enjoying, and pulled it out from under a stack of catalogs. "Sitting under the Land's End thing for two months."
She handed it over. Then she didn't go back to the mail. She stayed where she was with one hand on the counter.
I unsnapped it at the table. Purchase agreement, deposit receipt, spec sheet, warranty booklet, a financing worksheet I never filled out. Behind all of that, folded in thirds, the dealer's trip planning form.
Colleen picked that one up.
I didn't feel it coming. I was looking for a phone number.
She unfolded it. It's one of those things a salesman hands you to keep you excited, a printed worksheet with blanks. ROUTE. NIGHTS. INTERESTS. ANY CONSTRAINTS ON DATES?
I'd filled the whole thing out at their little table with a pen out of a cup, while a kid named Devin went to copy my license.
Six weeks of route in my handwriting. Departure and return. Mileage per leg. Campground names with stars next to the two Ray told me about.
And down at the bottom, in the box next to the question about scheduling, in my own printing:
WIFE WORKS AT A SCHOOL. SHE CAN TAKE LEAVE ONCE THE YOUNGEST IS GONE.
She didn't say anything for a long time. She just stood at my kitchen table in her robe with her glasses up in her hair, reading a sentence I wrote in July, while I read it with her upside down.
"July fourteenth," she said. She'd found the date at the top.
"Around there."
"On July fourteenth I drove Owen to get his physical for orientation.
I remember, because the office had the wrong insurance.
" She set the form down and squared it with two fingers, which is what she does when she's holding herself steady.
"And you were at a dealership writing down that I could take a leave. "
"I didn't?—"
"You wrote it on a form, Hank." Her voice didn't go up. When it gets bad she goes quieter, and I had to lean toward the trouble to hear her. "A stranger asked you a direct question about my life. And instead of saying I'll ask her, you wrote down an answer."
The camper I could've talked my way around. A deposit's a piece of paper. A route's a daydream a man has in a parking lot.
That box was different. Somebody had asked the question — the exact question, in writing — and I'd picked up a pen to answer it for her, without one second of hesitation, because in my head it wasn't a question at all. It was a condition of the site. Like ceiling height. Like where the joists run.
I'd turned my wife into a measurement.
"I'm not going to sit here and call it a small thing," I said.
"Good."
"I don't have anything to put next to it."
"No," she said. "You don't."
She went upstairs to get dressed. I sat at that table until my coffee went cold, then got up, went out the front door, and took down the banner.
Still hanging there after nine days. It had rained on it twice, so the gold had gone soft at the edges of the letters, and the zip ties had dug into the paint on the rail.
I cut them with my pocket knife and rolled the thing up.
Ray Faber was across the street in his driveway with the hood of the Buick up, because Ray has never owned a garage door he can close. He raised a hand at me. Dee came out with her coffee.
I could've walked back inside with my rolled-up banner. Nobody was going to ask.
I went across the street instead.
"Morning," Ray said.
"Morning." I stood there with it under my arm like a rolled carpet. "I want to say something, and I'd rather say it once."
Dee came down off the step.
"The party was a mistake," I said. "It wasn't a party. Colleen didn't know it was happening. I set the whole thing up while she was upstairs asleep."
Ray started to laugh, got about a syllable into it, looked at my face, and quit.
"Friday we took Owen up to school," I said.
"And my wife lost the job she loved. Twenty-four years of it.
Nobody gave her a card. Then I got home, put balloons on my own porch rail, threw confetti at it in front of nineteen people.
" I moved the banner to my other arm. "So when you see her, I'd take it as a favor if nobody congratulates her. "
Dee's hand went up to her mouth. Ray wiped his palms on the rag in his back pocket, twice, which for Ray is a whole paragraph.
"We didn't know, Hank," Dee said.
"You couldn't. I served it to you that way."
There was a spot right there where I could have made a joke. I could feel it sitting in my mouth — something about what an idiot I am, something to let everybody laugh once so the three of us could go back to our own lawns. Twenty-six years I've gotten out of hard moments that way.
I didn't do it. I stood in Ray Faber's driveway and let it stay quiet for four seconds, which is a long time in a driveway.
"Anyway," I said. "That's all."
Halfway across the street Dee called after me to say she'd bring something over on Wednesday, which is Dee telling you she's sorry. I said Colleen would like that. Behind me Ray dropped the hood of the Buick, harder than he had to, the way a man does when he's got no idea what to say next.
I went home and put the banner up on the shelf in the garage over the extension cords. I couldn't make myself drop it in the can while the can was out at the curb where she'd see it. I'm aware that makes no sense.
Ottis called at two.
Dee talks to her sister, who bowls with our cousin's wife. That's how information moves in this family. Transit time's about four hours.
"Hey," he said. "Heard you got in some trouble."
"That's one word for it."
"Dee told Karen you took your banner down." He was chewing something. My brother has never in his life made a phone call without eating. "Fabers throw a party for you or something?"
"I threw it. For me. On the lawn." I was standing in the garage with the phone against my ear, looking at nothing in particular. "Colleen didn't know."
He laughed. Ottis laughs at everything; it isn't personal, it's a nervous system.
"Well," he said. "What happened to single digits, baby?"
I'd read those words off a screen two nights before, in my own kitchen with the lights off, and that had been like finding rot behind a wall.
Hearing them out loud in my brother's mouth, cheerful, on a holiday afternoon, with my wife upstairs in the room over my head — that went through me like cold water. I took a step, in my own garage, away from nothing.
"Don't," I said.
"What?"
"Don't say that to me."
There was a pause on his end. The chewing stopped.
"All right," Ottis said. "Hey. Hank. It was a joke."
"I know what it was."
"You've been saying it for years, brother."
"Yeah," I said. "I have."
He talked another minute about our mother's hip, because that's where he goes when a conversation gets a temperature. I said the right things back. We hung up.
I stayed out there a while. The banner up on the shelf, the truck cold, Colleen moving around over my head in a house where two doors stay shut.
You've been saying it for years, brother.
I sat down on the tailgate, took out my phone, opened the thread.
And this time I scrolled.