Chapter 7
COLLEEN
He found me in the laundry room at four o'clock with a new idea.
I could tell before he opened his mouth. He came down the hall too fast, wearing the look he gets when the thinking has turned into something he can build.
I'd been in there since three doing a load that took twenty minutes to fold, because there isn't much anymore.
Two of us generate about a third of what four of us did.
I used to run the machine twice on a Monday and once more Thursday night for whatever Owen needed.
Now I could go Wednesday to Wednesday if I felt like it, which is the kind of fact nobody warns you about, since it isn't sad enough to warn anybody about.
He'd been out in the garage since one. Around two he took a phone call — I heard the shape of it through the wall, not the words, and then I heard it stop early.
He came in afterward with his mouth gone tight, ran the tap, drank half a glass of water at the sink, went back out. He didn't say who it was.
"Forget the camper," he said.
"It's forgotten, Hank."
"No, I mean it. Forget the whole thing. Traveling, all of it." He put a hand on the door frame. "We don't have to go anywhere. Not this year, not next year. I'll cancel it. I'll eat the deposit, I don't care about the deposit."
I kept folding. "Okay."
"And I had an idea." He was almost smiling. "Owen's room."
My hands stopped on a towel.
"Hear me out. It gets sun till two, it's the only room in this house that does.
You've got that sewing machine in the basement under a tarp, you've got your mother's fabric in the crawl space getting damp.
I could pull the carpet, put a floating floor down.
Build you a cutting table along the long wall.
Real light over it, not that yellow junk. Shelves to the ceiling on the closet?—"
He stopped.
I hadn't said a word. I was standing there with a towel half folded, waiting for him to get to the end of it.
His hands came down out of the air.
"I'm doing it again," he said.
"Yeah."
He looked at the dryer for a while.
"Two days ago it was six weeks in a camper. Now it's a room." He said it slow, like a man reading a level. "Other direction, same thing. I built you a finished plan and carried it down the hall."
"Yes."
"Nine days after he left."
"Ten," I said.
He put both hands in his back pockets, which is what he does with them when there's nothing for them.
"Can I say something that's going to sound like a defense?"
"Say it."
"I wasn't trying to erase him." He was careful with it, the way he gets when he's trying not to make something worse. "I was trying to give you a place to be. You've been going room to room in this house for ten days like you're checking for a gas leak."
It was accurate. I didn't enjoy that.
"I know what you were doing," I said.
"Okay."
"Do you know why it doesn't help? Because a craft room is a thing you'd want. Not the sewing — the finished room. The floating floor, the good light. You want the job." I set the basket down on the dryer. "Nobody's ever asked me what I'd do with an empty afternoon."
"I'm asking. What would you do with it?"
"I don't know." My voice cracked on it, which I hated. "That's the whole problem, Hank. I haven't had an empty afternoon since 1999. I don't know what I'd do with one, and I'm not going to figure it out by Thursday."
He nodded, slow.
"Do you want anything done with that room?"
"No."
"Okay."
He didn't ask again. He didn't offer the paint or the carpet or the light over the desk. He stood there another second, then took his hand off the door frame.
"I do want the carpet cleaned in there eventually," I said, because I couldn't stand it. "It's got that mark from the amp."
"I can clean a carpet."
I took the basket upstairs.
He didn't go back out to the garage, which is what I expected.
He went into the front room instead. When I came down twenty minutes later he was sitting in the chair by the window with the sports section, not reading it.
He still had his boots on in the house, which he hasn't done since his mother was alive.
"You eating?" I said.
"Later."
"There's the chicken from Sunday."
"Later's fine."
He stayed in that chair. I stood in the kitchen doorway a minute watching my husband sit still, which is not a thing he can do. He looked like a man in a waiting room.
At five I remembered I'd left the enrollment binder in my car. The car was at the shop until Wednesday for the brake job, so the binder was sitting on the passenger seat of a Honda in a locked lot out on Route 9.
No. I'm doing that thing where I make it sound accidental.
I needed to go to the building. The first day was tomorrow, four hundred six children coming through those doors at seven-forty, and I'd spent my whole long weekend inside this house looking at a shut door. I wanted to stand in my own front office and touch the folders.
"I'm taking the truck," I said from the doorway. "I want to run to the school."
"Now?"
"For an hour."
He got the keys out of his pocket without getting up. "Bed's got a bag of Sakrete in it. Don't take the turn by the church fast."
The truck smells like sawdust, like coffee, faintly like him.
I backed out and drove with the windows down, because the air conditioning has been out since spring, because he won't fix his own things.
Two coffee cups in the console holder, both his, both from Monday.
A tape measure on the passenger seat. A receipt from the sandwich place on the floor mat with a phone number written on the back in his printing, which turned out later to be a subcontractor's, which I didn't know at the light.
His phone was in the console.
He does that — leaves it out there at the house, on the theory that a client who calls on a Saturday shouldn't get him. I've known that about him for years. It's never once been interesting to me.
I was sitting at Route 9 and Bridgeman, which is the longest light in this county, when the screen lit up.
OTTIS.
Hey. You good? Sorry about earlier.
That was all of it. One line on a locked screen, and then the screen went dark again, the way they do.
The light turned green. I drove through the intersection, got maybe two hundred yards, put my blinker on, pulled into the lot of the Presbyterian church, between the food pantry van and the sign with the plastic letters.
I put the truck in park. The engine ran, because I didn't shut it off, because shutting it off would have made it a decision.
A woman came out the church side door with a folding chair under each arm, put them in her trunk, looked at me the way you look at a strange truck, then decided I was nobody.
I picked the phone up off the console.
Here's my whole inventory, sitting there. A call at two that ended wrong. My husband at the kitchen sink with his mouth set, saying nothing. His brother apologizing on a Monday afternoon.
Three items that don't touch each other.
His passcode is Meg's birthday. It's been Meg's birthday since he got his first phone with a lock on it, which is a thing I've always known the way you know where the flashlight is.
Knowing a passcode isn't permission. I knew that with the engine running, in a church parking lot, at twenty after five in the afternoon.
There was a version of that afternoon where I put the phone face down on the seat, drove to my building, walked into my front office, touched the folders, went home, made dinner, and asked my husband who'd called him.
I didn't do that.
I put my thumb on the screen, typed in my daughter's birthday, and opened my husband's phone.