Chapter 11
COLLEEN
It happened on a Wednesday. Nothing important in a marriage happens on a Saturday.
I got home at seven. The online conference scheduler had gone down at four with hundreds of families in it. I'd fixed it with a laminated paper grid plus a telephone, and I was in a mood.
Hank had made chili. He'd also cleaned the stovetop, which he never does, because he doesn't see the stovetop.
We ate. He asked about the scheduler, I told him, he laughed in the right place. Then he put his spoon down.
"I want to tell you the whole thing. Not tonight if you're wrecked — but sometime this week. I'd rather it was tonight, because I've been putting it off since Labor Day and I keep finding reasons."
I looked at him.
"Say it now," I said.
He got up and put the kettle on, because he needed something to do with his hands, then sat back down. He never touched the tea when it came.
"October of 2008," he said. "Owen was eight months. I was running the Wexler job. Three towns, six days a week."
"I remember 2008."
"I know you do. I know what you were doing. That's part of it." He turned the mug a quarter turn on the table. "I came home one night around ten. You were asleep at the kitchen table with the baby monitor in your hand. Sitting up. There was a bottle in the sink you never got to."
"That happened a lot that year."
"It happened a lot," he agreed. "And I stood in that doorway looking at you, thinking — I'm going to say this badly."
"Say it badly."
"I thought, she's gone." He said it to the table.
"Not gone like she left. Gone like — the woman I married.
The one who used to come out to the shop at ten at night with two beers, sit on the sawhorse, talk at me till I put the tools down.
That woman had been gone about six months, and I hadn't noticed the day it happened. "
"I was up four times a night, Hank."
"I know."
"For nine months."
"Colleen, I know." He looked up. "That's why I didn't say anything. That's the whole thing. I'm not sitting here telling you I had a grievance. I'm telling you I decided that night, standing in a doorway, that this was a season and I could wait it out."
"You decided by yourself."
"I decided by myself, in a doorway, at ten at night, and I never told the other person there was a decision." He turned the mug again. "Then I went out to the truck and texted my brother about it. You've read it. I miss her. I'll get her back someday."
"I've read it."
"I'd rather you'd heard it from me." He put a hand up before I could answer that. "That's not a complaint. I had eighteen years to say it out loud in this house. I don't get to be sore that you found it lying around."
"I've had that sentence in my head for five weeks."
"So have I."
"Then explain to me why you texted your brother, two hundred miles away, and not me, thirty feet up the stairs."
He was quiet a long moment.
"Because in my family men don't say that sentence."
"That's a little easy."
"It's not an excuse, it's a description.
Let me get it out." He put both palms flat on the table.
"You met my father. When my mother had her breakdown in '89, you know what he did?
He rewired the whole basement. Took him five weeks.
Nobody in that house said one word about her.
When she came home there was a new light over the workbench, and that's how he said I was scared. "
"I know what your father was."
"So that's the grammar I got. You don't say I'm lonely.
You build. You fix. You plan things. You wait.
A man doesn't stand in a kitchen and tell his wife he misses her while she's standing right there, because it sounds like a complaint about the kids.
" He shook his head. "And I want to be careful here, because I can hear myself building a defense.
It isn't one. My father's dead. I'm fifty-four years old. I had eighteen years."
"Yes, you did."
"So here's the honest version, then I'll stop talking.
" He looked at me. "You didn't take anything from me.
Meg didn't. Owen didn't. Not one day of it.
I handed my share of you away, every single time I decided that missing you was something I ought to keep to myself.
I did that. Not you. Nobody took her from me. I put her down."
I didn't say anything. My eyes were doing something, so I looked at the salt.
"And it didn't stay clean," he said. "That's the part I hate.
If I'd just missed you for eighteen years, fine.
That's not what missing turns into when you sit on it.
Around the time Meg started high school it went sour.
I'd be up on a roof at four in the afternoon catching myself doing arithmetic.
Six more years. Then five. Like a man in a bunk counting bricks. "
"You were resentful."
"I was resentful."
"Of the children."
"No." He said it hard, then came off it.
"Not of them. Of the shape of it. Which isn't better, because the shape of it was them, and you can't dress that up.
I never once looked at my son and thought hurry up.
I looked at a calendar to do it." He rubbed his face.
"And then it stopped being resentment, because resentment's uncomfortable.
It turned into a countdown. A countdown feels good, Coll.
That's the trap. It feels like patience.
It feels like a man being a good sport."
"You were proud of it."
"I was proud of it. Eighteen years and I never complained once. I thought that was the accomplishment."
"You never complained because you never said anything at all."
"Right."
"Those aren't the same thing. One's a marriage. The other's just — a man in a house."
"Right," he said again.
The kettle had gone cold. The furnace came on.
"So then August," I said.
"Then August." He let a breath out. "I waited eighteen years and called it patience. Then the day the countdown hit zero I threw myself a release party on the front lawn, and I couldn't understand why my wife looked like she was at a funeral."
"Because I was."
"Because you were. And I want to get this part right.
" He turned toward me in the chair. "Friday, in the truck, coming back from that campus — I was the happiest I've been in ten years.
You were two feet away with your face turned to the window and I was whistling.
That's not me being clumsy. That's not a man saying the wrong thing at a party.
That's eighteen years of not looking at you, and it all came due in one afternoon. "
I put my hands around the cold mug.
"Do you know what I thought," I said, "in that parking lot at the church? Before I got to 2008?"
"Tell me."
"That you'd been serving a sentence." My voice went, and I let it. "That every year I loved most was a year you were enduring. The banquets. The lunches. Meg calling at eleven at night. I thought I'd been happy the whole time inside something you were counting your way out of."
"Colleen—"
"Let me finish." I put my hand up. "Then I got to the top of it, and it wasn't that.
And I want you to understand what that did, because you don't get to think it made things better.
It was worse in one specific way. It meant all of it was avoidable.
If you'd said one sentence to me in that kitchen in 2008 — one — I might have said something awful back.
I probably would have cried. And then we'd have fought about it.
Then we'd have figured something out, because that's what we do, Hank.
We've built two bathrooms, run a business, buried your father. We'd have figured something out."
"I know."
"Eighteen years of a solvable problem."
"Yes."
"You didn't even give me the chance to fail at it."
He nodded. He didn't say one word in his own defense, which is the most unlike him he has ever been.
"Say the sentence," I said.
"What?"
"The one you wouldn't say in 2008. Say it now, out loud, in this kitchen."
He looked at me a second. Then his face came apart a little, and he put it back together.
"I miss you," he said. "I've missed you for eighteen years. I never told you. That was mine to fix."
I sat there.
"Thank you," I said, "for finally saying it in English."
He almost smiled.
"Now learn the grammar."
"Meaning what."
"Meaning you don't get to say it once as a speech and then go back out to the garage. Meaning if you feel it on a Tuesday, you say it on the Tuesday. In words. Not by cleaning my stove."
"I liked the stove."
"The stove was nice. The stove isn't a sentence."
He laughed once, then rubbed his eyes with his thumb and finger.
"I'm not there yet," I said. "I want to be honest with you. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's finished tonight, because it isn't. I'd be lying to make the evening end better."
"I don't want it to end better than it is."
"Good." I got up and took the mugs to the sink, stood there with my back to him a second, then turned around to lean against the counter. "But I'll tell you what I do know."
"Okay."
"October is mine to plan."
"It's yours."
"And you're invited." I let that sit. "That's the word, Hank. Invited. Not scheduled. Not accommodated. Not taken along. Invited."
He stood up, came over, stopped in front of me, close, not touching me, his hands at his sides.
"I accept," he said.
I put my forehead against his chest, on the fourth button of his shirt, and stayed there a while.
Neither of us had to guess what the other one meant.