Chapter 12
COLLEEN
Saturday morning he came into the kitchen carrying a legal pad.
I laughed at him, I couldn't help it. He was standing there in his socks holding a yellow legal pad against his chest like a man delivering an estimate.
"I know," he said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You laughed at me in your face."
"I laughed at the pad."
"The pad is how I think." He sat down. "You can have the pen if you want. I'd rather you had the pen."
I took the pen.
Two people in their fifties at a kitchen table with a legal pad, writing rules for a marriage they've been in since the Clinton administration.
We're not people who do that. We've never had a budget meeting or a family mission statement.
I went to a marriage counselor exactly once, four sessions in 2013.
I went alone, and I told him it was for work stress.
But everything that broke in this house broke where we assumed. He assumed I could take a leave. I assumed his quiet was contentment.
So we wrote it down.
"Start with October," he said.
"Not October." I put the pen down. "Bigger."
"Okay."
I thought about how to say it, then wrote:
Nothing that takes up a season of our life gets decided by one of us alone.
I turned the pad around so he could read it.
"A season," he said.
"Six weeks in a camper is a season. Retirement's a season. Your knee surgery, when you finally get it — that's a season. Selling this house would be a season." I took the pad back. "Which one of us calls about the gutters is not a season. I'm not asking you to hold a summit about gutters."
"What about the truck?"
"Is the truck a season?"
"It's thirty-nine thousand dollars, Coll."
I looked at him. "Then yes. Obviously yes."
"Just checking the width of it," he said. "I'd rather ask now than guess later."
I wrote TRUCK in the margin with a box around it.
"Put the job down," he said. "That's the next one."
"No."
"Coll—"
"I'm not writing my job on a piece of paper so you'll remember it exists." I set the pen on the table. "It's not a rule. It's a fact you've had wrong since 2007 and never went back to check."
He took that. He didn't like it.
"Then let me write the part that's mine."
I gave him the pen. He turned the pad sideways for room, since his block capitals take up twice the space of my handwriting.
IF IT LANDS ON HER CALENDAR I ASK BEFORE I PUT IT THERE.
"That's not the same as what I said."
"No. It's the part I actually get wrong." He kept the pen. "You can have the principle. I'll take the thing I'll violate."
Then he wrote a second line before I could start one, which surprised me.
I ASK BEFORE I MAKE THE WORK ORDER.
"Explain that one," I said.
"You tell me something's wrong at seven. By nine I've decided what fixes it, and by Saturday I've bought materials." He put the pen down. "Somewhere in there I skip the part where I ask what you actually want. I've been doing that to you for years and calling it being responsive."
"That's the problem."
"I know it is." He looked at what he'd written. "Nobody gets mad at a man who's already started. That's how I never had to quit doing it."
The next one was about words.
"The language goes," I said. "Freedom. Finally. Getting our life back. Now it's our turn. All of it. I don't want to hear any of it in this house."
He sat back. "Can I ask why? I'm not fighting you. If I don't know what it does, I'll slip."
"Because every one of those words says the last twenty-four years were a room we were locked in." I pressed my thumb against the edge of the table. "They weren't. They were the best work I've ever done. I'm not going to sit in my own kitchen and let it be described as a sentence I served."
He took that.
"What do I say instead? When I want to say — I like this. I like it being us."
"Say that."
"'I like it being us.'" I didn't write it down. "That's the whole vocabulary."
He nodded slowly, twice. Then he took the pad back and wrote his own line, without asking me, in the same block capitals:
IF I MISS YOU I TELL YOU. WITHIN THE DAY. IN WORDS.
I read it three times.
"Within the day," I said.
"If I give myself a week I'll build something instead." He wasn't looking at me. "That's not humility, that's just true. Give me a week and you'll come home to a new shelf."
"And if I'm the one who's short?"
"Same rule?"
"Same rule," I said. "I'm not the sick one in this house, Hank. I stopped asking why you went out to the garage after dinner. I was relieved when you went."
That got him. He looked up.
"You were relieved?"
"Some nights I was relieved."
"Huh." He sat with it. "Okay. Same rule."
Then we tried to do Owen's room, and it went badly.
"It stays his," Hank said. "Write it down. A year."
"A year isn't the thing."
"You said no on Monday. I'm agreeing with you in writing."
"I said no on Monday. I didn't put a number on it." I had the pen back by then. "And if next August I'm not ready, I'm not ready. I'm not arguing that with a piece of paper you're holding."
"So write that."
"Write what? Colleen decides, forever?"
"If that's what it is."
"It isn't what it is. It's his room too. He's going to have an opinion about it eventually, he's nineteen in February?—"
"He's not going to have an opinion, Coll, he's got a milk crate for a nightstand up there?—"
"—and I'm not signing a treaty about my son's bedroom on a Saturday morning."
Hank put the pen down and looked at the pad a second.
"We're writing the United States Code now," he said.
I laughed, and it got away from me. He started too, which made it worse, and for the better part of a minute the two of us sat at that table laughing at a legal pad like a couple of idiots.
"Okay," I said, when I could.
"Okay."
"Not yet. That's all I've got on the room. Not yet."
"Not yet," he said. "That'll do."
He didn't write it down, which is the part I noticed.
He got up, put the pot in the drainer away, wiped a counter he'd already wiped once, then came back and stood behind his chair instead of sitting in it.
"Can I ask for one thing? It's not for the pad."
"Ask."
"I want a night. Not a date — I'll ruin a date." He rubbed his thumb along the top of the chair. "Just, a piece of the week that isn't earned. Something that happens whether either of us has been good."
I'd come downstairs that morning with that exact thing in my chest, unsaid, in my own words, looking for somewhere to put it.
"Friday," I said.
"Friday what?"
"Every Friday. From five-thirty on, we're not doing anything else."
"Doing what, though?"
"That's the point." I turned my chair to face him.
"Not a date. Not dinner out. Not a thing we plan on Wednesday, get excited about, then feel guilty about cancelling.
Just the two of us, in a room, on purpose.
Sometimes it's a beer on the back step. Sometimes it's the grocery store.
Sometimes it's forty minutes of nothing. "
"Every week."
"Every week, forever, whether we've earned it or not.
" I heard my own voice go hard there. "That's what I want most, if you want to know.
I don't want to have to have a crisis to get your full attention.
I've had six weeks of your full attention.
I never had it before. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life staging emergencies to keep it. "
He looked at the table a second. Then he nodded.
"Friday at five-thirty," he said.
"Both calendars."
He got up for his phone — he does everything on his phone, the pad's only for thinking — while I got the paper calendar out of my bag and turned to the week.
I wrote H — 5:30 on Friday, then flipped forward to write it on the next one, and the next one, all the way to the end of the year. Ten boxes.
Hank stood at the counter tapping at the screen.
"Repeats weekly," he said. "No end date."
"What did you name it?"
He turned the phone around.
FRIDAY. COLLEEN.
That's all it said. No emoji, no exclamation point, no DATE NIGHT!!, no little heart.
He put the phone in his back pocket and went to see about the storm door, which has needed a screw since June.
I sat at the table with the pad in front of me.
Four lines on it, only one of them mine.
A coffee ring in the corner, a fifth line started twice and crossed out both times, plus a whole marriage's worth of things we never got to.
Nothing on there about money. Nothing about his mother.
Nothing about what we do the first Christmas neither of them comes home.
I looked at that Friday square in my own calendar for a while.
For twenty-six years the calendar in this house has been a device for informing me of things.
That was the first thing on it we decided in the same room.