Chapter 13
COLLEEN
The cottage was smaller than the pictures. They always are.
Blue door, white clapboard, four rooms, a screened porch on the water side with two chairs that didn't match. There was a hand-painted sign in the kitchen that said THE MERRYS, which I took for a family name until Sunday, when I decided it was probably a pun, which has annoyed me ever since.
We got there at four on Thursday. Hank carried in the bags while I stood in the middle of the front room with my keys still in my hand, the way I'd stood in Owen's dorm room in August, waiting to find out what I was supposed to do next.
"There's a grocery about a mile back," Hank said. "You want to go now or in the morning?"
"I don't know."
"Okay." He set the last bag down. "I'm going to sit on the porch, then."
He went out, took one of the mismatched chairs, put his feet on the rail. He didn't ask me what the plan was.
It took me about twenty minutes to stop waiting for the itinerary.
Thursday night we ate sandwiches out of the paper on the porch. It got dark at six-forty. There's a channel marker out there that blinks green every four seconds, and past a certain hour there's nothing else to look at.
Friday we did nothing until eleven. I slept till nine, which I haven't done since 1999.
Hank went out at seven and came back with coffee.
He didn't wake me. He didn't leave a note about where he'd gone, so I woke up alone in a strange bed in a quiet house, lay there a minute working out whether I was upset about it.
I wasn't. I got up and drank the coffee, which was cold, which I didn't mention.
That afternoon we drove up the point and walked out on the jetty with the wind going. A man fishing told us the stripers were done, then talked to Hank for a solid fifteen minutes about a boat.
Walking back off the jetty I asked him what all that had been about, and he told me the whole thing, all fifteen minutes of it — hull, engine hours, what the fellow paid for it in Rhode Island. I didn't need to know any of that. I liked the sound of him telling me.
At five-thirty we sat on the porch, because it was Friday, because that's the rule now. He brought out two beers and neither of us said anything about it being the first one.
At six his phone went off in his shirt pocket. He looked at it, then turned it face down on the arm of the chair.
"Kelleher," he said. "It's about a threshold strip."
"You can take it."
"It's a threshold strip, Coll."
It rang again at ten after and he let it. At six-thirty he got up, went inside, and came back with a bag of pretzels he'd bought at the grocery without telling me, which is the closest thing to a gift my husband has ever produced under pressure.
Saturday it rained. We drove into town, went into all three stores, and I bought a dish towel I didn't need. Then we sat in a coffee place with a wet floor for two hours while I read the local paper's police blotter out loud.
Nowhere in those four days did we stand at a scenic overlook and understand something.
The first night I missed Owen so hard at eight o'clock that I had to go stand in the kitchen.
It was the low tide smell coming up off the flats.
When Owen was six we spent a week in a rental like that one.
He collected forty-one shells, lined them up on the windowsill, cried when we couldn't take the windowsill home.
I stood in that kitchen with both hands on the counter.
Hank came in behind me. Two months earlier he'd have had his phone out, looking up whether there was a place in town that did fried clams. Instead he came and stood next to me, putting his hand flat on my back, between the shoulder blades.
"Which one?" he said.
"Owen. He was six. The shells."
"On the windowsill."
"You remember that?"
"He tried to take a rock the size of a cat."
I laughed with my hand over my mouth, which turned into the other thing for a second, and he stayed there with his hand on my back until it passed.
"You want to walk down there?" he said.
"It's dark."
"There's a flashlight in the truck."
We went down and stood at the edge of the water with the flashlight for about ten minutes. Nothing worth keeping. He picked up a piece of green glass, looked at it, put it in his coat pocket without saying anything about it, and we came back up.
That was the whole event.
Saturday, in the coffee place with the wet floor, I caught myself enjoying it.
I'd looked up from the blotter — somebody had reported a suspicious raccoon on Vernon Street, which the paper printed in full, including the raccoon's approximate weight.
My husband was across the table in his reading glasses, doing the crossword in pen the way he does, getting it wrong. I'm having a good time, I thought.
And underneath it, right away, like a hand on my ankle: you're allowed to be having a good time?
Some part of me had been keeping a receipt. If I was fine, then it hadn't cost what I said it cost. I'd have taken that idea off any woman who carried it into my front office — four seconds, my hand on her arm.
I folded the paper over to the classifieds. Hank asked me for a five-letter word for a river in Spain and I told him I wouldn't help him cheat.
I didn't say any of the rest of it to him. Not then. I don't think every single thing a person has needs handing across a table.
Saturday night we ate at the place by the marina, mostly closed for the season, four tables going and a kid busing who was obviously related to the owner. We split a piece of pie because they had one piece left.
Back at the cottage he put the heat on, since the nights had turned, and the baseboard ticked for an hour. We sat out on the porch in our coats. The green light did its four seconds.
"Can I say something?" he said.
"Yeah."
"I've been trying to figure out where to put it so it isn't a speech."
"Just say it, Hank."
He looked out at the water.
"I missed you for eighteen years," he said. "And it was my fault, for not saying so." He turned his head. "I'm saying it now while you're right here."
I didn't say anything for a second.
"That's the whole thing. I'm not asking for anything with it. I just noticed I was doing it again tonight — sitting here having a feeling about my own wife and planning to keep it."
"How long have you been sitting on that one?"
"About forty minutes."
"Within the day," I said.
"Within the day," he agreed. "I'm at forty minutes. I'll get it down."
I reached over in the dark and found his hand on the arm of the chair.
We stayed out there until the cold got real. Then we went in. He locked the door, turned off the porch light. I stood in the little hallway of a rented house in my coat, looking at my husband — fifty-four years old, gray coming in the stubble on his jaw, standing there waiting to see what I wanted.
"Come here," I said.
Afterward he fell asleep with one arm across me and his face in the pillow, snoring a little, the way he has since 2004. I lay awake a while listening to the baseboard tick and the water do whatever water does.
Sunday morning we packed the car in forty minutes. He wiped down the counters and I stripped the bed, because I can't stand to leave a bed for another woman to strip.
At the door I looked back at the four rooms.
"We could come back in the spring," Hank said. Then, right away: "That's not a plan. I'm not planning it. I'm saying I liked it here."
"I liked it here too."
"Okay."
"Ask me in February."
"I'll ask you in February."
In the car he said, "Can I ask you something without it turning into a thing?"
"Try it."
"Was this all right? Four days. Was it enough of a—" He stopped. "I don't know how to finish that sentence without it sounding like I want a grade."
"It was all right," I said.
"Okay."
"It was better than all right. I'm not going to tell you it fixed anything, because four days doesn't fix anything."
"No."
"But I'd do it again in February."
He put both hands back on the wheel, and he didn't say one word about February for the rest of the drive.
We got home at two. The house smelled like a shut house. Three days of mail on the floor under the slot, four leaves dropped off the plant in the front window.
I carried my bag up the stairs, and at the top of the landing I stopped.
Owen's door was open.
It's been open since the second week of October, when I opened it one morning on my way to the linen closet without thinking about it, the way you open a door. It's stayed open. Some days I go in, some days I don't.
The blinds were up. He'd left them down in August. I left them down another ten days after that, then one Tuesday I went in and pulled them, so now the room gets light in the afternoon whether anybody's in it or not.
The window was open two inches, which was my fault, from Wednesday, from airing it out.
The curtain was moving.
I stood on the landing with my bag on my shoulder, watching my son's curtain move in the cold air over an empty bed, in a room with four gray tape marks on the wall and a pair of split sneakers by the closet.
The room was empty. It wasn't erased.
Downstairs Hank dropped the cooler on the kitchen floor and said a word about it.
"You all right up there?" he called.
"Coming down."
I went in and shut the window, because it was cold. I left the door open.