Chapter 14
HANK
The second Tuesday in November I went out to my own garage at seven-forty at night with nothing to do out there.
That's the whole crime.
It was progress-report week. She'd been home since six without looking up from the table — two hundred-some envelopes, a printout with holes in it, a highlighter, a list of families who'd moved without telling anybody.
She said hello. She ate standing up. Around seven-thirty she said, "There's chicken," which meant she wasn't going to be having a conversation.
So I went out to the garage and started reorganizing the shelves.
About eleven minutes in — extension cords down, a coffee can of drywall screws in my hand, about to sort them by length, which is a thing no man has ever needed to do — I heard myself.
I was lonely at seven-forty on a Tuesday.
So I was going to make noise out there until she noticed. Sort screws for two hours. At nine-thirty she'd come to the door and say what are you doing out here. I'd say nothing. She'd say come inside. I'd have gotten what I wanted without once having to say what it was.
That's the whole machine, thirty years of it. It's not even a good machine. It works about a third of the time. The other two thirds it gets you a very organized garage.
Then I sorted the screws.
I knew what I was doing at eleven minutes in, and I did it for two more hours. There are two jars on that shelf sorted to the quarter inch, and every screw in them went in after that.
At nine-forty the kitchen light went off. I heard it more than saw it — the strip of yellow under the side door went away and the house dropped a note. Water running upstairs. Then nothing.
She'd gone up.
I stayed out in that cold garage another ten minutes waiting on a woman who wasn't coming.
When I came in she was asleep, or close enough that I wasn't going to find out. I lay there most of the night with my hands on my chest.
In the morning she came down at ten of six for the coffee, in the robe, hair still flat on one side. She got the milk. She got her glasses off the microwave.
"Coll."
"Mm."
"I missed you last night." It came out wrong, too loud for the room, like a man asking to borrow the car. "That's what the garage was. I knew what it was by about eight o'clock. I did it anyway. I stood out there until almost ten waiting for you to come get me."
She stood at the counter with the milk in her hand.
"I'd have come out," she said. "Two months ago I'd have come out at nine-thirty."
"I know."
"I'm not doing that part anymore." She put the milk down. "I've got two hundred envelopes and a job, Hank. I can't also be the one who notices."
"No."
"So." She poured the coffee. Her voice was even, which is worse than the other thing. "You could've walked eleven steps."
"Yes."
"That's what I've got this morning. I'm sorry, I have to be in the building at six-fifteen."
"The rule says within the day," I said. "I made it by about nine hours."
She stopped with the cup halfway up.
"That's not what the rule meant."
Then she got her bag, kissed the side of my head on the way past — she didn't have to — and went to work.
I didn't fix it that morning. There wasn't anything to fix. I had a cup of coffee in a kitchen by myself, then went and did a floor in Ashford.
Got home at five. She was at the table with the envelopes again. I put my keys in the bowl, got my boots off at the door, and sat down across from her with the stack that already had labels on them.
"You don't have to," she said.
"I know how to seal an envelope, Coll."
We did two hundred of them. She read the addresses out loud when the handwriting was bad. It took an hour.
Meg called on the fourteenth.
I answered, because I answer now. For twenty-six years the phone rang in this house and I let it go, on the grounds that it was going to be for Colleen anyway.
"Hey, Dad."
"Hey, kid."
She did the caterer for a while, then got to it in that run-up way she's had since she was nine, where the actual sentence shows up with three sentences of scaffolding around it.
"So — Daniel's mom asked us about Thanksgiving. They do this whole thing, like fifty people, his grandmother's ninety-one, it might be her last one. I said we'd come. We're going there. This year. Just this year."
My mouth opened, and what was in it was:
More turkey for us.
I could hear the exact delivery, the little laugh at the end, the way it would get me out of that phone call in four seconds with everybody's feelings sealed up like a jar.
Tuesday night was still in the room with me. Two jars of screws on a shelf.
I closed my mouth.
"That one stings," I said.
There was a silence on the line.
"Dad."
"You should go. Ninety-one is ninety-one, that's not a question." I switched the phone to my other ear. "I'm just telling you it stings, because it does, and you'd have found out anyway when I got weird about it in December."
"I didn't know you'd — I mean, Mom does Thanksgiving."
"Your mother cooks Thanksgiving," I said. "That's different from Thanksgiving being your mother's."
Another silence.
"I'll call her," Meg said. "I'll tell her myself. I'm not making you do it."
"That'd be good."
"Is she okay? You keep telling me to call her."
"She's all right. She's got the progress mailing." I looked out the window at the yard. "And I've got about eighteen years of phone calls to catch up on, so you're going to have to get used to me."
Meg laughed. Then she said, "Love you, Dad," in a way she hasn't said it since she was about fifteen, and hung up before I could make anything out of it.
Colleen got home at six. I met her in the kitchen, because waiting until after dinner was what I wanted to do, and that would have been managing her.
"Meg called. They're doing Thanksgiving with Daniel's family this year. His grandmother's ninety-one."
She stopped with her coat half off.
"Oh," she said. Then: "Well, that's right. That's the right call. If the grandmother's ninety-one, then?—"
"Coll."
"What?"
"Say whether it stings for you too. Then we'll figure out Thursday."
She stood there with one arm out of her coat.
"It stings."
"Okay."
"It's the first one. Twenty-five years." She got the other arm out and hung the coat on the hook. Her voice was steady, mostly. "And she should go. I want her to go. Both things."
"Both things," I said.
"Owen's coming Wednesday night."
"I know."
"So it's three."
"So it's three. Do you want to do the whole thing for three, or do you want to do something else? I'm asking, I'm not steering. I'll do either one. If you want the twenty-pound bird for three people, I'll go get a twenty-pound bird."
She thought about it while she washed her hands at the sink, which is the first thing she does when she comes in the door, which she's done for twenty-six years.
"The whole thing," she said. "But you're doing the potatoes."
"I don't know how to do the potatoes."
"You'll learn Thursday."
Thursday she made the whole dinner and I did the potatoes. Badly. I didn't get the lumps out, on account of not knowing there's a step where you're supposed to care about lumps, and Owen ate three helpings of them out of loyalty.
Meg called at ten in the morning from a driveway in another state. Colleen took the phone out to the back step in her apron with the cold coming in the door behind her and stayed out there twenty-eight minutes.
When she came back in she said, "Ninety-one and she's still making her own pies."
"Good for her."
"That's what I said."
She washed her hands, picked the knife back up, and I watched her decide to be fine, which is a thing my wife can do at will, which I've stopped mistaking for being fine.
"It's a good Thursday," she said.
"It's a good Thursday," I said. "It's also three."
"Yes. It's three."
Saturday I cleaned out the garage. Actually cleaned it, not the fake kind.
The banner was up on the shelf over the extension cords where I'd put it on Labor Day, rolled up, a little water-stained on one end, the gold gone soft.
I'd walked past it for eleven weeks, thinking about it every time.
I'd built about four different plans for it — burning it in the fire pit, which is theater; showing it to her first, which is asking her to do work; keeping it in a box somewhere as a reminder, which is a thing men do so they can feel bad about themselves in an organized way.
I took it down, unrolled about a foot of it, enough to see CONGRA, then folded it once across the middle and put it in the recycling bin under the flattened boxes. Sunday night the bin went out at the curb with everything else.
I didn't tell her. I didn't make her come out and look at it.
I stood in the driveway in the dark with my hands in my pockets.
Owen leaving wasn't a catastrophe. I was right about that, and I was so busy being right about it that I never once asked what it actually was.
It wasn't a victory either, and I got that wrong loud, in front of nineteen people, with a banner.
It was a change in the weather. Nothing out there needed a party or a funeral. It needed somebody in that house to say out loud what it was doing to them.
I went in. Colleen was on the couch with her feet under her and the TV on low.
"Trash is out," I said.
"Thank you."
I sat down at the other end, put my hand on her ankle, and we watched the end of something neither of us had been following.