Chapter 15
COLLEEN
The Sunday after Thanksgiving I did the audit again.
I didn't plan on it. I came down at six-forty, which is still the hour my body gets up, which I've stopped fighting. I stood in the kitchen in the dark waiting on the coffee, and I found myself listening.
The furnace was running. It runs a lot now — the house is old, the north wall has never been right. There's a knock in the duct under the front room that starts about forty seconds after the burner, then goes for a minute.
Over my head our bedroom floor creaked twice. Hank getting up, finding his jeans in the dark, coming down.
Down the hall, nothing. The dishwasher had finished at midnight.
Outside, a car door, two houses up.
I let myself do the other list too, the one from August, because it's still there and pretending otherwise is a waste of my morning.
No shower at six-forty. No screen door.
Those are still true, and they're going to be true for the rest of my life, more or less, with four exceptions a year.
Owen had been home Wednesday to Saturday.
He slept until noon. Thursday he ate an entire loaf of bread standing up over the sink, and his father made a sound like a man who'd been handed something.
He came back from seeing his friends at one in the morning.
I heard the screen door bang, and I lay there in the dark grinning at the ceiling like an idiot.
He left Saturday at eleven. I didn't cry. I got about half of it done in the driveway, finished it in the laundry room, and then I was fine.
His door's open. His bed is made, badly, by him, which is worse than not made.
Hank came down at ten of seven for his own coffee, and on the way past he put his hand on the back of my neck, which is a thing he's started doing.
"You're up early," he said.
"I'm always up early."
"You're up early standing in the dark."
"I'm listening to the furnace."
He didn't ask what that meant. He got the milk out, put it back. "That knock's the elbow under the front room," he said. "I could pull the register and look at it."
"Don't."
"All right."
"I like the knock."
"That's a hell of a thing to say about a duct, Coll."
"It makes a noise," I said. "The house is allowed to make noises."
He looked at me over his cup a second, and I watched him decide not to make a joke, which is its own kind of joke between us now.
"You want eggs?"
"I want to stand here another minute."
"Okay." He got the pan down anyway, set it on the burner without turning it on, then came and leaned against the counter beside me with his cup.
We stood in the dark kitchen while the furnace ran, and he didn't fill it. At one point the knock started and he said, "That's the elbow," under his breath, like a man naming a bird.
"I know what it is."
"I know you know."
Owen called at four in the afternoon, because Sunday is when he calls.
Nineteen minutes about a group project where one boy has done nothing and another boy has done everything wrong.
He asked me how to get a stain out of a hoodie.
Then he said "love you, bye" and hung up before I could answer, which is how he's said goodbye since he was fifteen.
Meg texted twice from a state four hours away, once with a picture of a dress and once with a question about brining. She'd called Thursday morning at ten and talked to me half an hour from her fiancé's mother's driveway.
Two plates at dinner. I count them out of the cabinet, two, and it doesn't knock the wind out of me anymore. It did in September. There was a night in September I put four on the counter before I knew what I was doing, and stood there with two extra plates in my hands.
The women at work say you'll find yourself again, like I'd been under there the whole time, in storage, waiting.
I wasn't in storage. I was doing it.
It's in my hands. It's in the way I stand at a counter and know which of four hundred children hasn't eaten. That didn't come from a training. It came from being up at three in the morning with a sick six-year-old for six years running.
Nobody's taking that back out of me. It's also not the only thing in there, and I gave it twenty-four years of being the only thing, which nobody ever asked me to do.
Monday morning I got to the building at six-fifteen.
There'd been forty-one granola bars in that bottom drawer at the start of the year. There were nine on Monday. I'd bought four boxes at the warehouse store on Saturday with my own money, which I don't tell Dr. Okonkwo about, and which she knows about.
I sat on the floor behind my desk with my knees up, loading them in one at a time, peanut butter ones on the left. There are three children in that building who can't have those. I know their names, I know their faces, I know which bus each one gets on.
The heat in that building comes on the first Monday after Thanksgiving whether the weather agrees or not, so the whole front hall smelled like scorched dust. It does every year. That's the actual smell of December to about four hundred children in this county.
Marla Vance came in at seven with the flu forms and stood at the counter longer than the forms took. Her husband died in March. December's coming, which she didn't say, which is why she was still standing there at ten past.
"You still doing the staff thing at your house this year?" I asked.
"I hadn't thought about it."
"Think about it Thursday. Tell me Friday."
"Colleen."
"Friday's fine," I said, and took the forms.
Trina brought me a coffee at seven-thirty without being asked, which she started doing in October, which is the only thing anybody at that school has ever said to me about any of it.
Four hundred one children that day. Two absences in fifth grade, one broken zipper, one bloody nose.
Friday afternoon I got home at four-forty. Hank's truck was already in the driveway, which doesn't happen on a Friday. It means he quits a job early now. That costs him about six hours a week, and he has never once mentioned it to me.
I could hear him down in the basement.
I put my bag down, got two plates out of the cabinet, and set them on the table at four-forty-five, ninety minutes before anybody was going to eat anything.
Not because two is what's left.
I set two plates because there are two of us here tonight. Tonight is Friday, and Friday is ours.
Hank came up the basement stairs with sawdust on his forearms and stopped when he saw the table.
"It's four-forty-five," he said.
"I know what time it is."
"We eating at four-forty-five?"
"We're eating at six-thirty. The plates are early."
He looked at the table, then at me, and he didn't ask a single question about it.
"Okay," he said. "I'm going to wash my arms."
He went to the sink and ran the water. Outside it was already going dark at that hour, the way it does at the end of November, and the streetlight at the corner came on with its little buzz.
The furnace started. Forty seconds later the elbow under the front room knocked, went on knocking for a minute, then stopped.
Upstairs, in the empty room at the end of the hall, the door stood open.
I listened to all of it. The house I live in makes new sounds. Not one of them has to sound like the old house to be mine.
THE END
Thank you for reading The Party He Threw.