The Reunion He Skipped (Marriage In Crisis #29)

Chapter 1

MARLA

The packet came on a Thursday, wedged in the mailbox between the water bill and a flyer for gutter guards.

Heavy cardstock, the Chilton High ram stamped on the front in maroon — the same ram they've put on everything since before I was born, with the same dumb belligerent expression I used to draw in the margins of my algebra notes.

I stood at the end of the driveway and turned it over like it might be meant for somebody else.

Renfro's. God. Cold fried chicken in foil pans, ham salad, those little rolls that come apart in sheets.

Renfro's did my mother's funeral lunch and my cousin's wedding and the volunteer fire department's pancake breakfast every March for forty years.

There was an RSVP card tucked inside with a line for Name and a line for Guest, and I stood there in the August heat with the tar going soft under my sneakers, reading those two lines like a word problem.

The air conditioning hit the sweat on my neck when I got inside. I dropped the mail on the counter, still in my scrubs, still carrying that clean chemical smell from the office that never quite washes out. Twenty years at Dr. Ahn's and I only notice it when I come home.

It had been a long day, too. Mrs. Pettigrew's grandson needed a specialist she couldn't afford, so I spent forty minutes on the phone running down somebody in Vernon who'd take payments, then ten more printing the address out big because her eyes are going.

That's the job. Insurance codes, recall postcards, remembering the Marchetti twins won't touch the cherry fluoride, remembering Denny Voss lost his wife in April so nobody asks after her at the desk.

Keith came in at six-fifteen. Truck door, storm door, then that scuffle of him toeing his boots off on the mat without bending down, which he's done for thirty-one years and which drives me quietly insane.

"There's a smell in the parts room," he said. "Bill thinks it's a mouse. I think it's Bill."

"Wash your hands."

He washed his hands. He's got good hands: big, scarred across the knuckles, permanently gray in the creases from thirty years of manifolds and belt housings.

He dried them on the towel instead of the dish rag, because he knows I like that.

Then he leaned on the counter next to me and read the packet upside down.

I watched his face. Not for the answer. For the half second before it.

Nothing moved at all.

"Thirty-five," he said. "That's a real number."

"That's a real number."

"When is it?"

"Second Saturday. September twelfth."

He picked up a pen off the counter, clicked it twice, set it down again. "That's regional inventory."

"Is it."

"Second weekend of September, every year.

They pull four stores into Grantsburg and we count nuts and bolts for two days like a bunch of monks.

" He said it wry, the way he says everything, the way that's made me laugh in kitchens for three decades.

"I'd rather have the gym. I'd rather have Renfro's chicken. I don't get a vote."

"You could ask Dale."

"I could ask Dale." He got the pitcher out of the fridge and poured and drank half of it standing up. "Dale'd say what Dale says."

The pen was still lying where he left it. I put it back in the cup by the phone.

"Is it the whole weekend?"

"Two days. Back Sunday for supper."

"It's Saturday night. The gym."

"I know when it is." He rinsed the glass and set it upside down in the rack. "Renfro's chicken."

Ninety seconds, start to finish, and there wasn't a thing in it to put a hand on.

Regional inventory is real. He's gone every September since Clinton.

Every September I've packed him a thermos and slipped an extra sandwich in the cooler, because there isn't a decent lunch place within ten miles of that Grantsburg store.

So I said, "Okay."

He kissed the side of my head on the way past. He smelled like the parts counter and like the fabric softener I buy, and I leaned into it.

We had pork chops. He told me about a man who bought a hay rake in 2003 and still calls once a year to complain about the tine spacing. I told him about Mrs. Pettigrew, and he said if the Vernon fellow stiffs her on the payments he knows somebody who knows him.

After the dishes he went out to the garage. Door up, radio low, ball game or the classic country station, whichever's coming in that night. He doesn't always do anything out there. Half the time he just sits on the stool with the door up, looking at the road.

I got the card list down off the top of the china cabinet.

It isn't fancy — a green accordion file with a snapped elastic, index cards and steno sheets inside, and at the very back six pages of my mother's handwriting on that onionskin paper you can't buy anymore.

She started it in 1984, when my grandfather died and she inherited his church list. I took it over in 2002, when she got sick. Forty-two years of it now, all told.

Every August I do the audit, before the fall gets away from me.

Mark the moves, note the deaths, copy the new addresses off the backs of last year's envelopes.

If I've ordered by the end of September the cards come in October, and I can address them slow.

Wait until December and you're at that table until midnight with a cramp in your hand and no love left in any of it.

I made myself a cup of tea and sat down with the good pen.

Halvorsen, Ruth — moved to the assisted living in Vernon, apartment 118. Fine.

Kittle, Doug & Sandy — Sandy passed in June. I crossed her name out and moved the card to the back. My mother never threw one away either.

Pruitt, Bethann. Bethann and I were on the drill team together, and we wrote each other actual letters all the way through the nineties.

She's in the just cards section now. I made that section myself sometime in the early 2000s, for the people you send to but don't call, and when I made it there were four names in it.

I flipped through and counted without really counting, the way you check the gas gauge without deciding anything.

There were more than four names in it.

Wanda's card lives at the front in its own little sleeve, because Wanda's is the one I never have to look up.

Wanda Deel, 4411 Cutler Road. I know that address like my own phone number.

Fifty minutes — not two hours, fifty, because she moved out toward Ridley when she married Bo.

Good highway the whole way, no stoplights past the county line.

I wrote 2025 — card in the margin, because that's what I'd done in 2025.

My hand was already there, so I wrote 2024 — card under it.

Then I stopped, because I couldn't think what to put for the last time I'd stood in her kitchen, and my pen just hung there over the paper doing nothing.

Jenna texted at nine. hey mom quick q does dad still have that torque thing. I said I'd ask. She said thanks ily gtg. Reid hadn't called since the second week of July, which isn't a complaint, it's a fact about a twenty-six-year-old in Denver with a girlfriend and a job that eats him alive.

I filled out the RSVP at the table. Name: Marla. Then the second line. Guest.

I put a 1 on the attending line and looked at it a minute. Then I got up and went and stood in the doorway to the garage with the card still in my hand.

He was on the stool. Door up, radio going, bug light turning everything green.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey."

"You're sure about the twelfth."

He didn't turn around. He picked a socket up off the bench, looked at it, set it back in the tray in its own slot where it goes. "It's inventory, hon."

"Okay."

"You'll have a good time. You always have a good time." He did turn then, and he smiled at me. A real one. "Tell everybody I said hey."

"They don't know you."

He laughed. He thought I'd made a joke.

I went back in and put the card in my purse so I wouldn't have to walk past it again.

I mailed it the next morning on the way to work, at the blue box on Ninth. Heard it drop. Then I didn't think about it again for three weeks.

At 10:40 that night my phone lit up on the nightstand. Wanda texts the way she talks — no capitals, no mercy.

ok. the list went up on the class page. tell me youre coming.

I typed I'm coming.

The three dots went on a long time.

tell me youre BOTH coming and I will faint dead away in this kitchen. 35 years marla. thirty five. I have never once in my life had a conversation with your husband that lasted longer than a phone hello

I looked at that a while with the room dark around me.

Then I typed ha, which is what I send when I've got nothing. Then I typed he's got inventory that weekend, and looked at that a while too, and deleted it, and sent the ha by itself.

I put the phone face down and lay there listening for the garage door to come down.

Thirty-five years, she'd said, and she had it right to the month.

Fall of 1991, a church basement, a card table with macaroni salad on it, and a girl in a denim jacket leaning over to tell me my grandfather's sermon had run eleven minutes long.

Wanda has never once in her life been wrong about a date.