Chapter 2
MARLA
The gym still smelled like the gym.
Thirty-five years and they hadn't refinished that floor once. You could see the ghost of the old ram down under the new one at center court, a little off-register, like a printing mistake nobody ever paid to fix.
They'd done what they could. White lights up in the rafters, rented linens on the tables, a bar set up under the basketball hoop.
None of it touched the smell — floor wax and old sweat and the sweet dust of a hundred thousand hours — and I was sixteen years old again before I got past the trophy case.
I'd driven the two hours east with the windows up and the radio on that station that dissolves into static past Latham.
Left at four so I could stop at the cemetery first, which I did.
Eleven minutes at my mother's stone in good shoes on soft ground, telling her about Mrs. Pettigrew's grandson because she'd have wanted to know.
At the door they had a folding table with a white cloth, a coffee can of Sharpies, a stack of the peel-and-stick name tags. Some woman I didn't recognize was telling everybody, just write it big, honey, everybody's eyes are shot.
I wrote it big. The Sharpie squeaked.
I got maybe fifteen steps in before somebody hollered my name from the punch table, and then it was the good part, the part I'd driven two hours for.
Donna Reesor with both arms out. Little Petey Vance, sixty pounds heavier and bald as an egg, picking me up off my feet.
Somebody's husband I'd never met shaking my hand and saying, oh, you're Marla, I've heard the flood story about nine hundred times.
Because in that gym I'm the pastor's granddaughter who ran the concession stand at fourteen and the blood drive at fifteen. In that gym I'm the one who did the phone tree in '89.
They'd hung the photographs along the west wall on foam board, fifty years of Chilton blown up grainy. The '76 bicentennial parade. Coach Bidwell getting carried off the field. And down at the end, the one they always hang, the one that ran in the county paper and then the state paper — the flood.
April of '89, when the Nettle came over its banks at three in the morning and took the whole low side of town: the trailer park, the Methodist church basement, the Sunoco.
In the picture there's a long folding table in the fellowship hall with six phones on it and cords running everywhere, six people working them.
Second from the left is a sixteen-year-old girl with a spiral notebook and a pencil behind her ear, mouth open, mid-sentence, hair a disaster. She's telling somebody something.
I ran that table nineteen hours. My mother set it up, and then her migraine came on and she went home at eight in the morning, and I stayed.
Called every name in my grandfather's church directory, asked who was accounted for, wrote it all down — four hundred and some names.
We found the Kestlers' grandmother off that notebook.
She'd been sitting in her car at the top of the Baptist lot with her cat, no idea in the world that anybody was looking for her.
I stood in front of that picture with a plastic cup of punch and let it be good for a minute.
"They never take that one down," said a voice at my elbow.
Nadine Cropsey. She'd been two years behind us, but her sister was in our class so she'd always been around, and she looked wonderful — silver hair cut sharp, big earrings, a woman who'd decided to enjoy her fifties out loud.
"They should," I said. "My hair."
"Your hair was fine. It was 1989. Everybody's hair in this county was a felony." She squeezed my arm. "Daddy still tells that story. He was on the fire crew. He says a kid with a notebook was better organized than the county was."
"It was my mother's notebook."
"It was your mouth on the phone." She laughed. "How are you? Where'd you land? I lost track of you after your mama's funeral."
"West. Two hours. Near Bellwood."
"Doing what?"
"I run a dental office."
"Of course you do." She meant it as a compliment, and from Nadine it was one. "You would. You'd run a dental office and know everybody's dog's name."
"I do know everybody's dog's name."
We laughed. Somebody put on a song from 1990 and a whole quadrant of the gym groaned in recognition. Nadine got herself more punch and I got myself more punch. She started in on her father's hip, then stopped with the ladle still in her hand, looking at me with the warmest face in the world.
"So did you ever marry?"
The room didn't stop. The song kept going, the ice kept rattling, Petey Vance let out that big laugh of his over by the door.
"I'm sorry," she said right away, "that's so nosy?—"
"No." My voice came out normal, which surprised me. "No, it's fine. I did. I'm married. Thirty-one years."
"Oh, honey, that's wonderful." She meant that too, entirely, and she reached over and touched my wrist. "See, I never knew. Isn't that awful? I always pictured you out there running something with a whistle around your neck, all by yourself."
"That's not so far off."
"Is he here tonight?"
"He had a work thing this weekend."
"Ohh." She was already moving on, because it's a sentence people say a hundred times a night at these things. "Well. What's he do?"
"Parts manager. Implement dealer."
"Farm equipment?" She brightened. "See, my brother-in-law?—"
I couldn't tell you now what her brother-in-law did. She was still talking when Donna got my elbow and steered me off toward the photo contest table.
So I went around that gym holding my punch and smiling and saying things in the right places, and underneath it something started adding.
Because Nadine Cropsey is not a stranger. Nadine Cropsey came to my mother's funeral. Nadine Cropsey's sister sat two rows from me in homeroom for four years. She's known me since I was eleven years old, and she had no reason on this earth to think I had a husband.
After that I paid attention.
Donna, at the table with the little candles: "Do you have kids?" Two, I said, both grown. "And are you — is there a—" and she did a thing with her hand, a shape in the air, the universal gesture for a whole man.
Sharon Gebhardt, who I was in 4-H with: "Are you still — I'm sorry, are you still on your own out there?" I said no, and she said, "Well, good for you," in the voice people use for a woman who's finally gotten herself a cat.
Petey Vance, arm around my shoulders, cheerful as a Labrador: "Marla Hutchins, still holding this whole town together long distance. When are you moving back?"
Hutchins.
I let it stand. He was already off telling somebody about his knee.
Not one person laughed at me. Not one pried, not one looked at me sideways.
They were glad to see me. They fed me, hugged me, made me judge the photo contest, asked me to help count the cash box at the end because you're the only one who can add.
At ten Donna got me by the elbow at the end of the cookie table and cried about her son's divorce, quiet, turned toward the wall so nobody would see.
I gave her a napkin out of my purse and told her the first Christmas is the worst one, and the second one's nearly as bad, which is true and which nobody ever bothers to tell anybody.
By ten-thirty I was in the kitchen wrapping leftover chicken in foil with three women I'd known since the Carter administration. Sharon put the lid on the ham salad crooked, and I straightened it without thinking, the same way I'd have straightened it in 1988.
At ten-forty I sat on a folding chair by the trophy case with the cash box on my knees and counted it twice while Donna read the numbers off the ticket stubs. Every so often somebody went past and put a hand on my shoulder without breaking stride.
"You've still got the fastest hands in this town," Donna said.
"It's a hundred and eighty dollars, Donna. It isn't the county budget."
"It's a hundred and eighty dollars counted right. Last year Brenda did it, we came up nine short, and she cried in the parking lot."
I laughed. It was a good night, the whole way through.
They just didn't know I was married. Thirty-one years, two children, a mortgage, a shared checking account, a man asleep in a bed two hours west of that gym — and not one of them had ever laid eyes on a single piece of it.
I got in the car at eleven-fifteen with a foil pan of chicken on the passenger seat and flipped the dome light on to dig my phone out of my purse.
The name tag was still stuck to my chest.
MARLA HUTCHINS.
Big letters, black Sharpie, my own handwriting. Five hours earlier at that folding table, without one second of thought.
I hadn't been Marla Hutchins since 1995. I changed it at the courthouse on a Tuesday in April, standing there with a number in my hand like I was buying a deli ticket. Wanda came with me. Afterward we got hot dogs.
I sat in the parking lot of Chilton High with the dome light on and my hand flat on that name tag. I didn't cry. I stayed there until the parking lights of the last car swung across my windshield.
The drive home is two hours. I did it in a little under.
Porch light on. Kitchen light on over the stove, the way he leaves it. He'd fallen asleep in the recliner with the TV going and the sound down, which is his entire personality after ten o'clock.
I set my purse on the counter, the floor creaked, and he came up out of that chair all at once, blinking.
"Hey," he said, thick with sleep. "There she is. How was it?"
"It was fine."
"Yeah?" He rubbed his face with both hands. "Who all was there?"
"Everybody. Donna. Petey Vance. Sharon."
"Petey Vance." He smiled with his eyes still shut. "Is he still round?"
"He's bald."
"Well." He got up, stretched, cracked his back audibly. "Time comes for us all."
So there I was in my own kitchen at ten past one in the morning with a foil pan of Renfro's chicken in my hands and my maiden name on my chest, and I said, "Keith."
"Mm."
"Nobody in that gym knew I was married."
He was reaching for the light switch and he didn't stop reaching for it. He got it, and the kitchen went dim, and out of the dim he said it — easy, kind, no edge on it anywhere, the way a man says looks like rain.
"You know reunions aren't my thing."
Six words. Then he yawned into his fist, said something about being up at five, and went off down the hall.
I stood there a while. The bathroom fan ran and quit. The bed creaked. Inside of four minutes he was asleep.
Then I peeled the name tag off my shirt. It had gone soft from wearing, the adhesive tacky and gray at the edges, a little fuzz of my blouse stuck in it. I turned it over in my fingers. The trash can was right there, foot pedal, six inches from my knee.
I put it on the refrigerator instead, under the propane company magnet, next to the calendar and Reid's graduation picture and a coupon for the oil change place that expired in June.
Then I put the chicken away and went to bed and lay down next to my husband, who was already asleep, and who hadn't asked me one single question about the town where I grew up.