Chapter 3
MARLA
Monday I went to work and was excellent at it.
Dr. Ahn stuck her head in at four and asked if I was all right.
"Why?"
"You've alphabetized the sample toothbrushes."
"They were a mess."
"They were in a bin, Marla. It's a bin. That's the whole point of a bin."
"I'll put them back the way they were."
"Don't," she said. "Do the drawer with the floss picks while you're at it. That one really is a mess."
I got home at five-forty and Keith got home at six-fifteen, and the week went on the way weeks do.
Chili on Wednesday, because Wednesday is chili.
Thursday he asked if I wanted to run into Bellwood on Saturday — there was a thing at the fairgrounds, tractors, the whole deal, we could get a tenderloin. I said I had things to do.
"Suit yourself," he said, easy, no sting in it, and went out to the garage.
I did not fight. What I did instead was get the card list down off the china cabinet on a Tuesday night in the second week of September, which is not August, which is not when I do it, and open it under the good lamp with a fresh pen.
Then I started writing dates.
Not addresses. Dates. In the margin of every card, in the white space to the right of every name, the last time I had been in a room with that person. Not a card. Not a text. Not a comment under a picture of somebody's grandbaby. A room.
Pruitt, Bethann. We talk maybe twice a year, and she'd sent a long note in last year's card about her hip replacement. I sat there working backward through a decade and a half of Christmases before I could place it — my mother's funeral, 2011, fifteen years ago. Bethann brought a ham.
I wrote 2011 — Mom's funeral.
Reesor, Donna. Reunion, 2026, that Saturday, and before that nothing since the funeral either.
Gebhardt, Sharon. Same.
Cropsey family. Same.
I went through the whole east section, which is what I've called the Chilton half of that file since forever, and the number that kept coming up was 2011.
Over and over in my own handwriting, twenty-some times down the margins.
Everybody I'd loved before I was twenty-two, all of them dated to the same eleven days in March.
My mother died. I went home for a week and a half and stood in a church basement and let people feed me.
Keith came for the funeral. Two days, and he was lovely about it — he carried things, he was good to my aunt, he shook every hand in that basement. He drove back on the Wednesday because of the parts inventory that comes in the second week of March.
I wrote for two hours and let my tea go cold.
Twice I got up. Once for the kettle, once to stand at the sink running water over a clean spoon until I could sit back down.
At eight-thirty Keith came through for ice and looked at the file spread over the whole table.
"Big year?"
"I'm a month behind on it."
"You've never been behind on anything in your life." He filled his glass, cracked the tray, put it back in the freezer empty, which he has done since 1995. "Holler if you want the game on in here."
"I'm all right."
He went back down the hall. I held the pen still until I heard the recliner take his weight, then turned the lamp toward the file and started again at the Ks.
That's when I got to Wanda.
Deel, Wanda. 4411 Cutler Road.
Fifty minutes away. Fifty. She stood up for me in a mint-green dress she hated.
She drove up when Jenna was born and slept on our couch four nights and did every load of laundry in that house.
She called me every Sunday for years, and then most Sundays, and then when something happened.
We text constantly — I know about her knee and her son's second baby and the raccoon in her attic, and I could tell you what she had for supper last Thursday.
I could not tell you the last time I'd stood in her kitchen.
I sat there and worked at it. Bo's retirement party — no, that was a restaurant, that was Ridley, that was — so I got up and got my phone.
Went back through the photos month by month, thumbing past two Christmases, past the summer we redid the bathroom, past Reid's graduation, past Jenna's apartment, past, past, past.
There she is on her own back porch with a citronella candle and a glass of wine and her feet up on the rail. Sunburned. Laughing at me.
August. Six years ago.
Six years.
I set the phone face-up on the table so the picture stayed lit until it went dark on its own.
Then I wrote in the margin of Wanda Deel's card, same pen, same hand: 2020 — her porch. 6 yrs.
When I sat back and looked at the whole thing — three hours of margin notes across four decades of index cards — what I had in front of me was the recall report.
The one I run every quarter at the office, the one that tells me which patients have gone eighteen months without an appointment so I can call them before we lose them.
The whole east section had gone eighteen months without an appointment. It had gone fifteen years.
Nobody had forbidden it. Nobody blocked a door. Every single one of those friendships had died of next month.
I should have ordered the cards by then. I always order the last week of September so they come in by the second week of October. Then I do forty a week at that table with the lamp on and the game going in the other room, October through Thanksgiving. That's been mine since 2002.
The catalog came that Friday. Sixteen designs — the cardinal on the fence post, the barn in the snow, the gold foil one that costs an extra eleven dollars.
I put it in the recycling without opening it, and then I carried the bag out to the bin so I wouldn't fish it back out at ten o'clock.
I didn't tell him. I didn't announce anything. I just stopped.
He asked me things that week and I answered a beat short.
"You want to ride along to Grantsburg Saturday? I'll buy you lunch."
"No, thanks."
"Dale's wife's doing a thing at the church. Cookout deal. She asked about you."
"I've got the yard."
Not cold — I couldn't do cold if you paid me. Level. The exact tone I use on the phone with an insurance company that's denied the same claim three times.
By Thursday he'd noticed, and he started up his version of asking, which is doing something nice and standing near me. He brought home a rotisserie chicken. He cleaned the gutters over the porch without being asked, on a work night, in the last of the light.
Then he came in and washed his hands and dried them on the towel and said, "You've been quiet."
"I have."
"Something at the office?"
"No."
He waited.
"Okay," he said.
And he let it go, and got a beer, and went and turned the game on.
I sat there with that green file in front of me, every margin filled in, and it came to me clean and plain the way things do at nine o'clock at night.
I could carry the file into that living room and put it in his lap and make him read the margins. We'd have the worst night we'd had in ten years, and something would finally get said.
Or I could pick up the phone.
I picked up the phone.
She answered on the second ring, loud, TV going behind her. "Hey! I was just?—"
"Are you free a week from Sunday?"
A pause. Just a beat of one.
"Free how?"
"Free like I drive out there and you make me lunch. Or I make you lunch, I don't care. Free like I'm standing in your kitchen."
The TV went off on her end. I could hear her breathing, and I could hear her deciding how to play it, which took her about a second and a half, because Wanda has never in her life been able to hold a card.
"Marla Jean," she said. "You have not once in six years asked me that."
"I know."
"You always say we should."
"I know what I say."
Another pause. Then her voice came back up rough at the edges and she covered it fast with volume, the way she does. "Well, come at eleven, because Bo golfs and I want you to myself. And don't bring anything. I mean it. You show up here with a pie, I will throw it in the yard."
"I'll bring a pie anyway."
"I'll throw it in the yard."
I hung up and sat there with the file open in front of me and my heart going like I'd run somewhere.
Then I did one more thing. I got a fresh card out of the box and wrote Deel, Wanda across the top in clean handwriting, and under it the date: SUNDAY THE 20TH — 11:00. Then I slid the old card in behind it, dates and all, because I don't throw a card away.
Down the hall the crowd noise swelled on the TV, and Keith said, "Oh, come on," to a man four hundred miles away who couldn't hear him.