Chapter 4
KEITH
Iknew the quiet.
Thirty-one years of reading that woman's weather, and I had it by Tuesday.
Marla's mad isn't loud. Marla's mad is a kitchen that's already clean when I walk into it, an answer that fits in three words where it used to take twenty, the salt handed over without her looking up from what she's doing.
Tuesday I got home and the counters were bare. All of them, even the spot by the toaster where the mail lives. She said "Hey" from the sink without turning around, and I stood there in my socks in my own kitchen thinking, well, there it is.
At the counter I've got a system for this. Wait it out. Don't poke it. Do a couple of things she likes, stay in the room, keep the temperature even. Inside of a few days whatever it is works its way up on its own, gets said, gets fixed.
So Wednesday I made the chili. Thursday I did the gutters I'd been putting off since May — forty minutes on a ladder in the last of the light with the mosquitoes eating me alive. Friday I brought home a chicken from the deli case at Kroger, the good one, and a bag of those rolls she likes.
Friday she looked at that chicken on the counter and something crossed her face that wasn't gratitude.
"That's nice," she said. "Thank you."
The green file was out again. That thing had been living on the kitchen table for two weeks, which it has never done — it comes down in August and it goes back up in August. She'd been in it every night under the lamp, writing, and she wasn't addressing anything, because there weren't any envelopes.
Saturday morning she came out to the garage. I had the mower deck off and both hands full.
"I'm going to Wanda's tomorrow."
I looked up. "Wanda's."
"Sunday. Eleven o'clock. I'll be back by supper."
"Good," I said. "That's good, hon. It's been a while."
"It's been six years."
I had a nut in my fingers, trying to start it on a bolt I couldn't see, and I kept right on at it while she said that. "Six years, huh."
"Six years."
"Huh." The nut caught. I ran it down two full turns before I trusted my voice. "Well. Tell her hey for me."
She stood in the doorway another second. Then she went in, and the storm door didn't slam, because it never does.
Six years. That's a shame, I thought. Life gets away from people.
I felt bad about it for maybe a minute and a half — the clean, uncomplicated kind of bad, the kind you feel about a friend's diagnosis — and then the minute and a half was up. I went back under the mower, and by lunch I'd had an idea. It felt so good I got up off the floor to go tell her.
She was at the table. File open, pen down at least.
"Hey," I said. "So here's a thought."
She looked up.
"What if we had 'em here."
"Had who here."
"Wanda. Bo. The whole crowd, whoever. Your Donna, that Petey guy.
" I was warming up to it, seeing the whole thing while I said it.
"October's nice out back. I'll do the brisket, not the fast way, the real way, I'll get up at four.
Put the tables out under the maple, run a line out for lights.
Make a weekend of it. Wanda can have Reid's old room. "
She didn't say anything.
"I've got vacation I'm going to lose anyway," I said. "I'll take the Friday. I'll do all of it — you don't lift a finger, I mean that. Just tell me who to call."
She still didn't say anything, and I got that feeling you get on a ladder right when the ladder moves.
"You don't have to plan it. That's the whole point. You plan everything for everybody. Let somebody do it for you for once."
"Keith."
"Yeah."
"When's the last time you were in Chilton?"
I laughed, and then I sat down across from her, because it had turned into a conversation about something else and I wanted to be sitting for it. "What's Chilton got to do with a brisket?"
"When?"
"I don't know. Your mother's funeral."
"Two thousand eleven."
"Okay."
"Fifteen years."
"Marla." I put my hands flat on the table. "I'm offering to feed thirty people in my own backyard. I don't know what I'm getting graded on here."
She was quiet a second, working her thumb back and forth along the edge of that green file, and I watched her decide whether to say the thing. Most times she doesn't.
"You're offering to receive my life," she said.
"I'm offering to?—"
"To receive it. Here. On your ground, with your grill, at your address, where you're comfortable.
" No heat in it at all, which was the worst part.
"I don't need you to receive my life, Keith.
I need you to enter it. It has an address.
It's got a name painted on the water tower.
You've been driving around it for thirty-one years. "
"I have not been—" I stopped and started over, easier. "Honey, I've driven you east I don't know how many times."
"Name one."
"What?"
"Name one." She wasn't loud. She had her hands folded on the table like a woman at a parent-teacher conference.
"One time you stood in my hometown. One funeral.
One festival. One homecoming. One Saturday in thirty-one years where you were on that ground, on your feet, next to me. Take your time. I'll wait."
I opened my mouth.
The answer was in there somewhere, I could feel the shape of it.
There had to be one — you don't stay married thirty-one years to a woman from someplace and never once set foot in the place.
So I went looking. The wedding, which was at the church there, that's one, 1995.
Her mother's funeral, 2011, two days, and I drove back on the Wednesday.
After that it got awful quiet in my head, and I kept going through it anyway, the way you keep patting the same pocket.
"There's the wedding," I said.
"You were twenty-four. That's one, in 1995, and it was a Saturday afternoon, and we left for Gatlinburg at six." She nodded, slow. "And Mom's funeral. That's two. Thirty-one years, two days on the ground."
"That's not—" I heard my voice climbing and pulled it back down. "Come on. That's a stunt. You could do that to anybody about anywhere."
"Do it to me."
"What?"
"Do it to me. Name a place you love that I've never been to." She held my eyes. "Go on. There isn't one. I've been everywhere you ever wanted to go. I've been to Grantsburg with you a hundred times to sit in a truck while you count bolts."
"It's a two-hour drive," I said.
That was the best I had in the drawer. Two hours. I heard it come out of my mouth and land on that table between us like something dead.
She looked at it a while.
"I know how long the drive is," she said. "I've made it alone about two hundred times."
She got up, put her mug in the sink, rinsed it, set it in the rack. Then she picked up the green file and held it against her chest with both arms, the way you'd carry something out of a burning house.
"The brisket's a good offer," she said from the doorway. "I mean that. It's just for a different woman with a different problem."
"Marla," I said.
She stopped in the hall. I had about four seconds to come up with something, and I used every one of them.
"You want me to leave the porch light on for you?"
"I'm going to bed, Keith."
"Right."
So she went to bed at eight-forty on a Saturday. The hall light went off. The bedroom light went off before I got out of the chair.
I sat in the kitchen a while with that deli chicken going cold on the counter, and when I finally put it in the fridge I put it in whole. Didn't cut it down the way she does.
Around ten I decided I'd fill the truck for her, since she had a long round trip in the morning. Got the keys, went out, climbed in, turned it over.
Half a tank.
Plenty. It's fifty minutes to Cutler Road, an hour and forty round trip in a truck that gets nineteen. She could go and come back twice on that.
I sat with my hand on the shifter and the dome light dimming down and thought, well, I'll top it off anyway. Then I backed out, got on 36, and went west.
There's a station a mile and a half from my house.
There's a Casey's at the Bellwood exit, four minutes out.
I drove past both of them and got on the highway going the wrong direction for anything I could have named, eleven minutes west, out to the Shell at the Ridgeline exit where the pumps are old and the card reader takes forever.
Stood there in the dark with the nozzle in my hand and put nine gallons in a truck that didn't need it.
That's where it got me. Numbers rolling, a moth going crazy in the light over the pump.
I always do this.
I could not, at fifty-five years old, tell you the last time I'd bought gasoline within ten miles of anything.
Not once in — and I stood there trying to find the bottom of it, and there wasn't one.
It went all the way down through thirty years of trucks to a kid with a red gas can.
My hand started to shake on the pump handle for no reason a grown man could explain to anybody.
The pump clicked off. I hung it up. Took the receipt.
Then I sat in the cab in the dark at a gas station eleven minutes from my own driveway, and I did not go home for a while.