Chapter 5
MARLA
Wanda's driveway is gravel, and she was out on it barefoot before I got the engine off.
"You brought a pie."
"I brought a pie."
"I told you what I'd do. I will throw it in the yard, Marla Jean, right there by the propane tank."
She did not throw it in the yard. She took it out of my hands and held it up to check the underside of the crust like an inspector, said "peach, you show-off," and hugged me hard enough to press the pan into my sternum.
"You look good." She held me out at arm's length on the gravel. "You look tired. But you look good."
"That's the nicest thing anybody's said to me in about a month."
"I'm going to be a lot nicer than that. And then I'm going to ask you some things."
Her kitchen still has the yellow curtains her mother made, and there's a place on the linoleum by the stove where the pattern's worn white in the shape of a woman standing. We sat at that table from eleven until nearly four and I don't think either of us got up except for coffee.
It was easy, is the thing. I'd driven fifty minutes with my hands tight on the wheel, braced for the toll — the little pointed remark, the well, look who remembered where I live. Wanda has never in her life been able to hold a card. If it was in her, it was coming.
It didn't come. She had the first cup poured before I got my coat off and started in on her son's baby's ear infections, then the raccoon, which had turned out to be two raccoons, then Bo's knee, then the woman at church who's decided she's Wanda's boss now.
She had me laughing so hard I put my head down on the table.
At noon she made grilled cheese without asking if I wanted one, and cut mine on the diagonal, which she's known I like since we were eighteen.
Around two she said, "Was it awful? The reunion?"
"No."
"Because I'd have come. You know that. I'd have come and stood there and been forty-eight percent of the people you liked."
"It wasn't awful."
She looked at me and stopped there. Waited.
"Nadine Cropsey asked me if I'd ever married," I said.
Wanda didn't gasp. She set her coffee down and looked at the table a second and said, "Yeah."
"Yeah?"
"Marla." She rubbed her thumb along the table edge. "Nobody there's ever met him."
"You have."
"Four times in thirty-one years. My wedding, your wedding, Jenna's baby thing, and your mama's funeral, where he stood by the door with his coat on.
" She said it without one ounce of meanness in it, which is worse.
"He's a nice man. I've got nothing bad to say.
He's just — he's like a guy out of a story you tell. "
On the way to the bathroom I passed the guest room. Door open, bed made, a quilt I knew because I helped tie it in 1998. Two pillows. A little glass of dried lavender on the nightstand, gone gray with dust.
I stood in the hall a second. Then I used the bathroom, ran cold water on my face, went back to the kitchen and let her tell me about the second raccoon. She put a fresh pot of coffee on at three because we'd killed the first one.
At the car she hung onto my arm through the window.
"Do it again," she said. "Don't do the thing where you say we should."
"I won't."
"You will."
"Wanda."
"You will, honey, because you always do, and I always let you, and then it's been a year." She patted the door frame twice, hard, the way you'd pat a horse. "Drive safe. Text me when you're in."
I got home at five-forty and he'd cleaned the whole house — vacuum lines on the carpet, the good kind, in rows.
He was in the kitchen making a salad, which he has done maybe eleven times in his life, and there was a candle lit on the table.
A candle. In September. At a Sunday supper for two people who've been married thirty-one years.
"How was it?" he said.
"It was good."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. She's the same. Fifty-three years old and exactly the same."
"That's a good thing?"
"That's about the best thing there is, at our age."
"Yeah? How's Wanda?"
"She's got two raccoons in her attic. She's named one of them, which I told her not to do."
He laughed, and I could see him wanting more of it, standing there with a tomato in his hand, ready to be a good audience for fifteen minutes about a woman he couldn't pick out of a crowd of four.
I ate the salad and said it was good, which it was. He'd left the little tomatoes whole because I like them whole. I asked about his day and he said he'd changed the mower blade and watched most of a ball game.
He did not mention going out at ten the night before. I knew about it because I'd heard the truck go, and then lain there fifty minutes waiting to hear it come back.
After supper he said, "Are we all right?"
"I don't know yet."
"That's — okay." He took the plates. "That's fair."
"Are we all right about anything?"
"We're all right about the salad," I said. "The salad was good. You cut the tomatoes too thick."
"I know I did."
"Keith, do you know what I did Tuesday night?"
"You were in that file."
"I wrote a date beside every name in it. The last time I'd been in a room with that person. Not a card. Not a text. A room."
He set the plates in the sink very carefully. "Okay."
"Twenty-two of them say the same thing. March 2011. My mother's funeral." I stayed in my chair. "Sharon Gebhardt taught me to drive a stick shift. Bethann Pruitt held my hair when I was seventeen and stupid. They're on a list now with the propane company."
"Marla—"
"I'm not blaming you for Bethann Pruitt."
"I feel like there's a but coming."
"There's no but, there's a fact." I turned my glass around on the table.
"Every one of those people lives within twenty minutes of a gym you have never walked into.
If you and I had gone east twice a year — twice — for thirty-one years, those names would be alive. That isn't a theory. It's arithmetic."
He leaned back against the counter with his arms folded. He didn't get mad. He set his jaw and waited me out.
"You never once said don't go," I said. "That's the part I keep chewing on. Not one time. You'd have driven me to the door if I'd asked. You just never came." I looked up at him. "There's a way of killing a thing that never says a word."
I saw it get in. His jaw moved.
"I'm going to say something," he said slowly, "and it's going to sound like an excuse."
"Say it."
"I don't know why."
We stood in that a long few seconds, both of us.
"That's not an excuse," I said. "That's worse. An excuse would mean you'd looked."
"What do you want me to do?"
"See, that's the question that ends it." I stacked our two plates, because my hands needed something. "You say what do you want me to do, so I give you a list, and you do the list, and then it's my list. Eight months from now I'm the woman who made her husband go to a pie festival."
"That's not?—"
"It is, though. It's how everything in this house has ever worked." I ran the water. "The Christmas cards are mine. The birthdays are mine. Your mother's grave gets flowers twice a year and you've never once been in the store when I bought them."
He was quiet a second.
"I didn't know that," he said.
"I know you didn't."
"Marla, I'd have?—"
"You'd have gone with me if I'd asked." I shut the water off. "Say it out loud and listen to it. You'd have gone if I'd asked. Thirty-one years of me being the one who has to think of it first."
He stood there with the towel in his hands.
"That's fair," he said.
"Don't tell me it's fair. Say something that costs you."
He opened his mouth. He stood there holding that dish towel a good five seconds. Nothing came.
He went out to the garage at eight. The door went up. No radio.
I finished the dishes. Then I remembered Jenna's torque wrench question from three weeks back, which I'd never asked him and now definitely wasn't going to. I got the tablet off the charger to send her the picture off the manufacturer's site.
It's the family tablet. It lives in the basket by the toaster and it's been logged into everything since 2019, because neither one of us has ever had a single thing to hide from the other. His work mail is on it. So is mine. So is Reid's old fantasy football account.
I went to the search bar for the torque spec, and there was the mail app already open — he'd been reading a supplier invoice on it that morning — with the inbox sitting right there. I moved my thumb to swipe out.
And I saw the word inventory.
I did not put it down.
I searched it. Took nine seconds.
From: Dale Ahrends. Sent: August 14. Subject: RE: Regional inventory — CANCELED.
All — corporate is pushing the fall count to November to line up with the new system. Nobody's coming to Grantsburg in September. Enjoy your Saturday. Keith, tell Marla she owes me one.
Keith, tell Marla she owes me one.
Under it, his reply, sent eleven minutes later, at 9:02 in the morning on the fourteenth of August.
Ha. Will do. — K
I read it about six times. Set the tablet down on the counter. Picked it back up.
I kept waiting for the hot flood up the back of the neck, and it never came. What came instead was the thing that comes when the office computer goes down at eight-forty with a full schedule — everything in me going quiet and orderly, my hands already moving.
The packet came on the twentieth. I got the mail on a Thursday. I remember the gutter flyer.
He knew on the fourteenth.
He stood in this kitchen on the twentieth of August, six days after that email, and clicked a pen twice, and said that's regional inventory.
I got up and got the printer going, which takes a minute because it always wants an alignment page first. Printed the email.
Printed his reply. Then I went into the sent folder — I'm not sorry — and searched September of 2016.
There was a thread about a truck he'd supposedly had to help Dale move on the weekend of the twenty-fifth reunion.
I read enough of it to see the truck got moved on the Thursday.
I printed that one too. The good paper ran out partway through, so the last page came off the tray on a sheet of Reid's old resume stock, cream, watermarked.
Then I shut the printer off, squared the three pages on the counter, tapped the edges even, and got the green accordion file down. I slid them into the back pocket behind my mother's onionskin pages and snapped the elastic.
Out in the garage he was on the stool with the door up, not doing a thing, looking at the road.
I put the file back on top of the china cabinet and went to bed. He came in a little after eleven. I kept my eyes shut and let him think I was under.