Chapter 6
KEITH
Igot up at four-forty on Saturday and sat in the kitchen in the dark with a cup of coffee I didn't want.
Three hours a night was about all the sleep I'd been getting since the night at the gas station. Fifty-five years old, sitting in my own kitchen in the dark, looking at a name tag on my refrigerator door.
She'd put it up there the night of the reunion. MARLA HUTCHINS, in Sharpie, in her handwriting, and it had been there five weeks. Every morning I got my coffee, and every morning I looked at it under the propane magnet, and then I looked at something else.
Her maiden name.
Not the twenty-two people on her list. Not two hours coming out of my own mouth. That. It's only what she wrote at a table when somebody handed her a marker had gotten me through five weeks of mornings, and it didn't get me through that one.
She came in at six-thirty in her robe.
"You're up early."
"I'm up."
She got her cup down without looking at me. She's always been like that before seven, but lately it had an edge on it.
"Marla, sit down a minute."
She stood at the counter with the pot in her hand. "Okay."
"Sit down."
She sat.
I'd had two hours to figure out how to start and hadn't figured out anything, so I just went.
"The inventory was canceled," I said. "Dale sent it around on the fourteenth of August. Pushed to November, the whole thing, corporate.
I read it that morning at the counter and wrote him back a joke.
A week later you brought that packet in from the mailbox, and I stood right there and told you I had inventory. "
Her face didn't do one thing. I couldn't read it, which has almost never happened to me with her.
"I was free that Saturday. I had the whole day. I stayed home, I mowed, I cleaned out the shelf over the workbench. Around four I sat down and watched a ball game I didn't care about, and I knew right where you were the entire time."
Nothing. Both hands around her cup.
"That's not the only one." My throat was doing something and I made it keep going anyway.
"The twenty-fifth. Twenty-sixteen. I told you I had to help Dale move that flatbed on the Saturday.
We moved it on the Thursday, and I knew we'd moved it on the Thursday when I told you.
" I made myself look at her. "I don't know about the twentieth.
I honestly don't, that's twenty-some years back. But I wouldn't put money on me."
She set her cup down.
"I know," she said.
"You—"
"I found the email Sunday night. On the tablet. I was looking up a torque spec." She said it the way she reads an order back over the phone. "I printed it. Printed the flatbed one too. They're in the file."
I sat there.
"You knew Sunday."
"Yes."
"You've known five days."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you—" I stopped, because I could hear what was coming out of my mouth next. It was going to be why didn't you say something, and I didn't have the standing.
"Because I've been trying to decide something," she said. "And it isn't about the Saturday."
"What's it about?"
She looked at me a long moment. Then she got up and rinsed her cup and said, "I don't know how to say it yet. When I do, I'll say it," and went to get dressed, and at nine she left for the grocery store.
I sat there another twenty minutes with the coffee going cold in front of me.
Then I got the keys and copied her address onto the back of a feed-store receipt, because I didn't trust myself to hold it in my head.
I didn't tell Marla where I was going. She'd have said something kind about it, and kind would have let me off.
I pulled out at ten past ten on a Saturday morning with a full tank.
I'd filled it Thursday, eleven minutes west, caught myself doing it and done it anyway.
Fifty minutes to Cutler Road, on the strength of an address I'd had to look up in my own wife's Christmas file.
Gravel driveway. Blue house. Yard flag with a cardinal on it.
I sat out there four or five minutes before a woman came around the side of the house with a hose in her hand and stopped dead. Then I got out.
"Wanda."
"Keith." She said my name like a question with the question sanded off it. T-shirt with paint on it, hair up. She looked at the truck. She looked past me at the road. "Is Marla?—"
"She's fine. She's at the Kroger. She doesn't know I'm here."
Wanda shut the hose off at the nozzle and stood there holding it.
"Okay," she said.
"Can I come in a minute?"
I watched her decide. Took her longer than it takes Marla.
The kitchen had yellow curtains. She didn't offer me anything, which I appreciated more than coffee, and she sat down across the table with her arms folded. "Go ahead," she said.
I'd worked out about six ways to say it on the drive out, and every one of them had a joke in it somewhere, because that's how I get across a room. Around ten miles out I made myself take the jokes out. What was left of them wasn't much at all.
"Marla hasn't been kept from you by busyness," I said.
Wanda's chin came up.
"She's been kept by me." I put my hands on the table.
"Not on purpose in any way I could've named.
A month ago I'd have told you we were busy people with a long drive, and I'd have believed it.
That's not an excuse, it's just the shape of it.
There's an excuse that comes out of me every time she looks east, and I've never once looked at where it comes from.
Thirty-one years of that. It cost her the reunion, it cost her her hometown, and it cost her you. "
She didn't say anything.
"The starving stops now. That's not me telling you what she's going to do — she's got her own hands, and she's already using them, she came out here without me. It's me telling you I know what I did. And I owed you this visit before I owed anybody a speech, so I drove it first."
Wanda looked at the table a long time with her jaw working.
"She was in this kitchen last Sunday," she said finally.
"I know."
"Do you know she used to be out here every month? Ninety-six, ninety-seven, she'd come with Jenna on her hip and we'd put the baby on a blanket and shell beans." She turned her wedding ring around. "Then it was a few times a year. Then it was Christmas. Then it was a card."
"Yeah."
"I never once got a reason." She looked up. "That's the part. There was never a fight. There was never a Wanda, I can't. It just got thinner. You can't fight a thing that thin. You start acting like it's normal, because what are you going to do — call a woman up and tell her you think she's dying?"
"No."
"So I sent cards." She laughed, and it came out ugly, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. "Thirty-five years and I've got a card."
I sat there and took it. Some piece of me wanted to say now hold on. Marla's got a mouth and legs and a car, and nobody in this world ever locked a door on her.
I've gotten out of every hard room of my life on some true-enough thing like that. I didn't use it.
"Yeah," I said. "That's about the size of it."
She got up and got two glasses of water anyway, because she couldn't help herself, and set one down in front of me.
"Why now?" she said. "What happened?"
"She went to the reunion alone. Woman at the punch table asked her if she'd ever married."
Wanda shut her eyes.
"Nadine," she said.
"You know her?"
"Everybody knows Nadine. Nadine's nice, that's the hell of it." She sat down heavy. "Oh, Marla."
She put her hand flat on the table and left it there.
"Did she cry?"
"She doesn't cry."
"I know she doesn't." She looked at the window over the sink. "That isn't what I asked you."
I stayed maybe forty minutes. She asked what I did for a living, and I asked about the raccoons. When I left she walked me out and stood on the step above me with her arms crossed. She wasn't soft, and she wasn't finished. I could feel her holding about six things back.
"I'll say one thing," she said.
"Okay."
"That guest room in there. Second door on the left.
" She pointed back into the house with her chin.
"I keep that bed made. Not made the way a bed's made — made like somebody's coming.
Sheets get changed the first of the month whether anybody slept in them or not.
Six years I've done that." Her voice went flat and hard.
"Bo asked me two summers ago why I bother. I told him in case."
I looked at the gravel.
"Tell her that," Wanda said. "Word for word. Don't fix it up, don't leave anything out, and don't you dare tell it like it makes you look good."
"I will."
"And Keith." She was already turning back to the door. "Coming out here was decent. It doesn't count for anything yet."
"No, ma'am."
She had the door shut before I got to the truck. I stood in the gravel a second anyway.
Fifty minutes home. About twenty miles out I passed a station with the price down a dime. Three-quarters of a tank, and I pulled in and filled it anyway. Except this time I watched myself do the whole thing, start to finish, like a man watching his own hand move.