Chapter 7
MARLA
He came in at one-thirty with his keys still in his hand and stood in the kitchen doorway until I looked up.
"I went to Wanda's."
I had a bag of onions in one hand. I set it down.
"Today?"
"This morning. After you left." He didn't sit. He stayed there in the doorway like a man who'd decided not to get comfortable. "She didn't know I was coming. I told her the truth about the reunion, about the flatbed, about all of it. I told her the starving was mine."
He'd done the exact thing I would have asked him to do, and what came up in me wasn't relief. It was more like walking into a room somebody had crammed too much furniture into.
"How was she."
"She was fair." He looked at the floor. "She gave me a message. Said to give it to you word for word, and not to fix it up, and not to leave anything out."
"Okay."
"The guest room. Second door on the left.
" He said it carefully, like a man carrying a full cup across a room.
"She keeps that bed made. Not made the way a bed's made — made like somebody's coming.
Changes the sheets the first of every month whether anybody slept in them or not.
Six years she's done that. Bo asked her two summers ago why she bothers, and she told him, in case. "
I put both hands flat on the counter.
Six days ago I'd walked past that open door on my way to the bathroom. Saw the quilt I helped tie in 1998 and the little glass of dead lavender on the nightstand, thought that's nice, she keeps it up, and went and washed my face.
"Marla."
"Don't." I got a paper towel and pressed it under my eyes, which did exactly nothing, and then I laughed at myself a little, which helped. "Give me a second."
He gave me a second.
"She also said it doesn't count for anything yet," he said.
"That sounds like her."
We got through supper. Around eight he came and sat on the arm of the couch, which he never does, and I could feel him working up to something the way you feel a storm coming on in your sinuses.
"I've been thinking about it all day," he said. "The drive."
"What drive?"
"Yours. Two hours." He rubbed his palms down his knees. "I want to do it. I'll drive you. Every time. You want to see Wanda, I'll drive you. You want to go to Chilton — a funeral, whatever it is, that thing they do in the fall with the pies — you say the word and I'll have the truck warm."
I turned the TV down all the way.
"You'd drive me."
"Every time." He was picking up steam, and there was something in his voice I hadn't heard in a while, which was that he wanted something. "You shouldn't be doing two hours each way alone at night. I hate it. Always have. I never said so because you'd have told me you were fine."
"I'm fine. I've always been fine."
"You get home at one in the morning and I lie there listening for the tires.
Every single time." He said it plain, and it went right through me.
"So let me drive it. I'll take you to the door.
And I'll find someplace to be. There's a diner on the square there, isn't there? The one with the pie case."
"The Bluebird."
"The Bluebird, then. I'll sit in the Bluebird. Four hours, five, I don't care, I've got a phone and a paper. Or I'll wait in the truck. I'm real good in a truck." He tried a smile on that one. "You go be with your people as long as you want, and when you're done you come out, and there I am."
He meant it, every word of it. He'd have done it, too — eight hours round trip on a Saturday, a booth at the Bluebird with his coffee going cold, no complaining, for the rest of our lives, if I'd said yes.
"Keith."
"Yeah."
"Where would you be while I was at the funeral?"
He blinked. "At the — I'd be at the diner."
"At the funeral, though. Say it's Nadine's father. Say he goes this winter and I'm in the fourth pew at the Methodist church. Where are you?"
"I'd be around. I'd be close."
"You'd be in the parking lot."
He didn't answer that.
"I'm going to say this once and then I'm going to bed." I set the remote down on the cushion. "You're offering to idle outside my life with the engine running."
"That's not?—"
"That's exactly what it is. You'd be present, in a parking lot.
In the parking lot of my whole history. And I'd come out at nine at night and get into a warm truck and be grateful for it.
By Tuesday I'd be right back where I've been for thirty-one years, which is the only person in this marriage who has ever crossed a county line for the other one. "
He sat very still on the arm of that couch.
"Come in," I said, "or tell me why you can't. That's the whole menu now."
"That's not fair."
"It might not be."
"I'm trying to give you something."
"I know you are. I know you are, honey." And I did know it.
He was sitting there handing me the biggest thing in his inventory.
"It's just the wrong thing, and it's the wrong thing on purpose, and you know it's on purpose even if you can't say why.
You picked the version where you don't have to get out of the truck.
You did the same thing in the backyard with the brisket. You've got a real gift for it."
He stood up.
"I'm going out to the garage," he said.
"Okay."
He stopped in the doorway. "For what it's worth, I don't have a good answer for you."
"I believe you."
"I might have a bad one."
I looked up.
He shook his head once, like a man shaking water out of his ear, and went. The garage door went up. The radio stayed off.
I didn't go to bed. I sat there another hour with the television dark, and then, because I couldn't stand my own hands, I went and got the shoebox down.
Every October I do his taxes. He runs a little side thing — rebuilds a carburetor for somebody, does a starter on a Saturday — maybe four thousand dollars a year, and he mileage-deducts the truck.
So every receipt he takes goes into a shoebox in the closet, and every October I sit on the floor with it and sort by month.
I got the box down, dumped it out on the living room rug, and started sorting the way I always do, and for about ten minutes I was fine.
They're nothing but gas receipts. Little curls of thermal paper going brown at the edges, half of them faded to nothing. Date, time, gallons, station, town.
About a third of the way through the year my hands slowed down.
brAKEMAN'S SHELL — RIDGELINE. 9:47 PM.
Eleven minutes west of us. There's a station a mile and a half from this house, and a Casey's four minutes out at the Bellwood exit. In six years of shoeboxes stacked in that closet I have never once seen a receipt from either one.
I got the older boxes down. 2025. 2024. 2023. Laid them out on the rug in rows by year and sat back and looked at them a long time.
Every trip east — there aren't many, but there are some, Reid's graduation, my mother's funeral, my aunt's second wedding in Latham — every single time there's a receipt from Vernon or Latham or the Marathon out at the Kelso exit.
Then nothing. A gap. Then another receipt three or four hours later from a station on the far side, coming home, Kelso again or Vernon again.
There has never been a receipt from Harlan Falls.
I sat on my living room floor at eleven o'clock at night and went through six years of paper twice.
Not from the town. Not from the exit. Not from the state road that runs through it, which is the fastest way to Chilton by nineteen minutes, and which we have never once taken in the entire history of our marriage.
He always takes 41. Longer, two-lane most of the way, three stoplights in Vernon. I've asked about it maybe four times in three decades. Traffic's better. Trucks on the interstate. I like the road.
Harlan Falls is where he grew up. Twenty minutes past Chilton. His father died there twelve years ago and Keith didn't go to the funeral. I told everybody at the office that his family was complicated, and I wasn't lying when I said it.
I pulled the map up on my phone, zoomed in, put my thumb on the little dot and looked at the two roads — the fast one and the one we take. Plain as anything, laid out in paper on my own carpet, thirty-one years thick.
It wasn't my town.
He hadn't been avoiding my people at all. My people were a gym he could have walked into any Saturday of his life and shaken hands and been handed a plate. My town was just standing too close to something else.
I put every receipt back in its box and got up off the floor. My knees had gone to sleep and I held onto the doorframe until they came back. Out in the garage the light was still on under the door.
I stood in the hall a minute with my hand on the switch. Then I shut it off and went to bed, because whatever that was, it was not a thing to open up at midnight.
I lay there and ran it again anyway. Nineteen minutes. Three stoplights in Vernon. Thirty-one years. None of it had ever had one thing to do with my town.