Chapter 10
KEITH
Iasked her on the Tuesday.
She didn't ask me. She hadn't said one word about homecoming — not a hint, not a they do a thing the third Friday, nothing. She'd have let it go right on by.
I looked it up on the school's website at the parts counter on my lunch, wrote the date on the back of a work order, and put it in my shirt pocket. Tuesday night I said, "Third Friday. That's the sixteenth."
She was at the sink. She turned around with a plate in her hand.
"What is?"
"Homecoming. Chilton." I made myself get the rest of it out without any run-up. "I want to go. Not drive you. Go."
She stood there.
"You don't have to decide anything about me on account of it," I said. "I'm not buying anything with it."
"Keith."
"I'd like to leave by three so we're not walking in at halftime."
She put the plate in the rack, and it took her a second, and when she turned around her eyes were wet. She was mad about that, I could tell. She wiped them off with her wrist like they'd interrupted her.
"Two-thirty," she said. "There's traffic on Ballard Street."
I went ahead and took a personal day for it. Dale said, "For a football game?" and I said, "Yeah," and he waited for the rest of it, because there's always a rest of it with me. There wasn't one. After a second he said, "Well. Okay then."
We left at two-thirty and I drove.
At Vernon my blinker went on by itself, the way a dog gets up when the can opener runs.
Three-quarters of a tank. She watched me do it and didn't say one word, which was worse than if she had, and I shut it off and went on past the Marathon.
About a mile down the road she reached over and put her hand on my leg and left it there.
I took 41. I wasn't ready to come at that town from the east side with the Harlan Falls exit in the windshield, and I said so out loud in the truck, which is a new thing I do now.
"That's all right," she said. "Say it. That's the deal."
"It's on the list."
"It's on the list."
Chilton on a homecoming Friday is a thing to see.
They close two blocks of Main for the parade at four and the whole town parks on people's lawns for a dollar that goes to the band.
Kids on flatbeds. A fire truck. The homecoming court up in convertibles, freezing, waving like the queen of England.
Half of them looked like the parents of the people I was about to meet.
The gym opens before the game for what they call the Alumni Hour, which is a table of cookies and a coffee urn and about two hundred people who've all known each other six decades.
And at the door there was a folding table with a white cloth on it, a coffee can of Sharpies, a stack of blank peel-and-stick name tags.
Marla stopped walking about four feet short of it.
I picked one up and got a marker out of the can. I'd planned about nine things on that drive and this wasn't one of them.
I wrote: KEITH — MARLA'S HUSBAND.
Wrote it big, because everybody's eyes are shot.
Then I peeled it and stuck it on my chest and handed her the marker. She took it and stood there a second with her mouth doing something, and then she wrote MARLA BUNCH, and underneath it, small, (Hutchins). She stuck it on. "Well," she said. "Come on then."
They came at me in waves. Donna Reesor grabbed both my hands and said, "You exist," and laughed at her own joke a good ten seconds, then said, "I'm sorry, that was rude," and laughed again.
Petey Vance, who is in fact bald, shook my hand about a minute and a half without letting go of it and asked me four questions about hay rakes.
A fellow named Gully found me in the concession line and told me I'd stacked the plywood right, which apparently is high praise.
I said the same sentence forty times. Keith. Marla's husband. And forty times I watched a face do the same two-step — the little blank half second, then the recovery, then the warmth. Not one of them said where have you been.
Sharon Gebhardt hugged me. Sharon Gebhardt taught my wife to drive a stick shift in 1988 and I had never in my life laid eyes on the woman.
"You're taller than she said."
"She talks about how tall I am?"
"She talks about you plenty." Sharon held me out by both arms and read the name tag again. "Just never anywhere we could hear it."
Around six-thirty an old fella came at me sideways through the crowd by the trophy case.
Eighty, maybe. Feed-store jacket, hearing aids, the whole kit.
He got about a foot and a half from my face and squinted at the name tag, then up at me, then back down.
I felt the floor go a little soft under me.
"Bunch," he said. "You're Darrell's boy, ain't you."
The gym didn't go quiet. Nobody turned around. A kid ran past us with a pretzel. Marla was three feet to my left with a cup of coffee, and I felt her stop breathing.
Nineteen-minute detours. Gas two exits early. Forty-seven years of arrangements, and there it came anyway, in a feed-store jacket, eighteen inches off my chin.
"I was," I said.
He waited.
"Mostly now I'm hers." And I put my hand flat on the back of Marla's neck.
The old man looked at me a second, then nodded, slow, the way they do.
"Bickell," he said, and stuck his hand out. "Ted's brother. Ran the elevator in Harlan thirty years."
"I remember the elevator."
"I bet you do." He shook my hand hard, twice, the way men that age do. "Your daddy pulled my truck out of the creek in '81 and wouldn't take a dime for it. I never forgot that."
And then he told me a story about my father I had never heard in my life — standing there in a high school gym in my wife's hometown, band tuning up somewhere behind us, coffee urn going. When he was done he said, "Well," and patted my arm and shuffled off to find himself a chair.
I stood there a while.
"Keith," Marla said.
"I'm all right."
"You're not."
"No," I said. "But I'm staying."
I stayed through the game, which Chilton lost by three, up on aluminum bleachers in the cold with a stadium blanket over both our knees.
A kid came around selling hot chocolate out of a milk crate and I bought four — two for us, two for the women behind us, who spent the whole second quarter telling me what Marla's mother used to bring down to the concession stand.
Four different people came up those bleachers to say hello to my wife and got introduced to me.
A woman named Deb Lutz asked if we were coming to the pancake breakfast in March, and Marla said, "We'll see.
" I said, "What's the date?" Marla turned her head and looked at me.
"March seventh," Deb Lutz said. "Second Saturday. Seven to eleven, the fire barn."
"I'll write it down." And I got the pen out of my coat and wrote it on the back of my ticket stub while she stood there watching me do it, which I understood was the point.
At halftime they announced the alumni years.
A knot of people stood up for '91 and hollered, and Marla stood up in the middle of them with a cup of coffee in her hand.
Somebody behind me said, "That's Marla Hutchins," and somebody else said, "That's the flood girl.
" I sat there on a cold aluminum bench in a coat that wasn't warm enough and didn't turn around.
I got three more how's your daddy ghosts before the night was over. Not the words — nobody ever says the words. It's a thing in the eyes when they place the last name, a little recalculation. I stood there beside my wife and let it come.
Around ten the band bus wouldn't start, so I ended up under the hood of it with a flashlight in my teeth and a fella named Ronnie holding the light wrong.
Corroded ground strap. Had it in nine minutes.
Somebody's mother tried to hand me twenty dollars and I told her to put it in the band fund, and she put it in my coat pocket anyway.
We got in the truck at eleven-forty.
"You've got grease on your good shirt," Marla said.
"Yeah. It'll come out."
"It won't."
She fell asleep about twenty minutes out.
She does that — fights it, talks, gets a sentence and a half in, and then she's gone with her head against the window.
About a mile past the county line I reached over and got her by the shoulder and pulled her onto me.
She came without waking and put her head on my arm.
I drove the last hour and a half like that, with my right arm asleep from the elbow down.
Going home on the state road, the Harlan Falls exit comes up about ten minutes out of Chilton. I wasn't on the state road, though. I was on 41. But 41 crosses it at Kelso, and there's a sign at that junction — big green one, reflective — that says HARLAN FALLS 22.
I watched it coming for a while.
I went under it at about ten after midnight with my wife asleep on my shoulder and grease on my shirt. I put my eyes up in the mirror and watched the back of it go away, the dark side, no words on it at all. Held it there a good long time.
Longer than a man ought to, with somebody asleep on him and eighty miles left to drive.