Chapter 12
MARLA
We did the terms on a Thursday night at the kitchen table, and I made him write them down.
It wasn't a punishment. A thing agreed out loud at nine at night has evaporated by Tuesday, and a thing on paper in a man's own handwriting stays put. He didn't argue about it either. He got the legal pad out of the drawer where we keep the batteries, clicked a pen, and said, "Go ahead."
"No," I said. "Not go ahead. You start."
He looked at me.
"I've been running this table for thirty-one years," I said. "I'm not writing your homework."
He sat with that a second. Then he put the pen down and rubbed the back of his neck and said, "All right. Chilton's on the map."
"Say what that means."
"It means it's a place we go." He picked the pen back up.
"Holidays, if your people are doing something.
Funerals — all the funerals, not just the ones I can't dodge.
That festival with the pies. Homecoming if you want it, and if you don't want it that's fine, but the not-going is a decision we make out loud, one at a time.
It doesn't get to happen by itself anymore. "
He wrote it down. His handwriting is terrible, all capitals, the way he writes on a work order.
"Second one," I said.
"Wanda's Sundays."
"Those aren't yours to give me."
"No, they're not." He nodded. "So it isn't a promise about the Sundays, it's a promise about me.
First Sunday, I don't schedule anything.
Not a starter job, not the gutters, not Dale, not a ball game.
It's blocked. You want me there, I'm there.
You two want the house to yourselves, I'll find something to do.
Either way, I don't get to be the reason it doesn't happen. "
"Write that."
He wrote it, pressing so hard the pen went through to the second sheet. He tore that one off and started the next line on a clean page.
"Third," I said. "This one's the one."
"Harlan Falls."
"Harlan Falls."
He set the pen down and looked at the window a while, at his own reflection in it with the dark behind.
"I can't tell you when I'll be all right in that town," he said. "I've sat in Verl's yard twice and I haven't been down Sawyer Road on foot. I'm not going to stand here and promise you Thanksgiving at the bar in Rooney's."
"I'm not asking for that."
"What are you asking for?"
"Nothing about the town." I put my hand flat on the table. "The town's yours. Go at whatever speed you go. Take ten years."
"Then what?"
"The silence is over. That's the term. Not the fear. The silence."
He didn't say anything.
"You bought gas eleven minutes west of this house for thirty years and never once mentioned it to me," I said.
"You drove nineteen extra minutes to Chilton five hundred times and told me you liked the road.
That's what killed things, Keith. Not Darrell.
Darrell was a sad drunk in a town neither one of us lives in.
What killed my whole east section was a man with a reason he wouldn't say out loud. "
"So say it."
"That's the term. When you skirt something, you tell me you skirted it.
When you buy gas two exits early, you say so in the truck.
You don't have to make Harlan Falls disappear.
You don't have to be brave on command. But when you steer around it, you tell me you're steering around it.
" I looked at him until he looked back at me.
"I can be married to a man who's got a county he can't stand in.
I can't be married to a man who won't tell me why he took 41. "
He wrote for a while.
Then, without looking up, "There's a fourth one."
"Is there."
"It's mine. You're not asking for it." He kept writing, slow, pressing hard.
"When an invitation comes in from out east — anything.
Your cousin's kid gets married, somebody dies, Deb Lutz wants pancakes in March.
The machine starts up in me. I want you to know I can feel it start now.
It's like a well pump kicking on down in the basement.
About four seconds after I hear the invitation there's a reason in my mouth, fully built, and it's a good one, and it's true enough to say out loud. "
"I know that machine."
"You know it better than I do." He finished the line and turned the pad around.
"So here's the fourth one. When it starts, I say so.
To you. Same day. Before I answer anybody, before I say a word to whoever's asking, before I even look at the calendar.
I come find you and I say, the excuse engine just kicked on, and here's what it handed me. "
I read it twice, in his awful capitals: WHEN THE EXCUSE ENGINE STARTS I TELL HER THAT DAY. BEFORE I ANSWER ANYBODY.
"You came up with that yourself," I said.
"You'd have made me do it eventually."
"I would have. It's better that I didn't."
"There's a fifth," I said.
"All right."
"This one's small, and it's going to sound like nothing." I pulled the pad back toward me. "Ruthann's birthday is the ninth of March. Your mother's grave gets flowers in April and at Christmas. Verl's anniversary is the twenty-first of June — they got married the day after school let out in 1987."
He stared at me.
"How do you know that?"
"Because I've been the one doing it since 1995 and you've never once asked.
" I slid the pad back at him. "Write down that you're taking your own family.
Not helping with. Taking. You buy the flowers, you make the calls, you remember the ninth of March without me putting it on the calendar in the hall. "
He wrote it, and it took him a while, and partway through he stopped.
"The twenty-first of June," he said.
"The twenty-first of June."
"I was at that wedding. I was in it. I stood up there in a rented coat."
"I know. There's a picture of it in the box in the closet, and you're the only one in it who isn't smiling."
He put the pen down and looked at the page a second like it belonged to somebody else.
"Is that enough?"
"I don't know," I said. "That's an honest answer. Ask me in a year."
"A year."
"You cost me fifteen years of Bethann Pruitt and six of Wanda. A year of me not being sure is cheap."
"A year," he said again, the way a man tests a board before he stands on it.
He took it. He didn't flinch off it and he didn't reach for one of his dry little lines to set it down with, the way he'd have done in September. He just sat there with it.
Then he got up and stuck the pad under the propane magnet on the refrigerator, right next to the name tag, which is still there, and which I have decided is where it lives now.
"That's going to be up there where people can see it," he said.
"Who comes in this kitchen?"
He thought about that for a second, and then he laughed — one short unhappy breath of it — because we both got to the answer at the same time.
"Nobody," he said.
"Well," I said. "We'll work on that."
He took the pad back down and read his own handwriting once and put it up again square under the magnet.
"It's crooked," he said.
"Leave it crooked."
He left it crooked, and he looked at it twice more before he went to bed.
I got the file down that weekend.
The thirtieth of October, which is a month later than I've ever started in my life. I'd put the catalog in the recycling back in September, so I had to order online and pay for the rush — fourteen dollars extra, which I paid without one second of grief.
I sat at the table with the lamp on and the green accordion file open and every card in front of me with a date in the margin in my own hand.
Pruitt, Bethann — 2011, Mom's funeral. Gebhardt, Sharon — 2026, homecoming.
I sat with that second one a minute. Sharon Gebhardt had hugged my husband next to a trophy case.
Then I got a fresh index card and wrote ACTIVE across the top of it, which is not a thing my mother ever did and not a thing I'd ever done, and started moving names.
Donna Reesor. Sharon Gebhardt. Nadine Cropsey, whose father was worse.
Deb Lutz, who screamed about eleven hundred and forty dollars.
Petey Vance, who I've known since we were four.
Gully, who I had to text Wanda about, because I have never in my life known that man's first name.
The Kittles. Bethann, who I'd called on the Tuesday after the festival and talked to for fifty minutes about a hip and a grandson and a woman we both knew who'd gone strange about politics.
Eleven names. I counted them twice.
Those cards still have the dates down the margins. 2011 is still written beside most of them in my own hand, and December cardstock doesn't lift that off a page.
But eleven of them were coming back into the front section, where the living ones go.
I heard the garage door go up, and then a minute later go down again, which surprised me. He'd been out there ten minutes.
He came in and stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
"What's that?" he said, about the card.
"December."
"It's October."
"I'm behind."
He came over and read it over my shoulder, and I let him. All eleven names. He didn't say anything for a while.
"There's no Wanda on there," he said.
"Wanda's not a name on a list. Wanda's the first Sunday of the month."
"Right."
He stood behind my chair with his hand on the back of it. Out the window the neighbor's floodlight came on for a cat.
"Gully's first name is Marvin," he said.
I looked up at him.
"I asked him," Keith said. "At the plywood."