Chapter 13
MARLA
We planned the overnight on the phone like a couple of thirteen-year-olds.
The Tuesday before, nine-forty at night, Wanda on speaker on the bathroom counter while I took my makeup off, working out the logistics with the seriousness of a woman planning an invasion.
"You come Saturday. Not Sunday morning. Saturday, by four."
"Four's a lot."
"Four, because Bo's going to his brother's in Cutler and he's staying over. Marla, I arranged this. That man does not go anywhere."
"You threw him out of his own house."
"I did no such thing. I made a suggestion and I made it three times." Something clanked on her end. "We're doing the thing with the crackers."
"What thing with the crackers?"
"The thing. With the cheese and the little pickles. From the nineties."
"Oh my God."
"And I'm not cooking Saturday night. We're getting the pizza from Danko's. I'll get the one with the sausage, and you'll say you only want two pieces, and then you'll have four."
"I'll have four."
"You'll have four."
I got there at ten of four with a bag over my shoulder, and I slept in that guest room for the second time in six years and the first time either of us had planned it.
We stayed up until one-forty in the morning. I'm fifty-three years old and I have not been up until one-forty in the morning since Reid had strep in high school.
Somewhere around eleven she hauled out a shoebox of pictures — the actual kind, still in their drugstore envelopes — and we went through it on the floor with our backs against the couch.
There's one from my wedding I hadn't seen in twenty years. Wanda in that mint green dress with her hand on my back, laughing at something out of frame, and me not laughing at all, mouth a little open, looking at somebody off to the left.
"You were looking at your mother," Wanda said.
"Was I? I don't remember that at all."
"She'd just said something to you about your veil. She was fixing to cry and you were telling her not to." She tapped the picture with a fingernail. "I remember because I was about to cry too, and you looked at the both of us like don't you dare, either one of you."
I sat with that photograph a while.
"I've got nobody left who remembers that," I said.
"You've got me."
"That's what I mean."
Further down in the box there was another one, summer of 1997 — the two of us on her old back steps with Jenna between us in a diaper and a sun hat and a colander of green beans on the step below.
We're both about twenty-four in it. Wanda's hair is enormous.
I look tired in a way I remember being proud of.
"Every month," Wanda said. "That whole summer."
"I know."
"I could tell you what we talked about. That's the crazy part. I could tell you what we talked about on those steps, and I couldn't tell you one thing about the summer of 2013."
"There wasn't anything in 2013."
"There was plenty in 2013. I had my gallbladder out." She snorted. "You sent a card."
"Wanda."
"I'm not doing it to you." She put her hands up. "I'm going to do it maybe four more times over the next year and then I'll quit. You'll have to let me."
"I'll let you."
She didn't say anything smart back after that.
She leaned over and put her head on my shoulder, and we sat there on the floor with a shoebox of 1995 between our knees.
After a minute she said, "So is he coming tomorrow or what," and I said he was coming, and she said, "Good.
I've got a whole sink situation planned for him. "
Sunday morning she made biscuits. Actual biscuits, out of the shortening, in a bowl she's had since her mother died. I stood at the counter and cut them out with a jelly glass, because Wanda has never owned a biscuit cutter and thinks people who do are showing off.
She burned the first pan. Scraped the bottoms off over the sink with a butter knife, put those four on a plate by themselves, and ate every one of them standing up while the second pan baked.
We ate at ten and were still at that table at noon.
"Can I ask you something," she said, "and you don't have to answer it?"
"Ask it."
"Are you staying?"
I put my coffee down.
"That's a hell of a question at a breakfast table."
"I've had it in my mouth since October." She was scraping at a spot on the oilcloth with her thumbnail.
"Because from where I sit, honey, you found out in September that a man kept you out of your own life for thirty-one years, and I have watched three women in this church go through less than that and wind up in an apartment in Ridley. "
"I'm staying."
"Just like that."
"No. Not just like that." I set the cup down. "I've got a legal pad on my refrigerator with four things written on it in his handwriting."
She looked up.
"You're going to have to explain that," she said.
So I did. All of it — the terms, the engine, the eleven names, the fourteen dollars I paid to rush the cards. Took me forty minutes and she asked about nine questions, and at the end of it she sat back with her arms folded.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"You asked him for a different life. Not a different man." She got up to put the pot on again. "Most people ask for the man. It never works, and then everybody stands around at the divorce saying they don't understand what happened."
"Wanda Deel."
"What."
"Where did that come from?"
"I'm not stupid, I'm just loud," she said, with her back to me.
Keith got there at four for supper, on the dot, clean shirt, with a bag of ice. He'd called her Friday and asked what to bring, and she'd said "ice," which is what a woman says when she wants to see whether a man will actually bring the ice.
He brought the ice. Two bags of it.
Wanda made a pot roast and didn't make a production out of it.
Bo came back from his brother's around three, and he and Keith found each other over the subject of a snowblower that wouldn't start and disappeared into that garage for forty minutes.
When they came back in Bo said, "Well, it's the coil," in the voice of a man who's had a good afternoon.
At the table Wanda asked Keith questions. Real ones, not polite ones. What his mother was like. Whether he'd ever wanted to do something besides parts. Whether Reid was more like him or more like me — "because Jenna's Marla down to the ground, that's not even a question."
He answered them. Slow, some of them. There was one about his mother where he set his fork down and looked at the table a second before he got going. Wanda waited him out without filling it in, which I have watched her fail to do a hundred times with a hundred people.
He told a story about my father-in-law I had never heard.
A snow in 1983. A man who pulled four cars out of a drift with a chain and a tractor and then went home and drank for two days.
He told it flat — no voice, no joke on the end of it.
Wanda said, "He sounds like he was two people," and Keith said, "He was about four," and that was that.
Around six she got the pictures out again, the same shoebox, and made Keith look at my wedding.
"That's you." She tapped his shoulder in the photograph. "Look how skinny."
"I ate one thing that whole day."
"I remember. Your mother tried to feed you."
He looked at her.
"She was lovely," Wanda said. "She sat with me twenty minutes at that reception. Nobody ever tells you the mother was lovely."
At seven he got up and started clearing plates.
"Sit down," Wanda said.
"Nope."
"Keith Bunch, sit down."
"Nope." He already had the water running. "You cooked."
She let him get about halfway through and then got up anyway, because she can't help herself. Took a dish towel off the oven handle, stuck it in his hand, pointed him at the drying rack.
"You wash, I put away, because you don't know where anything goes," she said. "And you're doing that skillet by hand. Don't you put soap in it."
"I know about a skillet."
"Everybody says they know about a skillet."
He did the skillet by hand. She watched him do it out of the corner of her eye the entire time and didn't say one word about it.
I sat at that table with Bo drinking coffee I did not need at seven o'clock at night and watched my husband stand at Wanda Deel's sink with a dish towel over his shoulder while she told him where the mixing bowls live.
"Long time coming, huh," Bo said.
"Yeah."
"He's all right." Bo turned his cup around. "Wanda gave me the whole business. I said, well, the man drove out here on a Saturday morning to say a hard thing to a woman who was fixing to hate him. That's not nothing."
"It's not nothing," I said.
"It's not everything either," Bo said, and drank his coffee. That is the most words I have ever gotten out of Bo Deel in one sitting.
At seven-thirty Wanda made him take the leftovers. He tried to refuse, and she said, "You'll take it, because if I keep it Bo eats it standing up at midnight and then complains about it." Then she went and found a margarine tub with a lid that didn't match and packed it herself.
We left at eight-forty. Wanda walked us out in a cardigan with her arms folded against the cold. She hugged me hard enough to hurt, and then, after a second's hesitation, she hugged Keith too — one arm, quick, the way you hug a man you haven't decided about yet.
"December sixth," she said.
"December sixth."
"It's at your house."
"It's at my house."
"I'm bringing the crackers."
We hadn't gotten out of the county before my phone went off in my lap. Wanda texts the way she talks.
same time next month. both of you. tell darrells boy he does dishes fine
I read it twice and then read it out loud, and Keith drove about a quarter mile without saying anything.
"Huh," he said.
"You all right?"
"Yeah." He cleared his throat. "Yeah. Nobody's ever put those two things in the same sentence before."
We got home at nine-forty. The porch light was on because he'd left it on.
What happened after we came in the house is ours.
It had been a long time. Not a shameful amount of time — just the amount that gets away from two people who've been polite with each other for a while. Long enough that we were both careful at the start, the way I go down my own stairs in the dark.
The ledger wasn't clear. I still had twenty-two dates down the margins of a green file.
He still had a county he couldn't stand in.
Come Monday he'd be up at five-forty and I'd be up at six and we'd both go do our jobs.
The whole thing would still be a repair in progress, held together in places with a legal pad under a propane magnet.
But he came into that room and didn't make one single joke, and afterward he lay there a long time with his hand flat on my back, awake.
"What," I said into the pillow.
"December sixth is at our house."
"It is."
"Does she like brisket?"
"Keith."
"I'm asking a real question. I'm not—" He stopped himself, and I felt him do it. "That's not the brisket from September. That's a different brisket."
"I know it is."
"Because I could do it the real way. I'd have to get up at four."
"Get up at four," I said.
"All right."
"And Keith."
"Mm."
"Ask her yourself. Don't ask me to ask her."
He was quiet a second in the dark. Then he said, "I've got her number now," which I hadn't known. I didn't ask about it. It kept me awake a while after he'd gone under.