Chapter 14
KEITH
Verl came on the second Saturday of November.
I'd asked him three weeks before in the parking lot of a hardware store in Vernon, which is where two men like us conduct our business, and he said, "I'll see." Then he called Ruthann from the truck and called me back in four minutes and said, "The fourteenth."
Verl and I sat in the garage with the door up.
That's how our father sat, and his father before him. Two lawn chairs in the mouth of the garage, facing out. You look at the road, not at each other. You talk sideways. Every so often a car went by and we both stopped to look at it before we picked the talk back up.
Our garage faces east.
House came that way in 1999. A couple thousand nights I've sat in that doorway looking down a road that runs, if you stay on it long enough, to Sawyer Road. I never once looked at it that way until I was looking at it with my brother in the next chair.
We got the easy stuff out of the way first. His hip. The dealership. Reid in Denver, Jenna and her landlord problem, his boy's divorce.
"Ruthann wants to know if you still can't eat onions."
"I was twelve when that was true."
"That's what I told her." He drank. "She's kept you at twelve. Saves her having to ask."
Around one-thirty he opened the second beer and said, "You want the rest of it, or was the yard enough?"
"I want the rest of it."
So he gave it to me.
Some of it isn't mine alone to repeat. Some of it I'm still turning over.
But by two o'clock I had a thing I hadn't had at eleven, which was the size of him.
He didn't drink instead of loving us. He did both, badly, at the same time, for thirty years, in a town of two thousand people who watched him do it.
There was a stretch in 1988 he stayed dry eleven months and built the back steps. I knew about the steps. I didn't know about the meetings in Vernon — three nights a week, forty minutes each way, alone, in a Ford with a bad heater.
There was a stretch in 1993, after I was gone, where he got three years. Three. I never knew there had been a three.
"He came to see you," Verl said.
I turned my head.
"In Grantsburg. Ninety-four, ninety-five, in there.
Drove up and sat outside that dealership in the parking lot.
" Verl kept his eyes on the road. "Told me about it that night.
Said he watched you come out at five-thirty with two other fellas and you were laughing at something.
He sat there and thought, well, he got out. And he drove home."
"He never came in."
"He never came in."
I sat there and drank about half a beer without tasting any of it.
"Why are you telling me that?"
"Because you asked me for the whole record," Verl said, "and that's in it." He crushed the can in his hand, which he's done since he was seventeen and which drives Ruthann out of her mind. "And because there's one more thing I want you to hear, and then I'll leave it be."
"Go ahead."
"He sat in that parking lot because he was ashamed and he didn't want to bring it in on you." Verl turned and looked at me for the first time in an hour. "You've been sitting in the parking lot your whole life, brother. Same reason. Same man."
I didn't say anything for a while. Down the road a school bus went by with nobody on it.
"That's an ugly thing to say to somebody," I said.
"Yep."
"You been saving it?"
"Twelve years," Verl said.
We sat there.
"Ruthann says you sat in the yard for four hours."
"I did."
"Well." He reached into the case for another one. "Next time come in the house. She's redone the kitchen and she's about to bust."
Around four Marla and Ruthann came back with three bags from the outlet in Vernon and found us still out there in the cold, door up, coats on. Ruthann stopped in the driveway and looked at the two of us a second before she said anything.
"Well, look at this," she said.
"Don't," Verl said.
"I didn't say a word."
"You said look at this."
"I'm allowed to say look at this in a driveway," Ruthann said, and went in the house.
He left at five. In the driveway he hugged me, which we do not do. Neither one of us knew how to get out of it, so it went on about two seconds too long, and we both finished it by patting each other's backs too hard.
"Christmas," he said through the window.
"Christmas," I said. "Here or there?"
He looked at me.
"I said what I said," I told him.
"There." Verl put it in reverse. "You come there." And he backed out of my driveway before I could get my face under control.
Thanksgiving, Jenna came home and Reid didn't, which is how it goes now. Marla made everything she always makes.
But there was a pie on the counter I didn't recognize, in a glass dish, brown sugar and something dark under the lattice.
"What is that?"
"Kimmy Bardwell's mother's shoofly," she said. "It's the one they sell four hundred of every year. Deb Lutz mailed me the recipe on an index card. In the mail, Keith. She wrote it out and put a stamp on it."
Jenna ate two pieces, asked what shoofly was, and got a fifteen-minute answer from her mother about a pie booth. I stood at the sink and listened to my daughter learn something about the town she's from.
Then Jenna asked if we ever went back there for anything, and Marla started to say something about the spring, and I said, "Pancake breakfast. March seventh," and the both of them turned around in their chairs to look at me.
Nadine Cropsey's father died the twenty-third.
Marla got the call at seven in the morning on a Monday, from Donna Reesor. She stood there in the kitchen in her robe with her hand over her mouth about a minute, and then she said all the right things in that voice she has, and hung up.
"Wednesday," she said. "Eleven o'clock, at the Methodist church. Nadine's asking people to come by the house after."
And it started.
It came up out of the floor. My chest went tight and my jaw set, and there in my mouth, fully assembled, no assembly required, was this: Wednesday's the day before Thanksgiving.
Behind that one, already loading: the Grantsburg truck comes in Wednesdays.
Behind that one: it's a four-hour round trip on the worst travel day of the year, and you'll be worn out, hon, why don't I drive you.
They were so good. Not one of them was a lie. The truck does come in on Wednesday. It is the worst travel day of the year.
I had the keys in my hand. I'd picked them up off the counter to go start the truck for her, because it was twenty-eight degrees out.
I stood there with them in my fist.
"There it is," I said.
Marla turned around.
"What?"
"The excuse engine." My voice came out strange.
"It just kicked on. Right now, standing here.
It handed me three." I made myself keep going, because if I stopped I'd have rolled it up and put it away and been perfectly pleasant about it for the rest of my life.
"Wednesday's the day before Thanksgiving.
The Grantsburg truck comes in Wednesday.
And it's four hours round trip and you'll be worn out, so why don't I drive you and wait. "
She stood there with a coffee cup in her hand and didn't move.
"That last one's the good one," I said. "That one's got love in it. That's the one that would've worked."
"Keith."
"Ignore it." I put the keys in my pocket. "All three. Dale can take the truck in, he's done it before. What time do we leave?"
She set the cup down on the counter without looking at where she was setting it.
"Nine," she said. "It's a small church. You get there early or you're standing."
"Then we'll leave at eight-thirty."
I stood in the fourth pew on the twenty-fifth of November, in a Methodist church in Chilton, in the suit I bought for her mother's funeral. I shook hands with a woman named Nadine Cropsey, who has known my wife since she was eleven years old and who I'd never met.
"Keith," I said. "Marla's husband."
"Oh, I know," Nadine said. "You fixed the band bus."
Afterward there were fifty people in that house and a folding table of ham and rolls and somebody's beans. Marla had an apron on inside of ten minutes, because that's what happens to her in any room in that town. I wound up in a garage with three men I didn't know, looking at a snowblower.
It's always a snowblower. This one had last March's gas still in it.
We got home at nine that night. She went in and I sat out in the truck in my own driveway with the engine ticking and got my phone out.
I put two addresses in the favorites in the GPS. Took me a while, because I'm slow with it.
W. DEEL — CUTLER RD.
VERL — HARLAN FALLS.
Then I shut the phone off and sat there in the dark a minute, and went in and asked my wife if there was any of that pie left.