Chapter 15
MARLA
The cards went out on the ninth of December.
Eighty-one this year, ordered in a rush, cardstock with a barn on it in the snow. Sixty-eight in the front section, thirteen in just cards, which is down from twenty-four, and eleven of that difference is the index card I started in October with ACTIVE written across the top in my own hand.
I did them the way I've always done them — the table, the lamp, the good pen, forty a week, a ball game going in the other room.
I write a real line in every one. Not Happy Holidays from the Bunches.
A line. Sharon — I still can't do a hill start without hearing you yell.
Bethann — call me about the hip in January, I mean it, I'll be waiting by the phone like a teenager.
Petey — you were bald at nine, we all knew.
Keith came through on the second night, picked up a stack, and read the backs of two of them without asking, which I let him do.
"You put a joke in Petey Vance's."
"Petey Vance can take it."
He set it back on the stack, squared up with the rest, and stood there a second. Then he said, "Is there one for Verl?"
"There's always been one for Verl."
"Since when?"
"Since 1995." I didn't look up. "You've never once asked me about the cards, Keith. There's been one for Verl and Ruthann every year for thirty-one years. Ruthann's sent one back every year. And I've never in my life said anything about it, because I thought it was a sore spot."
He sat down at the table.
"What do you write on it?"
"Nothing. That's the shame of it. Hope you're well, love Marla and Keith. Eighty cards with a real line on them, and one that says hope you're well."
"Give it here," he said.
He wrote it himself. Took him eleven minutes, and I did not read it over his shoulder. When he was done he licked the envelope and handed it to me for the address book like a man handing over evidence.
"You want to know what it says?"
"No."
"You don't?"
"It's not mine." I put it in the outgoing stack. "That's the first piece of mail that's gone out of this house in thirty-one years that I didn't write. I'm not going to open it up and grade it."
He sat with that a second. Then he got up and poured himself a glass of water he didn't want.
I mailed them on a Wednesday from the post office in Bellwood, all eighty-one at once, in the canvas bag I keep for it, and the woman at the counter said, "Somebody's popular," the way she says every year.
Three days before the cards went out, the first Sunday of December was at our house.
That was its own thing. Thirty-one years, and Wanda had never once stood in my kitchen. She came up the walk at eleven with a plate under a dish towel, stopped on the step, looked at the door, and said, "Huh." I said, "What." She said, "Nothing. It's just yellow. I always pictured it white."
Then she went through every room. She didn't ask permission and I didn't offer it — she just went, room to room, a woman finally getting a look at the place.
She stood in the hall in front of the school pictures a long time and said, "That's Jenna's chin, right there, that's your mother's chin," and put her thumb on the glass.
I had to go do something in the kitchen for a minute.
She brought the crackers. Cheese and little pickles on a plate, arranged the way we used to do it in 1994 at somebody's mother's house, the cheese cut in cubes with toothpicks stuck in them. She set it on my counter and said, "Don't say a word."
Keith got up at four and did the brisket the real way.
Fourteen hours of it, rub and all, out in the cold in a headlamp at four in the morning like an idiot, sitting there with the smoker and a thermos while it got light.
He came in at seven-thirty with his face raw from the wind, drank a whole cup of coffee standing at the counter without saying anything, and went back out.
Bo ate three helpings and said "Well" twice, which is how you know. Wanda made him take a plate home for his brother.
After, we put them in Reid's old room, because they were not driving fifty minutes at ten o'clock at night. There was a small standoff about it at the door, which I won by taking Wanda's car keys off the hook and putting them in my pocket.
I stood in the hall at eleven that night and watched a light go off under a door in a room that's been empty since 2019. Then I went and shut the porch light off myself.
At the door in the morning Wanda hugged him — two arms this time, not one — and said something into his shoulder I didn't hear, and he laughed. On the phone that afternoon she wouldn't tell me what it was.
"That's between me and Darrell's boy," she said.
The next first Sunday was January third, at hers. We drove out on a bright cold morning with the roads scraped down to gray and the fields all stubble and snow in the rows.
We had the radio on the station out of Vernon, the one that plays the same forty songs, and neither of us talked much. The quiet in that truck used to be a room with a locked door in it. It isn't now. I still catch myself checking the handle.
He had a travel mug of Wanda's coffee from last month in the holder. He'd been carrying it back and forth for four weeks meaning to return it, and by then it had turned into a joke.
We were about forty minutes out, on the state road — the fast one, the one he takes now, which he's taken every time since the funeral without a word about it either way — when the sign came up.
HARLAN FALLS — EXIT 1 MILE.
I saw him see it. The side of his jaw. His hands changing on the wheel, one going up, one going down. I didn't say a word about it.
"There it is," he said.
"Yep."
"Not the engine. Just the sign."
"Okay."
He drove another half mile. Then he said, "You want a coffee?"
"Do you want a coffee?"
"I asked you first."
"That's not an answer."
He put his blinker on.
A mile out — a man who'd decided a while back and was only now getting around to telling his hands. He took the exit at forty, came down the ramp, turned right at the bottom.
Past the elevator. Past the IGA. Past a hardware store with a plywood Santa still up in the window on the third of January.
The BP has new pumps and the same building. There's a green dinosaur painted on the side of it, faded almost to nothing under a coat of white somebody never finished.
He parked at the side, by the air hose, and sat with his hands on the wheel about ten seconds.
"You want to stay in the truck?" he said.
"No."
"Okay."
We got out. Fourteen degrees, and the wind came straight across that lot off the field behind it. He came around the front of the truck and took my hand, which that man does not do in parking lots, and we went in through the door with the bell on it.
Inside it smells like a gas station. Coffee burned onto the second pot, hot dogs going around on the roller, pine tree air fresheners in a rack by the register.
A girl at the counter about nineteen, on her phone.
A man in a Carhartt out at the front pump filling a five-gallon red plastic can, which I saw Keith see and which he did not mention.
A rack of chips. A cooler humming. A laminated sign taped to the register about a raffle for a gun.
Nobody looked up.
He stood in the middle of that floor a second with his hands at his sides, the way he'd stood at the edge of the pavilion in October — a man waiting to find out whether a room was going to do something to him.
It didn't. The roller turned. The cooler hummed.
He got two coffees off the second pot, put the lids on them himself at the little station, and fixed mine the way I take it without asking, because he's known how I take it since 1994.
The girl had to get her chin off her hand to ring us up. Behind her the hot dogs went around one more time. She never really looked at either of us.
"Y'all want a bag?"
"No, ma'am," Keith said. "We've got a ways to go. We'll drink them in the truck."
"That's two seventy-eight."
He put a five on the counter. His hand was steady.
"Cold out there," she said.
"Yes, ma'am. Supposed to break Thursday."
She gave him his change and a receipt he hadn't asked for and didn't look at. He put it in his pocket, picked up both cups, handed me mine, and we walked out past the rack of pine trees with the bell going off over the door.
Out in the lot he stopped a second and looked back at the building. Then he came around and opened my door for me, which he has not done since we were dating.
We got in. He set his cup in the holder and backed out, and we went east on the state road with the heat blowing on our feet and forty minutes left to Cutler Road. Where Wanda would already be making biscuits, cutting them out with a jelly glass in the kitchen with the yellow curtains.
And because she was Wanda, there would be clean sheets on the guest-room bed.
Just in case.
THE END
Thank you for reading The Reunion He Skipped.
I’m always interested in the moments that look small from the outside but carry years of history inside them.
Sometimes a marriage doesn’t reach a breaking point because of one enormous betrayal.
Sometimes it is one ordinary moment that finally makes a person look back and see everything that came before it.
I hope Marla and Keith’s story gave you something worth staying up for.
If it did, I’d be grateful if you left a review. Reviews help other marriage-in-crisis readers find these books, and after twenty-eight stories, I still read what you have to say.
Thank you for spending another marriage with me.
Vivian Chapel
Some other stories you might like:
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No fight. No explanation. Just silence.
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Then her fourteen-year-old finds an old phone in the junk drawer.
It belongs to Andrea’s husband.
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They aren’t cruel.
They’re reasonable.
Concerned.
Loving, even.
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At 8:04, he called from the nineteenth hole.
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She stayed quiet.
She stepped back.
She never made Ray’s children choose.
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Ray sees it happen.
And he stays where the photographer put him.
Weeks later, the wedding announcement arrives.
Ray. His ex-wife. Their children.
The original family beneath the oak tree.
Marisol’s dress is in the photograph.
Marisol is not.
And suddenly one picture makes eleven years of marriage look very different.
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