Chapter 3
TOM
Icame up at five-forty out of habit, no alarm, and lay there a while listening to the furnace kick on.
Cheryl was on her side facing away. There's a way she sleeps when she's actually out — hand under the pillow, shoulder dropped — and there's the other way, and her shoulder was hiked up near her ear. She'd been awake sometime in the night.
I got up quiet and made the coffee. That's not a thing I'd claim; I make it because I'm up first, twenty-some years of it, her mug with the chipped handle set out by the machine so the light hits it when she comes down.
She came down at seven in her robe and picked it up.
"Thanks."
"There's a little of that creamer left."
"Okay."
Then she took it into the front room instead of the kitchen table and stood at the window drinking it, watching the Cavanaughs put up their inflatable snowman two days early.
She didn't slam a cupboard. She wasn't cold to me. It was like some switch I never knew was on had gotten shut off, so the room was one lamp darker, and I couldn't have told you which lamp.
I went over it while I shaved, the way I'd lay out a job before I bid it.
I have never once looked at another woman — not once, not seriously, not in a way that would embarrass me if she picked up my phone.
I know when her lower back is bad, which is any day she stands more than six hours at that office, and I know it before she says so, because she starts putting her hand flat on the counter when she leans.
I rotate her tires. I did the brakes on her Rogue in September, in the driveway, in the rain.
When her mother was dying up in Altoona I drove her there fourteen weekends running, and not one of those weekends did I make her feel like it was fourteen.
I text her when I'm going to be late. Every time. My own father never did that in his life.
So when she said what she said in the truck, that's what came up in me first. Not guilt. Evidence. I had a whole file of it, and that was exactly why I couldn't work out what she wanted from a folding table.
I kept at it while the water ran. Rachel had croup at four, the bad kind, and we sat in the bathroom with the shower running hot for two hours at three in the morning.
I took the second shift so Cheryl could sleep.
I've taken the second shift every time since.
When her mother was dying, the hospice nurse in Altoona asked me if I was the son.
When a kid with no insurance hit Cheryl's car in the Wendy's lot in 2016, I made every phone call for five weeks so she wouldn't have to.
I know what she takes in her coffee. I know she can't sleep if the closet door's open. I know she'll say she's fine about her back for eleven days before she'll take anything for it. That's twenty-five years of a man showing up.
So what in the hell was I supposed to do with a folding table?
I nicked my jaw and swore at the mirror.
I was on the Hamlin job by seven-thirty. Warehouse conversion, two hundred thousand square feet, half of it still open to the weather, and my apprentice Dev had the lift in the wrong bay again.
"Fifty feet down," I told him. "You want the run under the beam, not the joist."
"How far is fifty feet?"
"Count the bays. They're twenty on center."
He moved it. I stood there with my hands in my jacket pockets watching him swing it around, watching the ground he covered, and something in my head went sideways on me.
I do distance for a living. Thirty-eight years of it.
I can look at a wall and tell you within three inches where the box is going to land.
Twelve feet is one bay of a garage. It's the length of a service van.
And standing in a cold building in Hamlin, Pennsylvania, I put it in a room instead: Grandma's dining room, the walnut table under the light fixture, my seat on the window side, third from the head, then the archway, then the card table with the shim under the leg. Twelve feet, give or take four inches.
I could see her there. Not from the day before — from all of them, stacked up like prints in a file. Cheryl at that corner. Cheryl with somebody's kid on her lap. Cheryl half turned toward the archway to catch what was being said in the other room.
And me on the window side, every time.
"Tom." Dev, from the lift. "You want the hangers at four foot?"
"Five. Five's fine."
I ate lunch in the truck with the engine running, and Rachel called at ten past twelve.
"Hey Dad."
"Hey, kid."
"How was it? I felt bad missing it."
"You're in Columbus, you get a pass." I unwrapped the second half of the sandwich. Cheryl had made it Wednesday night — turkey from before the turkey, which is a joke she makes every single year. "It was fine. Grandma's turkey. Ray didn't show."
"Shocking."
"Your grandmother put Pauline in the wingback again."
"The one that eats people."
"Your mother had it swapped out inside of four minutes."
"Obviously she did. How's Pauline?"
"Ninety-one."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got. Mitch bought a new truck he can't afford."
"Also shocking." Then a pause, the kind where she's deciding whether to ask it. "Is Mom okay? She sent me a picture of pie at like nine o'clock last night with no caption."
I looked at the wiper blade.
"She's upset about the table," I said. "Grandma's table."
Rachel didn't say anything.
"Rach?"
"The kids' table?"
I sat up. "How do you know that's a thing?"
"Dad."
"No, I'm asking. How do you know that's a thing that's — a thing."
"Because I have eyes?" She said it kindly, which made it worse somehow. "Because I've been going out there since I was born and Mom has never once sat next to you at a meal in that house."
"That's not—" And then I quit, because it was. "She jokes about it."
"I know she does."
"She makes the joke before anybody else can get to it. She's been making it since before you were born. 'Still haven't graduated.' She made it yesterday."
"Yeah," Rachel said. "She would."
Something in how she said it put a splinter in me.
"Meaning what."
"Dad, Mom jokes when she doesn't want everybody staring at her.
" A horn went off on her end. "That's her whole — that's how she handles a room.
Somebody's crying at Christmas, she makes a joke.
Grandma Pauline says something racist at Easter, she makes a joke.
It's not that any of it's funny to her. She just wants the room to move on. "
Out the windshield, two guys were arguing about a pallet on the loading dock.
"She's laughed at that table for twenty-five years," I said.
"Okay," Rachel said. "And?"
I didn't have an and.
The quiet went on long enough that I heard her key turn in a door and heard her set something down.
"Did something happen?" she said. "Yesterday."
"Marlene's grandson asked her why she's still a kid."
"Oh my God."
"He's twelve. He wasn't being smart about it."
"No, that's —" She made a sound. "What did you do?"
That was the exact question, out of my own daughter's mouth, in a tone she hadn't used on me since she was nineteen.
"Daniel's chair was open," I said. "He bailed for his girlfriend's thing. Grandma kept the place set."
"Dad. What did you do?"
The heater blew. My sandwich sat on my knee, half eaten, and I had no interest left in it.
"I ate my dinner," I said.
She let that sit there. She knows exactly how long to leave a thing on the table before she picks it up.
"Okay," she said finally. "Well. I love you. Tell Mom I'll call her tomorrow."
She hung up.
Dev came around at two with a question about a homerun and then didn't leave.
"You good, boss?"
"I'm fine."
"You've been standing there like eight minutes."
He wasn't wrong. I was in the middle of a bay with no work in it, holding a set of prints I hadn't opened.
"Family thing," I said.
"Say no more." He picked at a callus. "My wife's people do Thanksgiving twice. Once at the mom's, once at the dad's. Same day, four hours apart."
"That's rough."
"It's a war crime is what it is." He laughed. "First year, I tried to get out of the second one. She sat me down and explained that we go to both, and we go to both happy, or I go to neither by myself for the rest of my life."
"She's right."
"Oh, she's always right," Dev said, and went back to his lift. Twenty-four years old, and somebody had already sat him down and given him the terms.
The GC came through at three with a man from the owner's side wanting to know why the panel schedule had changed.
It changed because they moved a wall in October and nobody told me until November.
We stood out in the cold over that for twenty minutes and I won it, because the RFI was in my truck and I've been at this long enough to keep the paper.
It came up on me afterward the way a stone works its way up in a boot. Twenty minutes in the cold over eleven hundred dollars of conduit, and I couldn't come up with the last hard sentence I'd said to my own grandmother. Not one.
I finished out the shift — ran a hundred and forty feet of EMT, made a call on the panel schedule, signed for a delivery — and the whole time there was something sitting at the back of my head that I couldn't get at, the way you can't get at a word.
Everybody knows.
That's what Rachel had said. Not I know. Everybody. My daughter, twenty-nine years old, living in Columbus, Ohio, had known for years about a thing in my own family that I'd spent twenty-five years calling nothing.
I drove home in the dark. Porch light on. Through the front window I could see Cheryl at the kitchen table with her laptop, doing that thing where she shoves her reading glasses up into her hair and then squints at the screen.
I shut the engine off and sat in the driveway a minute.
If she'd been laughing for twenty-five years so nobody would look at her, then I hadn't been believing my wife. I'd been agreeing with her.