Chapter 7
TOM
"Can I ask you about something," I said.
"That depends on what."
I sat down in the chair. "Your mother and Grandma's table."
She took her feet off the coffee table. "Okay."
"You told her something Friday night."
"I did."
"She hasn't said what."
Rachel pulled a pillow into her lap, the way she used to when she was about to tell me she'd wrecked something.
"Grandma Alma's birthday. The one at the house, the June one, with the bad cake. I was sixteen. I asked you in the driveway why Mom never sits with you." She looked up. "You said, 'That's just Grandma. Don't start something.'"
It didn't come back to me. It was already there and always had been, a drawer sliding open with everything in it.
The driveway, late enough for the porch light.
Cheryl out at the car with two grocery bags of leftovers, one of them up on the roof while she got the door open.
Rachel in a hooded sweatshirt with her arms crossed, sixteen and furious about something, which that whole year was most nights. And me, tired, wanting to leave.
"I remember," I said.
Her eyebrows went up. "You do?"
"I remember thinking you were starting something.
" I rubbed my hand down my face. "That's not — I remember thinking you were spoiling for a fight because you were sixteen.
You'd been fighting with everybody for six months.
About curfew, about the car. So when you came at me in the driveway about a chair, I heard it as more of that. "
"It wasn't more of that."
"No. It wasn't."
She waited.
"I remember something else." That one was harder to get out. "I remember thinking your mother was better with Grandma than the rest of us. That's what I told myself in the truck on the way home. Cheryl's good with her. Cheryl doesn't mind."
"Dad."
"I know how it sounds."
"It sounds like she's staff."
"Yeah." I sat there with my hands hanging between my knees. "Yeah, it does."
A car door went out in the driveway. Neither of us looked, because it was the Ashbys, because their girl gets dropped off at four.
"I'd have taken it back," I said. "If you'd pushed. If you'd said it twice."
"Dad, I was sixteen. You told me not to start something."
"I know what I told you."
Rachel got up and came back with two beers, which was her way of saying she wasn't going to press me, and handed me one and sat down.
"I'm not on a side," she said.
"I know you're not."
"But when she asked me Friday, I wasn't going to lie to her."
"You shouldn't have."
We watched ten minutes of a football game neither of us cared about. Then she went upstairs to take a call from her boyfriend, who I like fine, and left me in a house that had gone too quiet with a beer I hadn't opened.
Thirty years I've been the guy in that family who keeps things from turning into something.
That's the whole reputation. Tom's the calm one.
When Mitch and my dad went after each other over my grandfather's truck, I'm the one who got it settled.
When my aunt quit speaking to Denise for eight months over a bridal shower, I drove out there.
I always thought that was a skill.
The beer went warm in my hand.
I don't defuse anything. I find the person in the room who's least likely to make me pay, and I lean on them. It isn't fairness. It's a cost calculation, and I run it so fast I've never once caught myself running it.
My grandmother collects. She doesn't yell.
She goes quiet and polite for four months, she stops calling, she mentions to my father that she hasn't heard from me.
When my cousin Danny married a woman she didn't approve of, she sat out that entire reception in a folding chair by the door with her purse in her lap.
Every person in the room felt it. That marriage started out with a bruise on it that never entirely healed.
Cheryl doesn't collect. Cheryl absorbs it. Cheryl makes a joke and then goes and finds the gravy boat.
So every single time — every time, for twenty-five years — I ran the numbers and landed on my wife. And I never had to own up to choosing, because the choice never came with a bill.
I got up out of the chair and went and found the photo albums.
They live in the den built-in, four of them plus two shoeboxes, mostly Cheryl's mother's, from before phones.
I hadn't opened any of it in six years. I pushed the coffee table out of the way with my foot, turned the lamp on, and started laying them open across the carpet in a half circle the way you'd spread out a set of prints.
First one was Easter, '04 I want to say. Grandma's dining room, somebody standing on a chair to get everybody in. There's the walnut table with the leaves in. There's me on the window side in a shirt I remember hating. There's my dad. There's Mitch with hair.
And up in the top corner of the frame, half cut off, standing behind the chairs with a dish in her hands, is my wife. Not sitting. Standing, waiting for somebody to make room so she could set it down.
I turned the page. Christmas, I don't know the year, Rachel maybe eight.
Same room. I'm at the walnut table with a beer in front of me, and behind me and off to the right, through the archway, out of focus, is the card table.
You can see Cheryl's shoulder and one arm.
She's cutting something up on a kid's plate.
I turned the page again, and there was Grandma's eightieth.
Big one. Somebody rented a photographer for two hours, which was not like my family at all, so there are actual good pictures from that day.
In one of them the whole crowd is in the dining room, and he got every single person looking at the camera at once, which never happens.
I sat and looked at that one a long time.
Twenty-two people. Everybody smiling. Grandma at the head with her hands folded on the cloth. Me third from the head on the window side, mid-laugh, with my arm slung across the back of the chair beside me, because my cousin's kid had gone to the bathroom and left it empty.
Cheryl's in the picture. She's standing in the archway with a serving bowl on her hip, half turned toward the camera because somebody said her name, giving about eighty percent of the smile she actually has.
There is not one chair in that photograph for my wife.
Not an empty one, not one waiting, not a place setting anywhere on that walnut table with her name on a cream card in blue ballpoint.
Twenty-two people, taken in the room where my family gets photographed, and the woman I married is standing in a doorway holding a bowl.
And my arm is across an empty chair.
I went through the rest of the box after that, and most of what's in there has nothing to do with anything.
Forty pictures of a deck I built in 2002 — forty, every stage of it, because Cheryl's mother had gotten a camera and hadn't figured out yet that you don't have to.
Rachel in a rabbit costume looking furious.
A whole roll from Presque Isle where the only thing in focus is the cooler.
My mother in a lawn chair with her eyes shut, which I sat and looked at a while for reasons that had nothing to do with tables.
One of Cheryl asleep in the passenger seat with her mouth open, which she'd kill me for keeping, and which I put back.
By then I wasn't after evidence. I don't know what I was after. One frame, maybe. One in twenty-five years with the two of us side by side at that table.
The wedding, obviously. Rachel's graduation, but that was a restaurant. There's one from Marlene's anniversary in a fire hall where we're at the same round table, and I sat with that one a while like a man who'd turned up a receipt.
Not one in that house.
Cheryl got home a little after five. I heard the door, heard her keys go in the dish. I didn't call out.
She came to the den doorway with her coat still on and found me on the floor with the albums fanned around me and my hand over my mouth. She stood there a second.
"Which one are you on."
"Grandma's eightieth."
She didn't come in. She looked at the albums, then at me, and something came into her face that I hadn't seen in three weeks. Not softness. More like recognition.
"That's the one with the photographer."
"Yeah."
"I'm in the doorway."
"I know."
"I know you know," she said. "I've known for seventeen years."
She went up to change out of her work clothes, and I stayed down there until the light went out of the window.