Chapter 8
CHERYL
He came into the kitchen at nine that night while I was scrubbing the sheet pan, stood at the end of the counter, and said, "I remembered it."
I kept scrubbing. "Remembered what."
"The driveway. What Rachel asked me. I didn't have to be told, Cher, it came back the second she said it.
" His hands were in his pockets. "I remember she was mad.
I remember you were out at the car with the leftovers.
I remember thinking she was picking a fight for the sake of it, and I remember thinking?—"
He stopped.
"Say it."
"I remember thinking you were better with Grandma than the rest of us." His voice went flat at the end of it. "That's what I told myself the whole way home. Cheryl's good with her. Cheryl doesn't mind."
I put the pan in the rack. My hands were pink from the water.
"Okay," I said.
There was a version standing right there where I turned around with wet eyes and let him hold me. I wanted it. Three weeks of not touching my husband had worn a groove in me.
I wrung the pad out over the sink instead and wiped the counter with it, the whole length, twice, including the part under the toaster where nothing had been.
"Cher."
"I'm listening."
"You're cleaning."
"I can do both. I've done both for twenty-five years."
It wasn't relief, whatever was going on in me. It was more like watching a man arrive at the second floor of a building with eleven floors in it.
"That was thirteen years ago," I said. "You said it to a sixteen-year-old, and I understand you weren't thinking about it, and I understand it was one sentence in a driveway. That is not what's keeping me up."
"Then tell me what is."
"That you had it." I turned around and leaned back against the sink. "Somebody put it in front of you, in words, and you decided. That's not missing something, Tom. That's a decision. Took you about two seconds, same as Thanksgiving."
He nodded slowly. "I know."
"Do you?"
"I should've dealt with Grandma years ago. That's on me, I let it run so long it went to concrete." He rubbed his jaw. "So let me go over there. Let me sit down with her before Christmas and get it?—"
And there it was again. The breath that came out of me was closer to a laugh than I meant.
"Ask me something," I said.
"What?"
"You go over there. You sit down at her kitchen table with a cup of that terrible instant coffee and you make your case, and you say every word of it right. Twenty-five years. My wife. It's time." I folded my arms. "What happens if she says no?"
Tom opened his mouth.
And nothing came out of it.
Three seconds, maybe four, of my husband standing under the light over the stove with his mouth slightly open, finding out he didn't have an answer.
"That right there," I said. "That pause. That's the whole thing."
"I'd—" He shook his head like he was clearing water out of an ear. "I'd talk to her again."
"And if she says no again?"
"Cheryl."
"I'm not being cruel. I need you to hear where your own head goes.
" My back was starting to talk to me, so I came off the sink and pulled out a chair and sat down.
"Every road you've got runs through her.
Every single one. You're not asking yourself what you're going to do.
You're asking yourself how to get her to say yes. "
He came and sat down across from me. He didn't argue. Three weeks ago he'd have argued.
"Then tell me what you want," he said. "Because I've gone at this from every direction I've got and I'm coming up empty, and I'm scared, Cher."
I don't think I'd heard him use that word out loud in my life.
So I told him. I'd had a speech drafted for about a week, and I threw it out somewhere around the second sentence.
"I don't want the main table. I want you to hear that, because I think you think that's the prize, and it isn't. If your grandmother walked in here tomorrow and said, Cheryl, from now on you're at the big table, I'd thank her, and I'd sit there, and I'd feel exactly the way I feel right this minute. "
"Then what?—"
"Because it would still be hers to give." I put my hands flat on the table. "Twenty-five years. Every meal. Where I belong gets decided by a woman who isn't my husband, and you've gone along with her answer every single time, and then you've come home and been lovely to me about it."
He flinched. Good.
"You make me coffee. You did my brakes in the rain. You drove me to Altoona fourteen weekends running. I have never once doubted you love me, not one day in twenty-five years, and that is exactly why it took me this long to see it."
"See what."
"That you've been comforting me for injuries you were standing next to."
He put his hand over his eyes.
"I don't need to be let in," I said. "I don't need your family to take a vote. I don't need Alma to change one thing about who she is — she's ninety-seven, I'm not expecting it. What I need is a husband who knows where he belongs without checking with his grandmother first."
The furnace came on. The kitchen clock, three minutes fast since 2011, ticked at us.
"And I don't know what that looks like on Christmas. I'm not drawing you a picture. If I hand you the answer, all you did was follow instructions, and I'll spend the next twenty-five years wondering."
He took his hand off his face. His eyes were red at the rims.
"That's fair," he said.
"It's not fair. It's just true."
"Can I ask you one thing."
"Yes."
"Twenty-five years." He turned his glass a quarter turn, then another. "Why now? What's different? I've been trying to work out what changed in November and I can't find it. Same house. Same table. Same everything."
He deserved a real answer, so I made myself sit with it instead of saying the first thing that came up.
"The chair was empty."
"That's it?"
"That's it." I pulled my sleeves down over my hands, which I do when I'm cold or about to say something true.
"Every other year there was a reason. Ten seats, twenty-two people, somebody's got to sit in there.
I could always give it a shape that made sense.
Twenty-five years of arithmetic and I did it every time, because the other option was looking straight at it. "
"And this year the arithmetic didn't work."
"This year there was a chair beside my husband with a fork and a full glass of water for a man in Erie. You can't do the math on that. There's no version where that's about seats. It just sat there being what it was."
Tom nodded slowly.
"And then a kid said it out loud, which was almost a mercy. I'd been sitting there four minutes doing everything I could not to know it, and a twelve-year-old went ahead and said the sentence."
"He didn't mean anything."
"He didn't have to mean anything. He was right." I finished the last swallow of tea, which had gone cold an hour before. "He looked at a fifty-three-year-old woman at a card table and asked why. Nobody in that room has asked why since 1999."
Then we went around the house doing the ordinary things, because you can have the worst conversation of your marriage at nine-forty and the storm door still has to get latched.
He took the trash out. I found the checkbook I'd left on the table and wrote the water bill.
He asked whether I'd called about the gutter guy, and I said I'd called twice and gotten a machine.
He said he'd do it himself in the spring, which he says every year and does about half the time.
The dog next door was going again. The Cavanaughs' snowman had blown over onto its side, and Tom stood at the front window looking at it a second before he shut the lamp off.
"That thing's going to end up in our yard."
"It did last year."
"Did it?"
"You put it back over the fence in January."
"I don't remember that at all," he said.
We went up around eleven.
Twenty-five years of the same routine: he gets in first because he's colder, I get in second, and inside of about ninety seconds one of us has drifted. Doesn't matter which. His hand on my hip, my foot on his shin, the whole thing.
That night we lay there like two people in a hotel. I could hear him breathing, awake. I was on my back with my hands folded on my stomach like a woman in a coffin, and I thought about reaching over. I got as far as moving my hand two inches across the sheet.
Then I stopped, and it wasn't spite. For twenty-five years, reaching for him in the dark has meant we're fine. We weren't fine yet, and I wasn't going to say it with my hand because that was easier than saying it with my mouth.
I pulled my hand back.
He lay there a long time. He didn't go under until after one. I heard him swallow, I heard the sheets, and once I heard him let a breath out slow, the way a man does setting something heavy down.