Chapter 14
CHERYL
We left at seven, which is early by Whitaker standards, though not early enough to be a statement.
Tom did the goodbyes. It took me a second to register that.
For twenty-five years I've been the one who works the room on the way out — hand on Pauline's shoulder, promise to Denise about a recipe, hug for Marlene that lasts exactly as long as Marlene wants it to — while my husband stood by the door with the car keys looking at his phone.
This time he went around. He got Pauline's hands in both of his and asked about the hip.
He told Denise the ham was better than last year, which it was.
He carried three chairs out to Mitch's truck.
I stood by the door with the keys.
Alma sat in her chair at the head of the walnut table with a cup of coffee, watching him do it, and she watched for a long time. She's known that man since the day he was born. I'd give a good deal to know what was going through her head, and I never will, because she isn't a woman who says.
She didn't say goodbye to me. She said, "There's ham left, take it," which in that house is the same thing.
We got home at seven-forty with four takeout containers, a pie plate, and both pans empty. The house was cold, because we'd dropped the heat to sixty before we left, and it smelled like the Yankee Candle, and the timer lights in the front window made the place look better than it was.
Tom carried the pans in. I put the leftovers away. We did the thing you do after a holiday, which is move around a kitchen in silence for twenty minutes putting objects back into cabinets, both of you too tired to have the conversation and both of you knowing it's coming.
He took the white ridged tray down to the basement. I ran a sink of water for the pans, then didn't wash them, then let the water out.
Mostly my feet hurt. I'd been standing since eight that morning in shoes I only wear to that house, and my lower back had the hot band across it that means I'll be careful getting out of bed. If you'd asked me right then whether I was happy, I couldn't have told you.
I sat down at the kitchen table because my legs had had it. Tom came up and sat down across from me in his socks, still in the shirt he'd worn all day, with a spot of ham glaze on the cuff.
"I want to say a couple things," he said, "and I've been putting them in order about a week, so let me get through them."
"Okay."
"I knew." He put his hands flat on the table.
"That's the first one. I've been going around saying I didn't know and it isn't true.
Rachel handed it to me in a driveway when she was sixteen and I told her not to start something.
I've stood in that room with a camera in my face next to an empty chair with you in the doorway. I knew."
I didn't say anything.
"Second one." He looked at his hands. "I picked you.
Every time. Not because I loved you less.
Because you were cheaper. My grandmother makes you pay for six months, and you'd make me a cup of coffee.
" His jaw worked. "That's the ugly part, Cher.
It isn't that I didn't see you. I saw you, and I ran the numbers, and you came up cheap. Every time. For twenty-five years."
The furnace kicked on. I sat with my hands in my lap.
He got up in the middle of it, filled a glass at the tap, and drank half of it standing with his back to me before he came back and sat down. Forty seconds, maybe. He didn't apologize for it and I didn't ask about it, and I understood he'd needed the forty seconds.
"And the joke," I said.
"Yeah. And the joke." He let a breath out. "You handed me an easy way to believe you were fine and I took it every year, because it let me look at the wrong thing. I was watching your face. I should have been looking at where you were sitting."
I let that sit. The clock ticked, three minutes fast.
There was something I could have put on the table right then.
It was under my tongue — the whole of what I'd said to Rachel in a dark kitchen the night before — and part of me wanted to hand it over while he was still open like that.
I didn't. I'd been up since five-thirty and my back hurt, and I decided the way you decide about a phone call you'll make tomorrow that it could keep.
"I'm not going to say it's all right," I said instead.
"I'm not asking you to."
"Because it isn't. It's been a month. That's nothing against twenty-five years, and I'd be lying to both of us."
"I know what the arithmetic is."
I got up and got the wine that was open in the fridge and two glasses, and poured them at the counter with my back to him.
"I'm not over it."
"I know."
"I might be irritable about this for a year."
"Okay."
"I mean it. I'm going to be looking at you at Easter. I'm going to be watching, and I'm not proud of that, but that's where I am."
"Watch," he said. "Please watch."
"That's a strange thing to ask for."
"It's what I've got." He turned the glass a half turn on the table without drinking any of it. "I'm not going to be able to say one thing in the next six months that's worth anything. So watch."
I brought the glasses over and didn't sit back down across from him. I stood beside his chair. After a second he put his arm around the backs of my legs and leaned his head against my hip, which is a thing he used to do when Rachel was small and we were both too tired to talk in sentences.
I put my hand in his hair. It's mostly gray at the sides now and thinner at the crown, and I've watched that happen year by year and never once minded it.
We stayed like that a while. The dishwasher, which we hadn't started, did not start itself, and neither of us got up.
"Your hands were cold," I said. "In the archway. Before."
He turned his head against my hip. "How do you know that."
"Because you put them in your pockets, and you never do that in a warm house."
Later, upstairs, with the lamp off, he came across the bed and found me without either of us saying anything about it, and it wasn't the frantic kind or the fixing kind.
Slow and quiet, and at one point he stopped and put his forehead against my collarbone and just breathed a while, and I held the back of his neck.
Afterward I lay with my head on his arm, which had gone numb, which he wasn't going to mention.
"What if she does it again," I said.
Outside, a car went by too fast.
"Easter's at the house. Same room. She'll have the cards."
"Probably."
"So what if she does it again."
He shifted so I could hear his voice come through his chest.
"Then I move again," he said.