Chapter 14
WADE
Hoyt closed the season's books on the fifteenth of September in the scale house with a calculator and the door open, the way he's done it every year since we bought the place.
"Come here," he said.
I came. He turned the pad around — gross for the season side by side with last year's, cost of goods, payroll with Dev's scale hours sitting in a line I'd been looking at every two weeks all summer like a man checking a wound.
"You want to tell me what you see."
"We're up two percent."
"We're up two percent." He tapped the pad with the pen. "Wade. You took eighteen days out of the season. That's the most days you've missed in thirty-one years, all of them stacked into July and August, and we did not lose a dollar. We made money."
"Dev's good on the scale."
"Dev's better than you on the scale, and that's not a joke, he's twenty-six and he doesn't get into an argument about mulch." He put the pen down. "You could have done this years ago, you idiot."
I stood there with the loader going out in the yard. "Yeah."
"That's it? Yeah?"
"You said it in June, too."
"I've been saying it for about ten years, actually, but sure." He picked the pad back up. "I said it when your dad was sick. You remember what you told me?"
"No."
"You said, 'It's the season, Hoyt.'"
I went out and sold stone the rest of the day, but that number sat on me.
Six years of my father. My mother's cataracts, the shingles, the bronchitis.
Gwen's mother's five months, and me down at that yard in July of that year moving mulch and telling myself the truth as I understood it, which was that the season couldn't survive without me.
Two percent up. It cost me nothing. It never would have.
It's like standing in a field where a building used to be.
Twenty years of hours that could have been spent and just — weren't. Nobody got them.
My wife covered the shortfall out of her own life, and I called it the season.
I don't put that down in the basement anymore. Gwen gets to watch me carry it.
My mother came off the walker the second week of September.
She's got a cane now, which she uses in the house and refuses in public.
The PT people say full recovery by November if she keeps at it, and she keeps at it, because she is the most stubborn woman in three counties and she means to run the rummage sale in May.
Benita's down to three mornings a week. Charmaine has done every single one of her alternate Saturdays. Russ is coming for two weeks in October.
And I've kept Tuesdays and Thursdays. The care doesn't require it anymore. I told Gwen about it in the kitchen at the beginning of September, and I said it like a question, because I'm still learning what's mine to just decide.
"They're not shifts now. There's nothing to do. She doesn't need anything."
"So what are they?"
"Visits, I guess."
"Then they're visits," Gwen said. "Congratulations. That's the whole difference, and it only took you fifty-six years."
Tuesdays I go at noon. She has lunch ready, which she is not supposed to make and makes anyway. We eat, and she tells me who at the church has gotten worse, and I tell her nothing about the yard, because she has never in her life cared about the yard. Then I wash her hair at the sink.
Still mine. She's let Benita do it exactly twice, both times when I was in Pennsylvania for the aggregate show, and she complained about it for a week each time.
I've gotten good at it. I know the temperature now without the wrist. Three rinses, towel in thirds.
She still says I get water on the floor, and I still do, and last Tuesday she said, "You've improved," and then, immediately, so it wouldn't count, "Your father would have flooded the room.
" She complains about my parking every single week, and I park in the same spot every single week.
There's no word for it in my family. We don't say things. Last Tuesday she had her eyes closed with her head back over the basin and said, out of nowhere, "You're not slow anymore," and I said, "No," and that was the whole conversation, and I thought about it all the way back to the yard.
Then, the third Sunday in September, at 6:04 in the morning, Gwen's phone lit up.
I was already surfacing — I sleep lighter now — and the screen came on and threw that blue light up onto the ceiling.
MOM cell.
And my wife, who swam five kilometers in open water four weeks ago, who wrote her terms out on one page, who has not answered that phone before eight since the first of August, was upright.
Not reaching for it. Upright. Sitting on the edge of the bed with her feet on the floor and her keys already off the nightstand in her fist, and her eyes weren't open yet.
Twenty-nine years of reflex firing in the dark in about a second and a half, faster than thought, faster than any decision she's ever made about anything.
I got my hand on the phone first. That was the clause — block capitals, bottom of her page, August — and my arm went before I did.
"Mine now," I said. "Go back to sleep or go swim."
She sat a second longer with the keys in her hand. Then she put them down on the nightstand and lay back and said into the pillow, "Swim," and I took the phone out to the hall.
It was the church-sale ledger. Not a fall, not a chest thing, not anything.
My mother had woken at ten to six with her mind on the rummage sale accounts, which she hasn't been able to keep straight since her eyes went in 2019.
She wanted to know what a carryforward was.
There was a line in the book from May that said carryforward, and she couldn't sleep for it.
At six in the morning. On a Sunday.
"Ma."
"Well, I've been awake since four."
"That's not — okay." I went down to the kitchen so my voice wouldn't come up through the floor. "Okay. Tell me what the book says."
I don't know what a carryforward is. I sell mulch. I have a bookkeeper living in my own house and I've never once asked her what any word means.
So I did it badly. I stood at my own counter for thirty-five minutes at six in the morning with a woman reading numbers at me off a page.
I got the flashlight app out and looked up carryforward and read her a definition off a website I did not understand.
She said that made no sense. I said I agreed with her, and we went around it four more times.
And I never once said, "Let me put Gwen on." She was ten feet up and one floor over. She'd have solved it in ninety seconds and gone back to sleep. That sentence was in my mouth twice.
At about twenty of seven my mother said, "Well, you're no help at all," and hung up on me.
I stood in that kitchen and felt terrific. Failing at something at six in the morning all by myself felt better than anything I did in July.
Gwen came down at twenty to seven with her kit over her shoulder, dressed, hair up.
"What was it?"
"Church ledger. A carryforward."
"Oh, for — " She actually laughed. "Did you fix it?"
"No. I made it worse. She said I was no help at all and hung up on me."
"Good," Gwen said, and picked up the thermos, which I'd filled at five-fifteen out of pure habit now, and which I'll keep filling until one of us is dead.
She stopped at the back door with her hand on the frame. "Ask me."
"Ask you what?"
"You've been circling something for about two weeks. You do a thing with the toolbox when you're working up to something. You've reorganized that toolbox three times."
I put my coffee down. "Next summer. I want you to teach me to swim."
She turned around.
"I can swim," I said. "I mean — you know. I can get across a pool, I'd survive. I mean properly. Breathing on both sides. The deep part."
"You're fifty-six."
"Pearl's sixty-one."
She stood in the doorway with the light coming up behind her and looked at me, and I've known that face thirty years and I couldn't read it.
"It's cold," she said. "The lake is cold, it's dark at five, and you'll hate it for about six weeks."
"Okay."
"You'll have to let somebody see you be terrible at something. In front of people. Al's going to make you do the drill where you put your face in and take it out ten times, and Deb is going to watch you do it."
"Okay."
"And the deep part," she said, "goes down."
"Yeah. I know it does."
She looked at me a while longer. "June. After the qualifier. I'm not teaching you anything during a taper."
Then she went out and the screen door banged, and I heard the truck go down the drive at ten to seven on a Sunday morning in September. I stood in my own kitchen with a phone in my hand that was going to ring again. It's mine now. It rings on my side of the bed.