The Week He Chose Over Me (Marriage In Crisis #30)

Chapter 1

LOIS

The gear came down from the rafters on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, same as it has every year since Reagan's second term.

Bud went up the ladder in his socks and I held the rails, because he's fifty-eight now, and because that third rung has had a hairline split in it since Clete was in high school.

Neither of us has done one thing about it.

"Coming down," he said.

"I've got you."

The duffel first. Then the wool bag, soft with age, still smelling like cedar chips and thirty falls of woodsmoke.

Boot box. The orange vest, faded down to the color of a traffic cone somebody left out in the weather.

He passed all of it to me one-armed without looking, the way you do when you've done a thing four hundred times.

Then he came back down two rungs for the cooler, because the cooler always comes last, and he carries it with both arms wrapped around it like a sleeping child.

"Still cold in there." He knocked on the lid with a knuckle. "Thing'll outlive us both."

"It'll outlive the house."

He grinned at me over the top of it, sawdust in his eyebrows, happy as a boy on the last day of school. I married him for that grin. Thirty-two years on, it still got me, in a cold garage, at nine in the morning.

He set the cooler down and started laying the week out on the floor.

Bud doesn't pack. He stages. He clears the concrete from the deep freeze to the workbench, sweeps it even though he swept it in August, then puts everything down in rows like a man setting a table for company.

Base layers. Wool. Socks in their own line, rolled, seven pairs plus two, because the two are for the year it rains sideways.

Knife, whetstone, the little brass compass his father gave him that has never in its life found anything.

Then he stands back with his hands on his hips and looks at it, and he gets a face on him like a man seeing the ocean. I've watched him do it from the kitchen window with my coffee going cold in my hand.

He wiped the cooler lid with his sleeve, licked his thumb, went after a spot that wasn't coming off.

"Harv's bringing the generator this year. Dutch says the good one, not the one that ate itself in '22."

"Mm."

"You remember the one that ate itself?"

"You told me about it on the phone." I heard it as I said it. "No. You told me when you got home. You called from the gas station."

It went right past him, and I hadn't meant anything by it yet. Thirty-two years, you correct the record without thinking about it. It's bookkeeping.

"Right," he said, and moved the whetstone half an inch to the left so it lined up with the knife.

I went in for my list.

The pantry drive starts the day after Labor Day whether I'm ready or not, and this fall it's three hundred families, up from two-forty last year, which was up from one-ninety the year before.

There is no way to read that column as good news.

I run the county food pantry. They pay me for half of it, which everybody at the board meetings finds funny, and I laugh every time, because the other half doesn't have a name I want to say out loud.

I had the warehouse schedule clipped under the spring on my clipboard on the kitchen table. Six Saturdays, two truck days. And a new volunteer coordinator starting Tuesday, a woman named Marisol who had already emailed me twice with good questions, so I knew she'd last.

My phone buzzed. Denise.

mom does the chili freeze ok or does the dairy break

No dairy in mine, I wrote. Freezes fine. Flat in the bag, don't stand it up.

ur a genius

I'm a person who has frozen chili.

She's twenty-nine and lives twelve minutes away, in a house she and Tyler bought for what the basement was worth, basically, because the rest of it is fine and the basement is a coin flip every spring.

I poured Bud a cup and carried it out to him, and I couldn't have told you when I made it.

He'd gotten as far as the cooler.

"You want the venison chili in there or the turkey?"

It wasn't a question that needed an answer. He was thinking out loud in my direction.

"Venison's better for the drive up. Turkey I'll do for the back half, it holds."

"Back half," he said, pleased. "Listen to her."

I set the coffee on the workbench, got down on the concrete with the freezer bags and the marker, and started building the week, because somebody had to actually do it.

That's how it goes. He stages. I do the cooler.

Nine quarts of chili in flat bags, dated.

Two loaves of the bread he likes from the place on Route 9, sliced, bagged inside another bag because the lodge has a mouse situation nobody will address.

Coffee measured into filters and stapled shut, one per morning, because Dutch can't measure coffee and Bud won't say so to his face.

The good sausage. Eggs in the plastic carrier with the latch.

Butter, hot sauce — his, the one nobody else touches — aspirin, and then the other aspirin, the coated kind, for the day after they do the tree stands.

Paper towel wedged down both sides so nothing shifts on the highway.

Soap wrapped in a washcloth, because there is never soap at that camp.

Nail clippers, because six years ago he came home with a thumbnail split to the bed.

A sleeve of the peanut butter crackers, which I started buying the year his blood sugar scared us. He has never once mentioned them. He eats them.

Ninety minutes if nobody calls. My hands know the order, down to the aspirin somewhere he'll find it without having to dig, because he will not dig.

The pantry phone went twice, so call it two hours, and when I finally sat back my knees had printed the concrete. I wrote the last date on the last bag and pressed the air out of it.

"Cooler's set," I said.

"Attagirl." He didn't look up from the case. "Chili?"

"Venison first half, turkey second."

"There she is."

He was a man in his own garage on a Saturday with his wife across the concrete from him, humming along to something.

He still puts his hand on the small of my back when he squeezes past me in the kitchen.

He still calls from the plant when the weather turns to ask if I got in all right.

In thirty-two years he has never once raised his voice at me in front of another person.

I went in to start supper and needed my mother's cornbread, which lives in the recipe box, which is a tin the size of a brick with a hinge that catches.

That box is a disaster. Recipes in three handwritings, plus clippings, plus a punch card for a sandwich place that closed.

The postcard was between Pot Roast and Pierogi, where it lives. A dock, water going pewter at the far end, birch behind it with the leaves gone the color of a struck match, and AUTUMN IN MAINE across the top in white letters.

I didn't need to turn it over. I turned it over.

Lo — the ferry runs till the end of the month and the kitchen has two ovens, which I will never need but I like knowing. Bring nothing. Next fall? — C

Two years ago. My sister's handwriting slants uphill like she's hurrying to get to the end of the sentence, and she is, she's been hurrying since 1974.

There are three of those cards in that box. I could have put my hand on the other two without moving my feet.

I turned the card back over. The dock. The birch.

Thirteen years ago it was harvest overtime at the plant, the whole month, mandatory. Six years ago it was his mother's estate, the lawyer, two drives to Sandusky. Two years ago I don't have a reason. Two years ago I just didn't go.

Then the arithmetic came up out of the floor at me the way a cramp does.

Thirty-one Octobers.

I said it out loud to nobody in my own kitchen, in the voice I use for counting green beans off a pallet. "Thirty-one."

The number didn't sound like an accusation. It sounded like an inventory, which is worse, because an inventory is just what's on the shelf.

Then I did the other side of the column.

How many weeks.

Not vacations. Not the four days in Gatlinburg for our twentieth — that was ours, we took it together.

Not the two nights at Denise's when Clete had the flu.

A week. Seven days where the house wasn't mine to run, where nobody knew where I was, where I couldn't be reached because I'd decided not to be.

The oven beeped and I didn't move toward it. I had my mother's card in one hand, her pencil marks on the back where she'd cut the sugar, and my sister's ocean in the other, and the number was zero.

It stayed zero no matter how many times I ran it.