Chapter 2
LOIS
Ididn't say anything Saturday night. I made the cornbread and we ate it with the chili I'd made too much of on purpose. He had seconds. He said it was better than last year's, which is what he says every year.
I didn't say anything Sunday either. The number wouldn't go. It sat in me like a pill that hadn't gone all the way down.
Labor Day he had off and I had the morning, and by two we were both back in the garage, because the last of the packing happens Labor Day afternoon. Tradition.
He'd tightened the rows overnight, the way he does. Two more pairs of socks. The knife sharpened, wiped, sleeved.
"You know what I keep meaning to do," he said. "Take a picture of this. Every year, same spot. You'd have thirty of them by now."
"Thirty-one." I was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the garage with a dish towel over my shoulder, which is where I have stood for most of my adult life. "You've gone thirty-one times."
"Thirty-one," he agreed, pleased with himself. "Missed the first one."
"You missed the first one for the honeymoon."
"Dutch has never let it go." He laughed. "Thirty-two years, and every October that man says well, look who could make it."
"You've skipped it once in thirty-two years," I said. "For me."
Something in how flat it came out reached him, and he looked up from the whetstone.
"Lois."
"I'm not being ugly. I'm counting. That's all I'm doing.
" I came down the two steps and the concrete was cold through my socks.
"You've had thirty-one weeks. First full week of October, four hours north, every year since 1995, and you have never missed one.
Not the furnace in '07. Not when Clete broke his wrist. Not my mother. "
His hands stopped over the sock roll and stayed stopped.
"I want to ask you something," I said, "and I'd like you to actually do the math with me instead of waiting for me to finish."
"Okay."
"How many weeks have I had."
He put the sock roll down. Then he picked it up again.
He didn't understand the question. His face went where it goes when the plant calls at nine at night about a line down. He tried. There was nothing there.
"You go places," he said carefully. "That conference thing in Columbus."
"Two days. For work. I drove back the second night because the truck came Thursday."
"Denise's, when?—"
"Two nights, with a sick kid on me. I did laundry both nights."
"The beach with your girlfriends. That was?—"
"Two thousand." I didn't have to reach for it. That's the trouble with a short list. "That was a long weekend, Bud. Friday to Sunday. Twenty-six years ago. Denise was three."
My voice stayed where I put it, which is what it does when I'm counting.
He set the whetstone down on the towel and lined it up with the edge, because he can't not. Then he squared the towel to the seam in the concrete.
"Leave it," I said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're straightening."
"So the number," I said. "For me, it's zero. Thirty-one and zero. I'm not making a case here. I'm reading you the column."
"Lois, if you'd wanted to go somewhere?—"
"Say the rest of that."
He didn't. He looked at the socks instead. Seven pairs plus two.
The garage did the thing garages do, where the sound goes out of them.
"That's not—" he started.
"Careful."
He stopped. He knows that word from me. I've used it maybe four times in thirty-two years and every one of them mattered.
He wasn't scrambling to win. He was hunting for the floor. His eyes went over the rows like the answer might be lying in them, thirty years of wool and steel and faded orange. Then he said the thing he thought was true.
"It's one week, Lois. It's the one thing I've got."
"I know it's the one thing you've got." I said it gently, and he heard the gentleness and took it for the end of the conversation, and I watched his shoulders start to come down. "Now name mine."
"Yours what?"
"My one thing. The week that's mine the way October's yours. Name it and I'll drop this and go finish supper."
He couldn't.
He looked at the rows again, the way a man checks a list he's already checked, hunting for an item that was never on it in the first place.
"There's the?—"
"Don't say Gatlinburg."
His mouth closed.
"That was ours, and it was good. Four days, twelve years ago, and you were there. I'm asking about a week where you weren't."
He stood in a garage he'd swept twice with the whole season of his life laid out at his feet, and he couldn't name one week in thirty-two years that had belonged to me. There wasn't one. The quiet went on long enough that we both heard it answer for him.
"Okay," I said.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"That." He gestured at the whole of me standing there in my socks with a dish towel on my shoulder. "That okay."
Then, because he needed somewhere to put his hands, he crouched down and started on the cooler.
I hadn't finished it. Chili, coffee, bread Saturday, then the phone twice, then Sunday ate itself, and the eggs were still in the house.
"Where's the carrier."
"Second shelf."
"Second shelf where."
"In the door. Where it's been since we bought the refrigerator."
"Huh," he said, like I'd told him something about the weather in another state.
He went in and came back with it, opened the cooler, and stood over what I'd built — the flat bags laid down like shingles, the dates in marker. For about a second something moved across him.
Then it went the way it had gone thirty-one times before, and he fit the eggs down the side.
"Nine years ago," I said.
He didn't look up.
"Nine years ago my mother died on the Tuesday."
He stopped with the carrier half in.
"Lois."
"The Tuesday of camp week. I'd like to say the days out loud, because I've never once said them out loud to you, and I've decided I'm done finding that strange.
" I put a hand on the workbench, because my legs had gone unreliable.
"Tuesday morning the home called at six-forty.
I got there at seven-ten and I sat with her till the doctor came.
Then I called the coroner's office, because that's who you call, which I didn't know at six-forty and knew by nine.
"Wednesday I picked the casket. Alone, ten in the morning, in a room with a man named Gerald who kept calling me hon.
Wednesday afternoon I did the phone tree.
Forty-one people. I wrote them on a legal pad so I wouldn't lose my place and I lost my place anyway, and Aunt Deb found out from the newspaper.
"Thursday was the church, the flowers, the lunch count, the death certificates.
Twelve of them, because the bank wants one, the insurance wants one, the pension wants one.
Thursday night Denise slept in my bed on top of the covers with her shoes off, because she was twenty years old and she couldn't stop shaking.
"Friday I buried her. Ten-thirty in the morning, forty people. Denise stood on one side of me. Clete flew in that morning and stood on the other. There was a space between me and Denise where a person should have been, and every soul in that church could see it.
"Saturday I cleaned out her room at the home. Two carloads, because they charge by the day.
"Sunday afternoon, four-fifteen, you called from the gas station lot on Route 9, because that's where the signal comes back, and you said, hey, we're about an hour out, you want anything."
The garage was very quiet.
"I said no thank you," I said. "Then I hung up and put a casserole in the oven, because people had brought casseroles, and I heated one up for you."
He had his hand flat on the cooler lid and he wasn't looking at me. His jaw was working like a man chewing something that wouldn't go down.
Then he said it. Not cruelly — the way he reads out a forecast, the way he has said it every October of our marriage.
"You know there's no signal, Lois."
I stood there.
He wasn't defending himself. I hadn't charged him with anything. He'd handed me the fact the way he'd hand me a wrench I'd asked for.
You know there's no signal.
"I do know that," I said. "You've told me every year. Thirty-one times, in this garage, standing about where you're standing now."
He went back over the six words hunting for what he'd stepped on, the way you go back over a floor looking for the nail.
"Lois, all I meant was?—"
"I know what you meant. That's the trouble." My voice stayed level. "You didn't say that to get out of anything. You said it because it's the truest thing you know about that week."
I looked down at the cooler. Nine quarts with my handwriting on them. Filters stapled shut. Soap in a washcloth. Crackers.
There was a bag of shredded cheese in my left hand. I don't know when I picked it up, but I'd carried it out of my own kitchen for a trip I wasn't taking, in the middle of the worst conversation of my marriage.
I bent down and set it on the concrete beside the cooler.
"Finish it yourself," I said.
He got up off his knees, which takes him two tries now, one hand on the workbench.
"Lois—"
"I'm not being dramatic, I'm telling you where things are. Turkey chili's in the deep freeze, second drawer, green bag, four quarts. Batteries are under the microwave. Rain socks are the gray ones."
I went up the two steps into the kitchen. I didn't slam the door behind me. I've never in my life slammed anything, which I'm beginning to think was a mistake.
Behind me the garage stayed quiet. I ran water into a pot I didn't need, and after a while I heard the radio go off.
He didn't finish the cooler. Not that night, not Tuesday. It sat in the middle of the garage floor with the lid up, the eggs still in the side, one bag of shredded cheese sweating on the concrete beside it. Every time I went out to the deep freeze that week I had to walk around it.
He left the lid up the whole time. I think he expected me to come back out.