Chapter 3
LOIS
Tuesday morning I didn't set the pot.
I've filled that pot the night before since Denise was in a crib. Water in, grounds in, switch ready for five a.m. Nobody in this house has ever said one word about it out loud, and that includes me.
I'd gone to bed Monday with my back to him and a hot wire running from my collarbone to my hip, and when the alarm went I got up and looked at the coffee maker.
Not he'll learn. Not let him see. Just no, the way your hand comes off a hot pan.
I was at the warehouse by six-thirty. Marisol showed up fifteen minutes early, which I told her was the correct amount of early, and by nine we had the six Saturdays on the whiteboard in magnets.
She asked where the intake forms lived and I said the gray cabinet. Then I said, actually, come here, and I walked her through the whole system top to bottom. Every cabinet, every binder, every contact, the trick with the walk-in door when the humidity's up.
"You're giving me a lot on day one," she said.
"I'm giving you all of it on day one."
It took me until the drive home to notice what I was doing, and to feel a little sick about the shape of it, and to keep right on doing it.
The house wobbled Wednesday.
Bud got in at four-fifty and came through the garage — around the open cooler, I assume, though I didn't watch — and stood in the doorway with his lunch bag in his hand.
He set the bag on the counter and waited. Not rudely. Not smugly. He stood in his own kitchen at four-fifty in the afternoon waiting for the day to be handed to him, the way it's been handed to him at four-fifty for thirty-two years, and he had no idea he was doing it.
I kept working.
"You eat?" he said finally.
"Not yet."
"You want me to—" He stopped, because there were three ways to end that sentence and every one of them required knowing what was in the house.
He opened the refrigerator and stood in the light of it a while.
There was plenty of food in there. Ground turkey, carrots, eggs, half a rotisserie chicken from Sunday. Six meals, easy, and my husband looked into it like a man looking down a well.
What wasn't in there was the meal. The container marked LUNCH-THURS. The foil pan with the note taped on top — 350, 40 min, take the foil off at 30. The infrastructure.
He shut the door and made a sandwich standing at the sink and ate it in about ninety seconds, the way he has eaten standing up since he was nineteen years old at that plant.
Then he said, "Where's the — never mind. The pills. Fish oil."
"I don't know."
He turned around and looked at me.
"I genuinely don't," I said, and it was true, and it was the strangest sentence I'd said in ten years.
"I've been setting them out on the sill by the sink for you every morning since the doctor said.
So I don't know where the bottle lives, Bud, because it doesn't live anywhere. It lives in my hand at six a.m."
He found them in the cabinet over the stove, behind the vitamins.
It took him four minutes. I timed it, which I'm not proud of.
Four minutes is nothing. It's a man opening doors in his own house, which he is entitled to do, and I sat there with the spreadsheet in front of me listening to every one of those doors and not saying a word.
By Friday the notes had been gone long enough to be visible.
There's a strip of the refrigerator door, right side, hinge side, maybe eight inches wide, that has had paper on it every day since Denise was in third grade.
Dentist. Take the roast out. Call your sister back.
Truck day, don't park behind the garage.
Clete's flight. Trash night is Tuesday now, not Wednesday.
It was blank. Clean white, with a faint ghost where thirty years of adhesive had gone a shade darker than the rest of the door.
He looked at it a lot that week. He never said a word about it.
Denise came Saturday afternoon with the kids' outgrown clothes for the pantry closet, three garbage bags of them, and dumped them in the front hall like a woman making a delivery to a warehouse she happened to be raised in.
Then she went to the refrigerator and opened it and stood there. It's genetic, apparently. Straight down the line.
"Mom, where's the—" She caught herself and laughed. "Never mind. Weird question. Where's anything? I know where things are in my own house, but the second I walk in here my brain goes offline and waits for you."
I had my hand on the tap. I turned the water off.
"Where's what, honey."
"The good foil. Tyler's doing ribs."
"I have no idea."
She blinked. "What?"
"I do. It's under the toaster, behind the bags. But I want to say the other thing first." I dried my hands. "Ask your father."
She laughed again, then saw I wasn't going to.
"Dad's at Lowe's."
"Ask him when he gets back."
She was looking at me the way you look at somebody whose face has changed a little. Denise isn't slow. She runs a dental office with nine employees.
"Are you two okay," she said.
"We're talking about something."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I've got today." I got the foil out from under the toaster, because I'm not a monster, and put it in her hands.
"He lives here too, Denise. Thirty-two years.
He ought to know where the foil is, and he doesn't, and it happened because I'm fast. Somebody stands in front of a cabinet looking confused for four seconds and I say second shelf before they've finished looking.
I've done it thousands of times and I called it being efficient. "
She had the foil box against her chest like a schoolbook.
"You're not efficient?"
"Oh, I'm extremely efficient." It came out flat, the pantry voice. "I built a house that can't spare me. Then I stood in it for thirty-two years waiting to be spared."
She didn't say anything for a second. Then she came over and put her forehead on my shoulder, the way she's done since she was four, which takes about a foot more effort than it used to.
"Is this about deer camp," she said into my sleeve.
"It's about a lot of Octobers."
"I've always kind of hated deer camp."
"Don't hate deer camp." I had my hand on the back of her head. "Deer camp isn't the problem. Deer camp is the only thing in this family that's ever been protected."
She left around four. Bud came back from Lowe's at four-thirty with a bag of drywall anchors he did not need.
I sat up after he went to bed. The furnace kicked on for the first time since April, the way it always does the first cool night in September, and the way I always mean to mention to him and never do.
I got the tin box down, took the postcard out, and looked up the ferry.
It runs to the end of October, a morning boat and a four o'clock. The rental Carleen had sent me two years back was long gone, but there were others, small ones, one road off the water. One had a kitchen in the photographs with two ovens in it, which I doubted, and which I decided to believe.
Peak color, the site said. Generally the third week of October. Nine days after he gets home. Seven nights.
I sat there with my finger on the trackpad and my heart going like I was doing something illegal.
I didn't book it that minute. I sat another twenty minutes running it — the truck day is the eighteenth, no, we moved that, Marisol can take the eighteenth, the church drop is the weekend before, Denise has never needed me for anything she couldn't do herself.
Then I stopped, because I could hear what I was doing. I was building a case. Fifty-five years old at my own kitchen table, building a case for a week off from a job with no employer.
I closed the laptop. Then I opened it again and typed my card number in from memory, because I know it from memory, because I'm the one who buys everything.
The confirmation came through at 10:52.
I didn't tell him, not that night. I went up and lay down next to my husband in the dark and listened to him breathe, and a day's drive away my name sat on a reservation, spelled right, with my card behind it. I said the dates over in my head until I went under.