Chapter 4
BUD
Then she gave me the number and I couldn't put it down.
Thirty-one. Zero.
I ran it all week at work. That's what I do. A thing gets loose in me and I run it while my hands are busy, and my hands are always busy, which is the mercy of a maintenance job. Tuesday I rebuilt a gearbox on line three with thirty-one and zero going around in my head like a bad bearing.
Here's where it kept landing. She never asked.
I sat in that four days and built myself a nice little house out of it. If she'd asked, I'd have said go. Nobody stopped her. I even got a warm feeling off it, like I was generous, like the door had been standing open the whole time and she just never walked through.
That's the version I brought to the kitchen Sunday.
She had her drive stuff out, three stacks and the clipboard, writing with one hand while she moved paper with the other. The pot was cold. Six days of a cold pot, and I'd started stopping at the Marathon on Route 9 like a man with no house to go home to.
"So I've been thinking," I said.
"Mm."
"Come with me."
She kept writing. Then she stopped, laid the pen down flat, and looked up.
"To camp." She capped the pen, which is what she does right before she says something she's already decided.
"The wives come up now. Middle weekend. They come Friday and stay through Sunday, Cheryl does a whole meal on the Saturday, there's a fire, they play cards." I was talking fast, which I don't do. "You'd love it up there in October. Lois, you have never seen that lake in October."
"No," she said. "I haven't."
"So come. That's it. Come with me. Problem solved."
She sat back.
It wasn't mad. Mad I'd have known what to do with. It was the face she makes when somebody hands the pantry a case of expired formula — kind on the outside, doing hard arithmetic underneath, working out how much to say.
"Bud. You just offered me a guest pass to your holy week."
"It's not?—"
"It's exactly that. You've got one week a year nobody's allowed to touch.
I told you I don't have any, and your solution is I can come stand in yours.
" She wasn't cutting me. She said it slow.
"Friday to Sunday. Cheryl's meal. I'd be there forty-eight hours, and I'd cook, and by nine o'clock Friday night I'd know where everything in that kitchen was, because that's what I do.
I walk into a room and I learn where everything is so nobody else has to. "
"Nobody'd ask you to cook."
"Nobody's ever had to ask me to cook."
I thought about Cheryl coming up that road Friday afternoon with four casseroles in the back seat.
I didn't have anything for that.
"Cheryl does the Saturday," I said.
"Cheryl does the Saturday." She nodded slow, like I'd just made her point for her, which I had.
"Who does the Friday? Who does the Sunday breakfast before everybody drives home?
Who's up there at four on the Friday getting the heat going so the bunkroom isn't thirty-eight degrees when the wives walk in? "
I opened my mouth to tell her and found out I didn't know.
"I don't want a bunk at your camp," she said. "I want a week where nobody knows the number."
"What number."
"Any of them. Mine, yours, the pantry's." She picked the pen up, then put it down again, which for her is a man throwing something. "A week where the phone doesn't have me in it. Where nothing runs through me. You get that every October. Four hours north, no signal, and the whole world just waits."
"That's not—" And I quit, because I'd been about to say that's not what it's like, and I couldn't finish it.
That's exactly what it's like. That's the entire reason for it.
I have driven north thirty-one years for the specific feeling of the last bar dropping off the phone somewhere past the county line.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. Then where. Tell me where you want to go and we'll go."
"We."
"Fine. You. You want a week, take a week. Take two. Have I ever once told you no?"
She put the cap back on the pen a second time. It was already capped.
She looked at me a long while.
"No," she said. "You've never told me no. That's going to be a thing I think about for a while."
Then she went back to her columns, and I stood in my own kitchen with my hands going useless at my sides.
I went out to the garage.
Cooler still sitting there with the lid up. Six days. The cheese had gone soft on the concrete beside it, so I picked it up and put it in the trash, which was the first thing I'd done about any of it.
Camp was less than two weeks off. I counted it twice on my fingers against the calendar in my head, and in thirty-one years I have never once had to do that. Camp is the fixed thing. You don't count toward it any more than you count toward Sunday.
Then I got down on that floor, which at fifty-eight is a decision and not a movement, and looked in the cooler.
Nine flat bags of chili, frozen hard, laid down like shingles. Every one of them dated in her hand. Not the day she made it. The day I'd eat it. Mon. Mon. Tues. Two on the Wednesday, because Wednesday's the long day, because we do the stands Wednesday and come back at dark half dead.
Then a stack of coffee filters, each one measured out and folded shut with a staple. Seven of them. I sat back on my heels and counted the staples like an idiot.
Then I went in the house for the rest of it, with the list I'd made in my head. It turned out to be four items long.
Eggs I had, and that was the last easy one.
Bread: she'd said the place on Route 9, so I drove down there and sat in the lot.
Closed Sundays. There's a sign in that window with a clock face on it that a man could have read any time in the last twenty years.
I settled it at the Kroger, where they had four kinds and none of them were the kind, and I stood in front of that wall long enough that a kid in an apron asked if I was finding everything.
Turkey chili: deep freeze, second drawer, green bag. She'd said that in the middle of the worst thing she ever said to me and I hadn't known I'd caught it. Right where she said. Four quarts, dated.
Soap I didn't know about. Thirty-one years of soap in that cooler and I didn't know. I stood in the hall closet trying to work out what she wrapped it in, because I half remembered a washcloth the way you half remember a smell.
The coated aspirin I never found. I took the regular. Turns out there are two kinds, and I have been swallowing the second kind every Thursday of camp week since 2019 without once asking where it came from.
Hot sauce: two bottles in that cabinet, near identical, one of them mine. I took the one on the left. It is not the one on the left.
Crackers I found. Peanut butter. I stood there in the pantry cabinet with the light on and the sleeve in my hand and thought, she buys these. Nobody else in this house eats them. Six years of putting them in a cooler for a man who never mentioned it.
The filters I tried to do myself. There is no line on a coffee filter.
I did four and they all came out different.
Then I couldn't find the stapler, and the drawer where a stapler ought to be had three flashlights in it, all of them working, which is a thing about my wife I had never once considered.
Stapler was in the office upstairs, in the drawer with the tape and the good scissors. Of course it was. Everything in that house is exactly where a sane person would put it, and I have been living in it like a man in a motel.
By the end I had the cooler most of the way full and no confidence in any of it. Two hours and ten minutes, and I got maybe seventy percent.
I stood there looking at what I'd made of a job she does on her knees on a Saturday with the phone ringing at her. So I filed it where it fit. She should have showed me.
Carried it out to the truck, set it in the bed, told myself I'd square it away before Saturday. Then I went in and watched most of a ballgame next to my wife, and neither of us said a word. I went up to bed thinking the worst of it was behind us.