Chapter 5
LOIS
The folder is manila and soft at the corners now, the way paper goes when it's handled but not often. It lives in the file box in the closet in the back bedroom, third from the front, between HOUSE-INSURANCE and MOM-MEDICARE.
FUNERAL, it says on the tab, in Sharpie, in capitals. I remember writing it. I remember thinking that's an ugly word to have to put on a tab.
I got it out the Wednesday before he left.
He'd been strange all week, by which I mean he'd been trying. He set the coffee pot Tuesday night and got the ratio wrong. He fixed the third rung on the ladder without being asked, ten years after he started meaning to, and I understood exactly what that was and let him have it.
Wednesday he came in at four-fifty. I had the folder on the kitchen table with a glass of water on either side of it, mine and his, which may be the most married thing I have ever done in the middle of a fight.
"Sit down a minute."
He sat. I put the folder in front of him and he read the tab.
"Lois."
"You don't have to say anything. I'm not going to talk at you. I'm going to sit here while you read it, and then we're done with it."
"Do I have to?—"
"You don't have to do anything. I'd like you to."
He put both hands flat on the table either side of it, the way he does before he opens up a piece of equipment he isn't sure about. Then he opened it.
First page is the legal pad sheet with the phone tree. Forty-one names in two columns, my handwriting, check marks down the side. Some of the checks are wobbly. Near the bottom there's a wet mark that warped the paper. It could be anything. It isn't anything. It is exactly what it looks like.
It's a list of names. You can read it in nine seconds. He sat with it about two minutes, running a finger down the second column and back up it, the way you'd check a count.
"Deb's got no check," he said. "Aunt Deb."
"She saw it in the paper Saturday and called me at six-thirty in the morning to ask if it was true." I turned my glass a quarter turn. "Out of the whole week, that's the one I'd take back."
He turned the page.
Funeral home contract next. Gerald's carbon copy, blue ink, itemized. Casket, opening and closing, register book, death certificate times twelve. There's a line on there for LIMOUSINE and I wrote NO across it hard enough to go through to the second sheet.
"Why no limousine," he said. "There's a line here, you wrote across it."
"Four hundred dollars to drive a mile and a half. I was going to be sitting in it alone with our kids."
He put his thumb on the corner of the page and didn't turn it right away. He's a slow reader with paperwork, and it used to drive me half out of my mind at tax time.
"Who drove you."
"Denise drove me Wednesday. I drove myself Thursday, and I made a loop of it so I wouldn't have to cross town twice." I turned the page for him.
Then the invoices. The one from the woman who did the lunch in the fellowship hall has a note on it in my hand, sixty covers, add ten, because I catered my own mother's funeral lunch by telephone on the Thursday morning. I got the count wrong, and fourteen people ate standing up.
Then the certificates. Nine are left out of twelve. You never need twelve, and nobody tells you that.
He stopped on the florist invoice.
"You got the yellow ones."
"She hated lilies."
"I know she hated lilies."
"Everybody sent lilies anyway. Nine arrangements of them in that church, and I stood next to the whole row for ninety minutes thanking people for sending my mother a flower she couldn't stand."
He put his hand flat on the invoice like he was holding it down in a wind.
"You never told me any of this."
"You never asked me a question about that week that wasn't how are you holding up."
He didn't argue. Put a document in front of my husband and he stops defending himself.
Then the last page, which is the one I put in on purpose, which is why the folder exists in this shape at all.
Same legal pad. Days of that week across the top, Monday through Sunday, my handwriting, hours blocked underneath. It's a schedule. Tuesday 6:40, home called. Tuesday 7:10, arrived. Tuesday 9:00, coroner. Wednesday 10:00, Gerald. Wednesday 2:00, tree. It runs all the way to Sunday.
Under Sunday, in the same pen and the same steady hand, because I was still in the mode and couldn't get out of it, I'd written: 4:15 — Bud, gas station. Casserole 350.
He got to that line and I watched him get to it.
He didn't make a sound and his face didn't do anything for the benefit of the room. He just stopped, and stayed stopped. After a while he pushed the folder about two inches away from himself, which I think was the most he could manage.
"Why do you have this." It came out rough.
"Because I made it that week. Tuesday afternoon, because I was drowning, and blocking hours is the only way I know how to swim." I kept my voice level, the pantry voice. "I block them and then I work the blocks. I did the same thing Monday for the fall drive. It's the same paper."
"That's—" He stopped.
"I'm not showing it to you to hurt you. I've had nine years to hurt you with it and I never took one of them. I'm showing you because on Monday you told me there was no signal, and you were right, there wasn't, and you need to see what was happening down here while there wasn't."
He nodded without looking up.
"Okay." I closed the folder and put my hand flat on the front of it. "That's the end of that part. I won't read it to you again and I won't bring it up at Christmas."
"You could."
"I know I could. I'm telling you I won't."
He wiped his mouth with his hand.
"Now I'm going to ask you the same question I asked you in the garage," I said, "and I want you to try it a different way, because I think I asked it wrong."
"Ask it."
"Not: name a week I've had. There isn't one, we did that." I moved the water glass so there was nothing between us. "Name a week I could have. This fall. Tell me what it looks like — where I am, what day I leave, who covers what. Build it out loud, the way you'd build a shutdown at the plant."
He opened his mouth.
Then I watched a man of considerable competence try to construct a week that didn't have me in it.
"You'd go—" He stopped and started again. "Okay. You'd want your sister's."
"Good. That's right."
"So you fly. No — you'd drive, you hate that connection through Philly." He was talking himself through it now, hands starting to move on the table. "You'd drive up, that's what, fourteen hours, two days really. So you'd go?—"
And I saw the exact moment the wheel caught.
"Not the first week of October," he said.
"No."
"Because of camp."
"Because of camp."
"And not the last week, because of the—" His hand stalled in the air. "The drive. Your truck day. That's the?—"
"Second truck day is the twenty-fourth."
"Right." He put the hand down. "So it's tight."
"It's not tight, Bud. It's tight for me. Say the rest of that sentence out loud and listen to it."
He didn't.
"It's tight," I said, "because there's exactly one week in the fall that can't move, and it isn't mine.
" I said it as gently as I have said anything in my life.
"You've never once had to check my calendar to build your week.
Not one time in thirty-one years. October's yours the way a birthday is yours.
It doesn't move, and nobody asks it to. Everything else in this family gets planned around a fixed object, and the object is your week, and I built half of that myself and I'll say so. "
"You didn't build?—"
"I absolutely did, and I'll get to it." I sat back. "But look at what just happened. You tried to build me a week, and the first move you made, the very first one, was to take October off the table."
He didn't argue. He sat there with his big hands open on my mother's funeral folder. The refrigerator hummed. Out the window the neighbor's kid was doing something loud with a scooter.
"I want to ask you something," he said. "And I want a straight answer."
"Okay."
"Is this—" He worked at it. "Are we in trouble. You and me. Is that what this is."
I thought about lying to make it easier. I've done that before.
"I don't know yet," I said. "I know I'm not leaving you.
I'm not doing this the way Janet did hers, with the lawyer and the storage unit and the whole business.
That's not what this is." I looked at him.
"But I'm not going back to being a woman with no week.
That part's finished. It finished Monday, and I don't have a way to unfinish it. "
He nodded slowly.
"Okay," he said. "So tell me what you want and I'll?—"
"Maine's booked."
His head came up.
"Third week of October. I leave Sunday the eighteenth and I'm back the following Sunday.
Seven nights at my sister's — near my sister's, I took a place a road back from the water, because Carleen's kitchen table is the size of a hubcap.
" My voice came out steadier than I expected.
"I booked it Saturday night after you went to bed. I used my card."
He went very still.
"Your card."
"My card."
"Lois, we have a joint?—"
"I know what we have." And there was the first crack in the level voice, and I let it come.
"I know exactly what we have, Bud, I balance it.
I used my card because I didn't want one single thing about this week coming through you.
Not the money, not the timing, not the permission.
I didn't want to ask you. I wanted to have already done it. "
The clock over the stove ticked. That clock has ticked since 1998.
And my husband — I will never fully understand this man — put his hand flat on my mother's folder, looked at the table, and said, "Okay."
Not okay, but. Not we should talk about the money.
Just okay. Small, and about four years too late, and the first thing all September that landed anywhere near where it needed to.
"Okay," I said back.
He left for camp four days later. I didn't pack anything.