Chapter 8
BUD
The phone rang at Spruce Run at eight twenty-six on the Friday night.
Three grown men in a room with a woodstove and a card game, and a phone rings, and all three of us sat there like it was a fire alarm going off in a church.
Then Dutch got up and answered it with his mouth full.
"Spruce Run." Pause. "Yeah, he is." He held it out across the room. "Bud. Your daughter."
I have never crossed a room faster in my life.
She was crying, and Denise does not cry on the phone, and she got maybe a dozen words out — water, wall, east side, Mamaw's boxes — before I cut in.
"I'm coming. Here's what you do till I get there.
" I had my hand on the corkboard, my face about eight inches from Dutch's dad's picture.
"Boxes up on the dryer first, water second.
Kill the power to that side at the panel before you stand in it.
Before, Denise, not after. Tell Tyler. Four hours. I'll be there by one."
I hung up and I already had my keys.
Harv was in the doorway holding my coat out, not saying anything, the way you hand a man a wrench.
"Leave the rest of it," Dutch said. "I'll run it down to you next week."
"The cooler?—"
"Bud. Go."
It rained the whole way, not hard, just steady, that October rain that comes with no wind in it. South of Clare the phone found signal and lit up with three hours of nothing. I got to Denise's at about a quarter past one.
Every light in the house was on. Lois's car sat in the drive with the trunk open and rain coming into it, so she'd gotten there in a hurry, and hurrying is not like her.
I came down those basement stairs and here's what I found.
My wife on her knees in an inch and a half of water in her good coat, sorting a box of her mother's papers onto a piece of plywood she'd laid across two sawhorses.
My daughter at the far wall with a push broom, pushing water at a drain that wasn't taking it.
Tyler with the shop vac, bailing the ocean.
Nobody had a plan. They had three, which is worse.
Lois looked up. She looked at me maybe two seconds, then went back to the box, and I understood I was not going to get anything for showing up, and that this was correct.
"Tyler. Kill that vac a minute. Power's off on that side?"
"Yeah. Denise did it."
"Good." I set my bag on the stairs. "That drain's clogged.
It's not the water table, it's the drain.
Denise, the yellow coil in the garage, the snake — go find it.
And quit sweeping, you're just making waves.
Get towels and dam the doorway to the carpet side, that's the only thing down here worth saving and it's got about ten minutes.
" I took the vac off Tyler. "I've got this. "
After that everybody worked, and nobody talked much for two hours.
I had the drain open at ten of three. Wad of dryer lint packed like felt, twenty years of it, and once it cleared that basement drank the whole thing down in nine minutes.
Then I went out in the rain with a flashlight and found what I figured I'd find. Downspout on the east corner dumping straight against the foundation, because somebody had knocked the extension off with a lawnmower years back and nobody ever picked it up.
I put it on. Twenty seconds. Free.
The whole disaster — the boxes, my daughter crying into a phone in the woods — was a downspout somebody ran over.
I stood out there getting rained on, thinking about how there'd never once been a man in the yard with a flashlight to find it, because the man was four hours north with no signal.
Around four we sat in Denise's kitchen with the heat cranked, drinking coffee Tyler made badly.
"I still can't believe you drove down," Denise said. "Dad. It's camp."
"Yeah."
"You've never—" She stopped, because she's her mother's daughter and she saw where the sentence went.
"Nope," I said.
Nobody said anything after that. Lois had both hands around a mug with her sleeves soaked to the elbow, watching me over the top of it with a look I couldn't read, and I've had a lot of practice reading her.
I drove home behind her at a quarter to five. Sun coming up gray. My hands smelled like drain.
Here's what I did not say.
I did not say I came home early. Not to her, not to Denise, not to the guys at the plant Monday when Kowalczyk asked how camp was and I said fine. Say it out loud — I came home early — and the flood turns into a thing about me. A withdrawal out of an account with my name on it.
So I let it be that I came home when the phone rang, which is all it was.
The week after camp was the week before Maine.
She had the trip laid out on the kitchen table Sunday night. Printouts, ferry schedule, the confirmation with the address, and a map of my sister-in-law's road she'd drawn herself, because Carleen's directions are famously worthless.
I sat down across from her and opened my mouth to ask what time she was leaving.
Then I shut it, because underneath the words what I was about to ask was what time are you leaving so I can start planning around it, and that's the same sentence I've been saying since 1994 with different words laid over the top.
"That's yours," I said instead. "I'm not touching it. Tell me what you want me to know and don't tell me anything else."
She looked up, and something went across her face.
"Sunday the eighteenth. Shuttle at nine-forty from the lot behind the hardware."
"Okay."
"That's it?"
"That's yours," I said again, and got up for the water pitcher so I'd have somewhere to look.
She sat back. "Then here's mine."
She set the clipboard on the table between us.
Aluminum, hinged lid, box underneath, dented in one corner.
The Saturday schedule. The volunteer roster with little marks beside the phone numbers, dots and slashes, a code she never explained and I never asked about, because by day three I'd worked out it meant this one shows up or this one says yes and then doesn't. Church contacts.
The school man who only answers texts. A sheet she called the intake flow, which is the order a family moves through the room so nobody has to say out loud in front of anybody else what they need.
"Okay," she said. "Fall drive. Four things happen while I'm gone."
"Hang on." I got up for a legal pad. She waited while I sat back down, and she looked at that legal pad a second and didn't say one word about it.
"One. Thursday the twenty-second the church brings the cranberry sauce. There'll be too much. Do not tell Father Miles there's too much. Take it, smile, put it in the back on the left, we'll move it in January."
"Take it and shut up. Got it."
"Two. Saturday the twenty-fourth is the warehouse day. Three hundred families, everything that's come in since Labor Day, sorted and boxed and palletized in one day. Nineteen years running."
"Who runs it."
"I run it." Flat. "I've run it nineteen times. This year Marisol runs it. She's ready and she doesn't know she's ready."
"What do you need me to do."
She stopped, and I could watch her deciding whether to hand me something small. Something safe. Something I couldn't break.
"I don't know yet," she said, and I took that as honest. "Three. Denise will call you about Thanksgiving, because she always does in October. There isn't an answer yet, so say that."
"Four?"
"Four is the house."
"The house is fine."
"The house is not fine, Bud." She put the pen down.
"Trash goes out Tuesday, it changed from Wednesday in 2021.
The furnace filters are on the shelf above the paint.
The mail comes in every day, because there's a bill in it that isn't on autopay, and I'm not telling you which one, because that way you'll bring in the mail every day.
And there's nothing in the freezer. I stopped. "
"I know you stopped."
"I'm not starting again while I pack, either." Her chin came up a little. "I'm not cooking eight meals into containers with dates on them so that I can leave. Do that and I haven't gone anywhere. I've just gone somewhere with a longer commute."
"Lois."
"What."
"Don't cook a thing. I mean it. If I come home Sunday and there's a foil pan in that oven with a note on it, I'm going to have to sit down on the floor."
She laughed. First one in five weeks, one syllable, out before she could stop it.
"All right," she said.
So that's what we did every night that week. An hour at the table, her clipboard and my legal pad. I have not studied that hard for anything since the licensing exam in 1991.
I got plenty of it wrong. Misread her marks and built a phone list where nine of the fourteen were the slashes, and when I read it back to her Thursday she said, very carefully, "Those are the ones who say yes," and I had to do it over.
Wednesday night I put the pen down. "How do you hold all this."
"I don't hold it. It's a system."
"It's in your handwriting on one clipboard."
She looked at the clipboard like she'd never seen it before.
"Huh," she said.
Sunday morning I carried her one bag out to the truck and we stood by the tailgate in the lot behind the hardware store.
I had a whole speech. Two days building it on line three, and it was a good one. Trash night was in it. Furnace filter. Don't you worry about a thing. I've got the twenty-fourth handled, which I did not have handled. And a part where I'd call her Wednesday to tell her how the church thing went.
Then the shuttle came around the corner, and I heard the whole speech at once from the outside, the way you hear a machine from ten feet off and know a bearing's going.
Every line of it was me handing her something to carry. Don't worry is a thing you say so somebody spends the week not worrying, and that's work. I'll call you Wednesday is an appointment on her calendar in Maine.
The whole speech was a cooler I was asking her to pack.
So I put her bag in the bay and said, "Have a good time."
That was all of it. I didn't say one word about how anything would be managed, and I have never in my life worked harder at four syllables.
I stayed in that lot until the shuttle pulled out onto Route 9. Then I drove home to a house with nothing in the freezer.