Chapter 9
LOIS
The Saturday before I left we ran the volunteer kickoff, which is the day the fall drive stops being a spreadsheet and turns into a room full of people.
The paper here is a weekly and half of it is legal notices, and by seven-thirty there were forty-one people in that cold warehouse on a Saturday in October, because it was the day.
That got a sound out of the room. The low general noise a room makes when a piece of furniture gets moved.
"Maine," somebody said.
"Maine. My sister's."
Then, because forty-one people were looking at me and I have never known how to hold still under that, I picked up the clipboard and started the day.
We went eight hours. Around noon Marisol came and stood beside me.
"How do you know when a zone's about to back up."
"Watch the floor between them. Not the people, the floor. Floor goes empty, somebody upstream stopped. Floor gets full, somebody downstream stopped."
She actually wrote it down.
"You've taught me everything in four weeks," she said. "Like, everything. Which is amazing, but it also feels like—" She hunted for it. "Like somebody clearing out a desk."
"It's not that. It's that I've been holding it in one place for nineteen years, and one place is a stupid place to hold something three hundred families need.
" I said it lighter than it felt. "If I got hit by a truck on Route 9 tomorrow, this drive would get run out of a cardboard box by whoever cried the least at the funeral.
That's not a system. That's a hostage situation with a nice woman in the middle. "
She laughed, and then she stopped laughing, because she'd looked at my face.
Bud came at two.
I hadn't asked him to. The plant does a pallet donation every year, cases of water mostly, and every year some kid out of shipping drops it at the dock and leaves. That year my husband got out of the truck.
He didn't come find me. He went to the dock, got the door, and started moving cases where the Hendricks boy pointed, taking direction off a nineteen-year-old for twenty minutes without a word.
Del Ostrander caught him at the tailgate. Del's the board chair, seventy-one, and he says everything about four percent louder than necessary on account of the hearing.
I was ten feet away with my back turned, going over the afternoon count with Barb.
"Bud! You're driving now?"
"Just today."
"Well, that's a lot of water." I heard the slap on the shoulder. "How's it feel to have half a county's fall sitting in your kitchen?"
"How's that?"
"Your wife." Del laughed. "County runs on about six people. Six. I've been on boards here since 1988, and I can name them on one hand and have a finger left over." A pause. "And you married one of them."
I did not turn around. I stood there with a pen in my hand and a count sheet in front of me and Barb saying something about creamed corn that I didn't hear one word of.
Behind me my husband said, "Yeah."
Not a joke. Not don't tell her. Not the thing men say, which is don't I know it, and which sounds like agreement but is a complaint with a smile on it.
Just yeah, in a voice I didn't recognize.
He left around three. He didn't come say goodbye.
I got home at seven-forty. He'd made eggs, badly, and left mine covered on the stove.
Then I called my sister.
Carleen answers the phone like she's been sitting by it, which she hasn't, she's just built at that speed.
"Are you packed. Don't lie to me."
"There are four things in the bag."
"I knew it." I could hear her doing something with dishes. "Lois. I have not had you in my house since Mother's funeral, and that doesn't count, that was a hallway with a casserole in it. Thirteen years I've been asking."
"Three postcards," I said. "I've got them. They're in the recipe box between Pot Roast and Pierogi."
Carleen went quiet, which is not a thing she does.
"You kept them."
"I kept all three."
"Well." Her voice took a bend. "Then I'm going to be careful what I say next, because I've had a lot of years to work up a speech about your husband, and now that you're actually coming I find I don't want to give it."
"Give some of it."
"No. You'd defend him, and I'm not spending the night on the phone listening to that." Dishes again. "Just tell me what changed."
"I did the arithmetic," I said. "Thirty-one Octobers. Zero weeks."
"Ah."
"And there's a thing I want to say to you that I'm not going to say to him. Not this year, maybe not ever, because right now it'd be a rope he could climb out on."
"Okay."
I looked at the blank strip of refrigerator door.
"I built it," I said.
"Lois."
"Let me get through it. He took the weeks.
That's his, entirely, and the way he handled the week Mother died will be a thing between us until one of us dies.
" I turned the pen over on the table. "But the reason he could take them is I built a house that couldn't spare me.
The notes on the refrigerator. Freezer meals with the dates on them.
Saying second shelf before anybody finished asking. "
"That's called being competent," Carleen said. "They gave you a job doing it."
"It's called pre-staging my own indispensability, and I did it because it felt good.
Every time somebody stood in the middle of that kitchen and said Mom, where's the—, I got something out of it.
It was proof I was necessary, and I never had to ask anybody for the proof, I could manufacture it in an afternoon.
" My voice had gone dry. "So he built the myth about the phone.
Fine. I built the myth that nothing in this house keeps without me.
Two people, two myths, thirty-two years, and one of us got Octobers. "
The line hummed.
"Are you going to say all that to him?"
"No."
"Good."
"Why good?"
"Because he'd take it," Carleen said. "That's why. He'd take it and put it in his pocket, and someday when he's tired he'd take it back out. Men keep those."
I laughed. It was awful and it was true.
"Twenty-four hours," she said. "Ferry's at four. Do not bring food."
"I wasn't going to bring food."
"Lois."
"I was going to bring a little food."
Sunday morning I woke at four-fifty out of habit and lay there in the dark going down the list.
The twenty-fourth. Marisol was ready and I knew she was ready, and that did not stop me at five in the morning composing a text I could send her from the airport that would only clarify the thing about the pasta.
Denise's basement, dry now, with saturated ground under it and rain in the ten-day.
Bud, who did not know which bill wasn't on autopay. The cranberry sauce.
And under all of it, thrumming, the one that isn't a reason and that I could not talk myself out of. What if it goes fine.
I got up at six and drank one cup of coffee standing at the window while it came light over the neighbor's roof.
At nine-twenty we drove to the lot behind the hardware store. He put my bag in the bay, and I stood there and waited for the handoff.
I braced for it, standing in that parking lot in my travel coat, because I knew exactly what was coming.
He'd tell me not to worry. He'd tell me he'd call Wednesday.
He'd hand me the week to carry from a day's drive away, wrapped up nice, with a bow on it, the way it has been handed to me at every door in my adult life.
My husband looked at me a second.
"Have a good time," he said.
Nothing else. Not one word about the house, the drive, the twenty-fourth, the mail, the filter, the trash. Four words, like a man at a bus stop, and then his hands went back in his coat pockets.
My hands were empty. I stood there another second to be sure of it.
Then I kissed the corner of his mouth and got on.
The seat was cold. We pulled out and turned onto Route 9, past the Marathon where he called me from nine years ago, then past the turn for our road.
I looked at the seat back in front of me. I looked out the far window at the fields on the other side, cut already, the color of a paper bag.
I did not look at the house.