Chapter 10
BUD
The house did not fall apart. Nothing burned, nothing flooded, and nobody came home to find a man sitting in the dark eating cereal out of the box.
It ran at about sixty percent, is all, and I couldn't have told you where the other forty went until I was standing in the hole it left.
I got back from the shuttle lot at ten past ten Sunday morning. Eight hours later I worked out I hadn't eaten anything since a piece of toast.
I opened the refrigerator and stood there. Then I got the notepad off the counter and wrote down what was in it. Turkey. Carrots. Eggs, four. Cheese. Half a jar of something. Underneath I wrote what I could make out of that, which came to two things.
Twenty minutes, that took me. She does it in the doorway of the refrigerator in about four seconds, standing up, while she's talking to somebody about something else.
Monday I brought the mail in, all of it.
Tuesday I put the trash out, correctly, on Tuesday.
Wednesday I changed the furnace filter, and the old one came out the color of a hunting jacket.
It had been in there since spring, so it was on her list and not on mine.
In thirty years in that house I have changed maybe four of them.
Thursday, Father Miles met me at the dock with his hands out, fifteen parishioners behind him and four hundred and some cans of cranberry sauce.
"We had a wonderful response," he said.
"You sure did."
"Now, I know it's a lot of the one item?—"
"It's terrific. Back left is where we're putting it."
I did not say one word about January. I put four hundred cans of cranberry sauce in the back left corner of that warehouse, smiling the whole time, and while I was doing it I understood I'd just performed a piece of skilled labor that has no name and takes fifteen years to learn, and that my wife does eight or ten times a season without mentioning it at supper.
Friday I nearly blew it.
Marisol called me at four with a real problem. The truck we borrow off the co-op for the twenty-fourth, the one with the lift gate, had a bad alternator, and the co-op's guy said Monday at the earliest.
"I've called everybody on the list," she said. "I've called people not on the list."
"Okay."
"There's a rental in Findlay but it's four eighty for the day plus fuel, and that's forty families' worth of dry goods?—"
"Give me an hour."
I hung up and sat down at the table with her clipboard, and my hand went for the phone before my head caught up. I got as far as typing it.
Quick question — the truck for Sat has a bad alternator, do you have a backup you've used before or should we
Thumb over the button.
A day's drive away, Friday afternoon in Maine, my wife on somebody's dock or standing in somebody's kitchen, and a little green bubble comes up on her phone saying quick question.
There's no such thing as a quick question.
It's a whole afternoon of somebody else's head, rented for free.
She'd have answered it in ninety seconds and then thought about that truck for four hours, wondering whether I'd handled it, and around eight at night she'd have sent a follow-up she'd hate herself for.
That was the deal. No calls except the one she asks for.
I read it twice and deleted it.
Then I called my daughter.
"Denise. Who do we know with a box truck."
"Uh." I could hear her kitchen. "The furniture place on Sandusky Street. Kenny's dad's place. I know that because I waited a week for a couch."
"That's a real answer."
"I have those sometimes."
I called Kenny's dad at five-fifteen on a Friday and got the truck for Saturday, free, in exchange for an afternoon of my time in his back room in November, where he's got a compressor that's been kicking the breaker since March.
Then I sat there looking at the clipboard, and I thought: the plant.
We've got a box truck. We've got six guys on second shift maintenance who owe me nothing and would come anyway, because that's how a maintenance crew works.
Half of them have been through that pantry line at some point in the last four years too, which is a thing you know about people in a county this size and never say.
I made nine phone calls Friday night.
Saturday I pulled into the warehouse lot at six-forty in the plant's box truck, Kowalczyk behind me with four guys in his, Ruiz behind him.
I had my toolbag on the seat, because that overhead door has been eating motors for six years and somebody had finally mentioned it to a maintenance supervisor.
Marisol came out on the dock with her clipboard and a coffee and stopped dead.
"That's a truck."
"That's two trucks. Third one's coming at eight, it's a furniture truck, it's beige, don't panic." I got out. "Six of us. We're yours for the day."
"Mine."
"You're running it. So you're running us. Where do you want us."
She stood on that dock in the cold with her mouth slightly open.
"I don't—" she said. "Okay. Give me one minute."
She took the minute. Looked at her clipboard, then at the floor, then out at the four zones taped in blue.
"Zone one," she said. "All six of you, north wall, dry goods. Not the pallet jack, the Hendricks boy has the pallet jack, he's the only one insured. You're feeding zone two and you do not get ahead of them, because then Barb starts stacking pasta on the bottom and we lose the floor."
Kowalczyk looked at me. I looked back at him with nothing on my face.
"Yes ma'am," he said.
Del Ostrander showed up at nine with donuts, saw the plant's name on the door of that box truck, and came at me across the floor like a man serving a subpoena.
"Now what is this."
"Volunteering."
"You didn't clear this with the board."
"I cleared it with her." I nodded at Marisol, twenty feet off, running traffic with two fingers. "She's running it. That's the whole chain."
Del looked at me a while.
"You want to tell me what changed?"
Fifteen people in earshot, and I knew it, and I decided I didn't care.
"My wife has carried this county's October for nineteen years," I said. "And mine for thirty-one. This one's on me."
Del put the donuts down on the folding table and walked off. Three separate times that day I saw him tell somebody something, and every one of them looked over at me. I sorted cans.
We went until twenty past six. Around three the Hendricks boy asked me if I was Mrs. Topp's husband, and I said I was, and he said, "Okay, that tracks," and went off with the pallet jack before I could ask what he meant by it.
Three hundred and twelve family boxes, twelve more than the target. And one bad stretch around two when the whole floor jammed because intake stalled. I stood there watching the empty concrete between zone two and zone three, and I understood exactly what she'd meant about the floor.
I fixed the overhead door motor at four while they were loading. Limit switch. Fourteen dollars. Six years of eating fifteen-hundred-dollar motors.
There's a card taped to the wall by that button in Lois's handwriting. Run it up 18", let it back down 4", then all the way. The tape's gone amber at the corners. Forty people have been performing that workaround for six years like a superstition, and not one of them ever asked why.
I took the card down and put it in my shirt pocket. Then I put it back up, because I wanted her to be the one who took it down.
Marisol found me on the ladder.
"Is that fixed fixed?"
"That's fixed fixed."
"Huh," she said, in a voice I recognized, and went back to her floor.
Saturday night the house was standing. Trash out, mail in, filter changed, one plate and one fork in the rack.
Then I went for the yellow stickies. They've lived in the drawer under the toaster for probably twenty years and I had to open three drawers to find them.
The right side of that refrigerator door had been blank since the first week of September. Six weeks. You could still see the ghost of where the old ones sat, a shade darker than the rest of the white.
I wrote: She's back Sunday. Don't call unless it's blood or fire.
Stuck it up there in the ghost and went to bed.