Chapter 11
LOIS
Igot in at six-forty Sunday evening with Maine still on me — salt in my hair, my sister's woodstove in the sweater, and a paper bag of the little cinnamon donuts they sell at the ferry landing, which I'd bought for nobody.
He'd left the porch light on. Thirty-two years I have come up those steps in the dark feeling for the keyhole with my thumb.
The kitchen was clean. Not my clean. There was a ring on the table where something had sat, the dish towel was folded in half instead of in thirds, and the salt was on the wrong side of the stove.
One sticky note on the refrigerator door.
She's back Sunday. Don't call unless it's blood or fire.
I stood there in my coat and read it about six times.
He came in from the garage.
"You eat?"
"Ferry sandwich at two."
"That's not eating." He went to the stove. "I made a thing. It's a chicken thing. I'll say up front it isn't good, but it's food and it's hot."
It was not good. It was hot.
We ate with my bag still sitting in the hall. He asked how the drive from the airport was. He asked about Carleen's knee. He did not ask me one single question about the house, and he did not offer me a report on it either.
Around eight I got up to put my plate in the sink, and standing there with the water running I said the thing I'd been carrying since September.
"Bud. Why that camp."
"What?"
"You told me why you kept the phone a secret.
Reachable means leavable. I've thought about that for five weeks and I believe you.
" I turned the tap off and faced him. "But that's a reason to stay unreachable.
It isn't a reason to go. Thirty-one years, four hours north, the same six days, the same bunk, the same jokes.
Nobody protects a thing that hard because they like deer. "
He sat there.
"I've got Maine in my hair and I'm not tired," I said. "I'd like the rest of it, please."
He got up, took the bottle down from over the stove, poured an inch he didn't drink, and turned the glass a quarter turn with two fingers.
"You met my old man twice," he said.
"Three times. The wedding, Thanksgiving that year, then the hospital."
"You didn't meet him. You met a man in a good chair being polite for two hours."
"All right."
"Fifty-one weeks out of the year that man was a storm.
" He said it to the table. "Not the way you're picturing.
He never hit me. I want that said, because people always go there and it wasn't that.
It was — you'd come in from school and the whole house would be holding its breath, waiting to find out what he was that day.
Some days he was a joke machine. Some days he'd sit in the front room with the lights off, and if you walked through he'd say a thing about you that you'd carry for years. "
"Like what."
"Doesn't matter."
"Bud."
He turned the glass again.
"Like when I made the team in tenth grade," he said. "He said, huh. They must be thin this year."
The furnace kicked on. Neither of us moved.
"And then the first week of October he'd get in the truck and drive north to my grandfather's camp. And Lois, I'll swear to you on anything you want, that man did not take one drink from the minute he crossed the county line until the minute he came back."
"Not one."
"Not one. Seven days. I don't know why. Maybe it was his father being up there. Maybe he'd have been ashamed in front of Dutch's dad. I've got no theory that holds up."
"How old were you the first time he took you."
"Nine."
"Nine."
"Nine years old, and I got in that truck and drove north with a man I was scared of.
Two hours in he started talking to me. Just talking.
Asking me things. What I thought about stuff.
That week he taught me to sharpen a knife.
Taught me to sit still. Thursday I fell in the creek up to my chest and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on a rock, and he wasn't laughing at me. You understand the difference?"
"Yes."
"And Sunday we drove home." He picked the glass up finally, looked at it, put it down again without drinking. "About a mile past the bridge, coming south, I watched it come back into his face. Like weather. I sat in that truck at nine years old and watched my father come back."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't have been a lid on it.
"So that's the camp," he said. "That's what's up there. Seven days a year with a man I loved who only existed above the county line, and who's been dead nineteen years."
"You've been going to visit him."
"Yeah."
"Thirty-one years."
"Yeah." His jaw worked. "I know how it sounds.
Dutch would laugh at me. And it isn't like I get up there and sit in the woods thinking about my dad, I don't, half the time I'm thinking about the generator.
But the going, Lois. The drive. The last bar dropping off.
Standing in that room at eight in the morning with the stove going.
That's the only place on this earth I've ever felt like the good version of everything was still available. "
"And every year you came back."
"Every year I came back."
"A mile past the bridge," I said. "Coming south."
He looked up at me then, and I watched my husband understand something in front of me, and it was not a comfortable thing to be in a room with.
"Yeah," he said.
I sat down.
"There's another part," I said. "You're not going to like it."
"Say it."
"Somebody paid for those visits."
He didn't answer.
"Thirty-one Octobers. Four hours up, four hours back, six days in between.
Somebody's been keeping the lights on down here the whole time you were up there getting seven days a year with your father.
" I kept it level, because I've got one register for the worst things and this is it.
"The coolers. The Tuesdays. The furnace in '07. Clete's wrist. My mother."
"Lois—"
"I'm not finished. Don't answer yet."
"I'm listening."
"You've been buying something very expensive for thirty-one years, and I've been paying for it, and nobody ever told me what it was.
That's the whole thing, Bud. Not the week.
Not even the phone." My hands were flat on the table.
"You could have told me any year. You could have said, Lois, my father was a nightmare, and one week a year he wasn't, and I need to go stand in that place.
I'd have packed that cooler with my whole heart. I'd have driven you up there myself."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I do now." He put a hand over his mouth and took it away again.
"I didn't tell you because saying it out loud makes it — you say it out loud and it's a grown man with a dead drunk for a father driving north to feel nine years old.
That's a sad little story. I'd rather be the guy with the tradition. "
"Well, you were the guy with the tradition," I said. "Congratulations. It cost me thirty-one Octobers and the week I buried my mother."
He took it with his eyes on the table and didn't say one word in his own defense, and I let the quiet run because I needed to see whether he could hear me without reaching for an excuse.
He could.
"I'm not forgiving you tonight," I said.
"I didn't ask."
"I want to say it anyway, because I know how this house works.
We get to the end of a hard night and then we're nice to each other, and by morning it's a thing that happened once.
" I made myself look at him. "I'm not doing that.
The week my mother died is still between us.
Some Octobers that date is going to come around on the calendar and I'll be no good to anybody for a day, and you're going to have to know which day it is without me telling you. "
"The third," he said.
I stopped.
"Tuesday of camp week that year was October third," he said. "I've known that since I was standing in the driveway on the Sunday. I've never once said it out loud."
Something went through me and I didn't have a name for it. It wasn't relief.
"Say it again."
"October third."
"Okay."
I got up, took the second glass down, poured myself an inch I didn't want either.
"I saw your sticky note," I said. "Did you want to call me?"
"Friday. Four o'clock. Marisol had the truck go down, she'd tried everybody, I had the text typed out with my thumb on it." He shook his head. "Quick question."
"There's no such thing as a quick question."
"That's exactly what I thought." He laughed once, ugly, at himself. "Thirty-two years, and that's the biggest thing I've ever figured out on my own."
"I want to tell you what you did," I said.
"You don't have to."
"I do, because you'll get it wrong on your own. You'll think it was the flood, or the box truck. It was four words in a parking lot."
He frowned.
"Have a good time. That's what you said. Nothing else. Not don't worry, not I'll call you Wednesday, not I've got the twenty-fourth. You put my bag in the bay and you said four words and you let me get on a bus with empty hands."
"I nearly said all of it," he said. "The whole speech. I had it built."
"I know you did. I was standing there braced for it."
"Braced," he said.
"Every door I've ever walked out of in this marriage, somebody's handed me something on the way through." I turned my glass. "You handed me nothing, and it's the best thing anybody's given me in twenty years, which I understand is a sentence that ought to make us both sad."
He didn't explain it away. He sat there with both hands around a glass he still hadn't drunk.
"So here's what I want," I said. "And I want it said plainly tonight, while Maine's still on me. A week from now it'll be November, we'll be reasonable people again, and reasonable people let things slide."
"Okay."
"Thank you for the whole map north." I looked right at him. "That's real. I've wanted it for thirty-one years, I've got it now, and I'm not going to pretend it's nothing. It cost you something to say out loud and I know it did."
"Lois."
"Now the other half." I set the glass down. "January, we do the calendars. Both of them, at this table. And mine inks first."
"Yours inks first."
"Before camp. Before you call Dutch, before the plant's shutdown schedule comes out, before anything.
In January you come to me with the pen and you ask me my dates, and you write mine down, and then you build your October around it, same as I've built thirty-one around yours.
" My voice went a little, which I hated.
"And it has to be your hand on the pen. Not mine.
I'm not putting it on the calendar and then telling you about it afterward. You ask."
"I ask," he said.
"Say it back to me."
He didn't roll his eyes and he didn't smile at me. He sat up straight in his kitchen chair at half past ten at night, the way a man does at the plant when somebody reads him a lockout procedure and he has to confirm it. Then he gave it back plain, in order, nothing added.
"January, we do the calendars at this table. Your dates first. I ask you, out loud, before I call Dutch and before anything else. I write yours in ink. Then I build October around it."
"Every year."
"Every year."
"Even the year it's inconvenient."
"Especially then," he said. "That's the only year it counts."
I put my hand out across the table and he took it, and that's all we did for a while, two people in their fifties holding hands over a chicken thing that wasn't good.