Chapter 12
LOIS
We went through my five things the first Saturday in November, at the kitchen table, with the leaves down and the yard needing one more pass. There was a grocery list on the same table, and he had a receipt for a serpentine belt under his elbow the whole time.
"Okay," I said. "Five things."
"You've got a list."
"I've had a list since September. I've been waiting to find out if there was anybody to hand it to."
He didn't take that personally, which is new.
"One. The week. Every year. It's not a reward and it's not a make-up, and it doesn't stop existing the year money's tight or the year somebody's sick. If somebody's sick we move it. We don't cancel it. Same as camp. Anything you'd do to camp you can do to my week. Anything you wouldn't, you don't."
"That's a hard rule."
"It's the easiest rule in the world," I said. "You've been living under it thirty-one years. You just weren't the one it applied to." I wrote it down as I said it. "Destinations are mine. You get an opinion on when, because there's two of us and a calendar. That's all."
"Some years I might want to come," he said.
I looked up.
"Not—" He put a hand up. "Not to your week. I'm not doing that again. I mean what Carleen said, the last weekend, if you ever wanted?—"
"Sometimes. By invitation. Mine, in writing, if you want to be funny about it."
He wrote something on the back of the serpentine belt receipt. I didn't ask.
"Two." I tapped the pen. "The lodge number goes on the refrigerator, in my handwriting, where the notes used to be. Not because I'm going to call it. I've never called it once and I may never call it. It goes up because a thing that's written down isn't a myth anymore."
He got up right then, in the middle of the conversation, and took the card out of his wallet.
He'd pulled it off the corkboard. He'd been carrying it since the first morning of camp, behind his insurance card — the actual index card, blue marker, gone the color of weak tea, with the little box drawn around the last four digits for no reason anybody remembers.
He put it on the table in front of me.
"Write it out," he said. "That one's staying in my wallet."
"Why."
"Because I want to be carrying it."
So I copied ten digits onto a fresh yellow sticky in my own hand, and got up, and put it on the right-hand side of the refrigerator door, in the ghost, next to his.
Two notes on that door. That's all there's been on it since.
"Three." I sat back down. "The pre-staging is done."
"Meaning."
"Meaning it doesn't come back." I got the pad squared in front of me and then made myself leave it crooked, and put the pen down so he'd look at me.
"No freezer meals with dates on them. No note on the foil pan telling you the oven temperature.
No pills on the sill. No second shelf before you've finished asking. "
"Lois, some of that's just?—"
"Some of it's just love, I know that." I folded my hands.
"I can't tell them apart anymore. Which ones I did because I love you, which ones I did because they made me necessary.
They're all in the same box, thirty-two years of them, and I'm not sorting them one at a time at fifty-five.
And in ten years, if something wants to come back on its own — if I make you a pan of something on a Tuesday for no reason, with no note on it, and I don't tell you I did it — then we'll know that one was love. "
He sat with that a while, turning the serpentine belt receipt over with one finger.
"That's going to make things worse around here," he said.
"It's already made things worse. Did you know we're out of light bulbs? There hasn't been a spare in this house since the middle of October, and neither of us has bought any. We've been going up and down that hall in the dark for three weeks like a couple of idiots."
He started laughing, and then I did.
"Two adults," he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist.
"Two adults, and worse. That's the deal. Two adults running it badly instead of one adult running it beautifully and disappearing into it."
"I'll get bulbs."
"I know you will. The point is I'm not going to remind you."
"What if I forget."
"Then we sit in the dark until one of us gets tired of it." I shrugged. "It's a worse house with two adults in it instead of one adult and a guest, and I'll take it. I've done thirty-two years of the better house and it about ate me."
He looked at the table a second.
"Okay," he said.
I picked the pen back up. "Four."
"Four," he said, and something went out of his face, because he'd known since I said five things what four was going to be.
"My mother," I said.
He put both hands flat on the table.
And then my husband, who has said maybe nine unprompted sentences about a feeling in three decades, said it plain, in daylight, with a grocery list and a receipt for a serpentine belt on the table between us.
"Nine years ago your mother died on the Tuesday of camp week," he said.
"You did every hour of it by yourself. The coroner, Gerald, the phone tree, the flowers.
You buried her on the Friday with a hole beside you where your husband should have been standing.
And on the Sunday I called you from a gas station lot to ask if you wanted anything. "
The furnace was going. I kept my eyes on him.
"There was a phone the whole time. I knew where it was. If you'd called it, Dutch would have answered, and I'd have been in the driveway before midnight. That's the true sentence. I've never said it, and now I've said it."
I waited.
Here's where he tells me he'll never forgive himself. Here's where I get up and fill him a glass of water.
He didn't do it. He sat there with his hands flat on the table and let it be hers. Mine. Whoever's it was.
"Okay," I said.
"That's the whole truth," he said. "I'm not bringing it up to get credit for it, and I'm not bringing it up to feel bad in front of you."
"Good."
"I can't undo it."
"No."
"All right."
I looked down at my list. My writing had gone crooked at the bottom, the way it does.
"Five," I said, and had to clear my throat.
"Five is yours. Five is the one you have to write.
" I pushed the pad across the table and set the pen on top of it.
"The clause. About January, about the pen.
I want it in your handwriting, in the drawer with the calendars, so that in six years, when we're both tired and it's a bad winter, there's a piece of paper in this house with your hand on it. "
He looked at the pad a long time.
Then he picked up the pen and wrote slowly, all capitals, the way he writes, the way a man writes on a work order.
EVERY JANUARY. LOIS'S DATES FIRST. I ASK. INK. THEN CAMP.
He held the pad flat with his left hand the way he does, and added a line underneath.
THE NUMBER STAYS ON THE FRIDGE.
Then he signed it, which I hadn't asked for, and which about took the legs out from under me. He dated it too, because he dates everything, because he's been filling out maintenance logs since 1988.
I went out Wednesday and bought the calendars.
That's early. Nobody buys next year's calendars in the first half of November. The rack at the drugstore wasn't even up yet, and the girl at the register had to find a box in the back that hadn't been opened.
Then I went two aisles over and stood in front of the pens longer than a woman ought to stand in front of pens. I bought blue and I bought green. His and mine. I won't pretend it was a small thing, because I stood there in a drugstore at four in the afternoon and picked out a color for my own year.
I brought them home and put them in the drawer under the phone. Calendar first, flat. Green pen on top of it. Then the blue.
Then I shut the drawer and went and started supper, which was fine, and which nobody had a note about.