Chapter 13
LOIS
Denise came the second Saturday in November for the outgrown clothes I still hadn't sorted, which I'd told her I would sort, and which I had not sorted.
"You always say that and then you sort them," she said.
"I didn't sort them."
She stopped in the front hall with her keys in her hand.
"Huh," she said.
Then she stayed. I made coffee and she said, "Okay, show me Maine. I've seen four pictures and two of them are of a rock."
Bud hadn't asked, on purpose, so three weeks of Maine had been sitting in me with nowhere to go. I got my phone.
"Ferry. The four o'clock out of Rockland. I stood outside the whole way and my hands got so cold I couldn't work my own phone. There was a man on board with a dog in a life jacket."
"Why does the dog need a life jacket?"
"Because the dog can't read the schedule," I said, and Denise laughed so hard she put her head down on the table.
"Here." I swiped. "That's the kitchen. Two ovens, in a rental. One of them doesn't work, but there are two." Yellow cabinets, a window over the sink with the water a road away. "It isn't a nice house. There's a stain on the ceiling shaped like Michigan and the second bedroom smells like a boat."
"How's the color? The leaves."
I swiped, and Denise stopped talking.
"Oh," she said.
"That's the road in from the ferry landing." I have thirty-one pictures of that road on that phone and there is no way to take a picture of it. "The maples go red like something's wrong with them, and the road's got a foot of leaves on it nobody's cleared, because why would you, more are coming."
"You sound like a person."
"What does that mean?"
"You sound like a person on a vacation," Denise said. "Not like you're reporting."
I hadn't heard it, and she was right.
"We cooked. That's mostly what we did. Carleen can't cook, she'll put a hot pepper in anything to prove she's an adult. We made a chowder on the Tuesday that took four hours and was terrible."
"Terrible?"
"Two hot peppers, and then she stood over the pot daring me to say something about it." I shook my head. "We ate it anyway with a pound of crackers and half a bottle of wine, and somewhere in there she started doing Aunt Deb — the voice, the way Deb says well, I heard?—"
Denise groaned.
"—and I laughed until my face hurt. Honey, I mean it hurt. There's a muscle right here." I put my hand on my cheek. "I hadn't used it."
"What'd you do all day, though? Like actually. Seven days."
"That's the thing I keep trying to explain to myself.
" I picked the phone up and then put it down without looking at it.
"We sat in the car in the rain at a place she likes with a pier on it and talked about Mother's hands for forty minutes.
I bought a sweater I did not need for sixty-eight dollars off a woman who wanted to tell me about her divorce, and I let her, because I had nowhere to be. "
"You? Sixty-eight dollars on a sweater?"
"I'm wearing it. I've worn it four days this week."
Denise looked at my sleeve like she'd never seen it.
"One afternoon Carleen got us properly lost. No signal, forty minutes on a road that just quit at a gate.
Twenty years ago that would have taken nine years off my life, thinking about who needed me.
I sat in the passenger seat of my sister's filthy car and thought, well, we'll turn around.
" I turned the phone over on the table. "Nobody was waiting on me.
There's a strange part, and I want to tell you, because you're the only one I'd tell it to and I don't want it to sound worse than it is. "
"Okay."
"I called home once."
"Once?"
"That was the arrangement. I asked for one call. He did not call me one single time otherwise. Not a text, nothing. So Wednesday afternoon I sat on the back step of that house and called my own kitchen."
"And?"
"He picked up on the second ring and said, nothing's wrong, I'm leading with that.
Then he asked me what I'd eaten." My mouth was doing something I couldn't help.
"Six minutes about nothing. He didn't say one word about the pantry or the truck or the twenty-fourth, and I know for a fact that on that exact day he had a truck down and no backup.
He told me weeks later, and only because I asked him straight out. "
Denise sat back in her chair.
"So he ate it," she said.
"He ate it."
"Huh."
"So I hung up and sat there on that step and thought, the house is fine."
I picked up my coffee. It had gone cold and I didn't do anything about it.
"Then I went inside, into the bathroom, shut the door, and cried for about fifteen minutes."
Denise's face changed.
"Not bad crying," I said. "Or — no. It was bad. It was bad and it wasn't a bad thing, and I don't have a better way to put it than that."
"Because he was fine without you?"
"Because they all were." I set the cup down. "The house was fine. You were fine, your basement was dry. And the warehouse day did twelve more boxes than we've ever done, and Marisol never once called me. Nineteen years I've run that day, and the first year I'm not there it goes better."
"Mom."
"I'm not fishing. It really did go better, because your father brought six men and a box truck." I laughed and it came out wrong. "So there I am on a Wednesday in a rental bathroom in Maine, fifty-five years old, finding out I'm sparable."
"That's not?—"
"It's exactly what it is, honey." I put my hand flat on the table. "Sparable is what I've wanted my whole adult life. It's the only thing I've been asking for. And it came down on me in that bathroom like somebody had died."
Denise didn't say anything.
"Because if they can spare me, then they could always have spared me. Which means all of it was a choice. Every Tuesday. Every October. Nobody did, and I made sure nobody had to."
"Did Aunt Carleen?—"
"She was in the kitchen when I came out.
She'd heard me, she's got ears like a bat.
" I smiled, I couldn't help that either.
"She didn't say one word about it. She handed me a dish towel, put me on the wet side of the sink, and started in about her neighbor's leaf-blower situation, which is apparently a whole legal matter. She's known me fifty-five years."
Denise looked at the phone lying on the table between us.
"Book next year's," she said. "Before you lose the nerve. Because you will. You'll get to March and the drive'll be short a coordinator, or I'll have a thing, or Dad's plant will do a shutdown, and you'll look at it and think next year. I know that because I watched you do it three times."
"You knew about the postcards?"
"Mom, I've been going in that recipe box since I was nine."
She got up and rinsed both our cups without being asked, which is not a thing that happens in my kitchen. She left at four with two of the three bags, because the third one she made me admit I was keeping for no reason.
Bud came in at five, stamping, with a bag of light bulbs he'd bought himself, a week after the conversation about light bulbs, which is exactly right and which I did not comment on.
He set them on the counter, then looked at the fridge the way he does now, checking the two notes like a man reading a gauge on his way past.
"I showed her Maine," I said. "You never asked about Maine."
He stopped with his hand on the bag.
"Figured you'd tell me when it was yours to tell," he said. "Wasn't mine to ask about. That was the whole—" He made a shape with his hand. "That was the thing."
He stood in my kitchen holding a four-pack of sixty-watt bulbs, fifty-eight years old, waiting to find out whether he'd said the wrong thing.
"Ask me now," I said.
So he did. We sat at that table with the light going and I told him for two hours. The ferry, the dog in the life jacket, the two ovens, the terrible chowder, the road in with the leaves nobody had cleared.
I didn't tell him about the bathroom. That one belongs to Carleen and Denise and me.
I told him about the Wednesday call, though. I told him he'd been six minutes of nothing on a back step and it was the best phone call of my life, and he put his hand over his eyes for a second.
We ate late and neither of us cleaned up. At some point I got up to turn the overhead off, and he was standing there in the doorway. I put my hand flat on his chest, which I have not done in a very long time in a way that meant anything.
He didn't say a thing. He put his hand over mine.
We went up. I left the dishes in the sink, the two notes on the door, one light on in the kitchen, and I didn't go back down for any of it.