Chapter 14
BUD
November in that house ran worse. Some of it permanently.
We went three weeks in a dark hallway before I bought bulbs.
Then I bought the wrong dish soap, and she used it and never said a word, and I only worked it out because I saw her wince at the smell over the sink one night.
So that's what's under there now, forever probably, because neither one of us is going to be the one who brings it up.
We missed a dentist appointment, both of us, same day. Nobody wrote it down. Nobody's written anything down since the middle of September.
Then a bill came back with a late fee on it. Fourteen dollars, and it wasn't even the one she wouldn't name, it was the water. I paid it and didn't mention it. Then two days later I did mention it, because not mentioning it was the old thing wearing a new shirt.
"Fourteen dollars," she said, without looking up.
"Yep. That's on me."
"Okay," she said, and went back to her book.
Fourteen dollars and nobody got a speech about it. I sat down across from her with the sports page.
I know where things are now. Not everything.
But the light bulbs go on the shelf in the garage above the paint, because that's where the furnace filters are, because that's where she said.
Trash is Tuesday, and it's the blue bin the first week, not the green.
There are two kinds of aspirin in this house and I know which one is for the day after the stands.
I moved into that house in October of 1996. I have known where the shutoff valve is since the day we closed. I did not know where the aspirin was until I was fifty-eight years old.
Dutch called the second week of November. He calls twice a year, and both calls run ninety seconds and always have.
"Bud."
"Dutch."
"Harv wants the second through the ninth. First full week, Saturday to Saturday. He's got a thing with his daughter the weekend after, so he wants it locked."
I was standing at the counter with the phone in one hand and a dish towel in the other, which is a sentence I could not have written down about myself in August.
"I'll get back to you."
Pause on the line.
"Get back to me," Dutch said. "On the first full week of October. It's been the first full week of October since your uncle ran the place."
"Dutch, I'm not doing anything to it." I put the towel down. "I'm not skipping and I'm not moving it. I'm going to say yes after I know Lois's dates, and I don't know Lois's dates yet, because we do that in January."
Long quiet.
"Huh," Dutch said. "That's the thing you did up here. In the morning. With the card."
"Same thing, yeah."
Another quiet. Dutch has been married to Cheryl forty-one years and I have heard him say approximately nothing about it in all that time.
"All right," he said. "January. You want the second to the ninth held or not held."
"Hold it soft. If her week lands on top of it I'll call you inside a day."
"Cheryl's going to want to know what that means."
"Tell her it means January."
He hung up on me, which is how he ends every phone call he has ever made.
I stood there in the kitchen a second and then did a thing I hadn't planned. Got the yellow pad off the counter and wrote Dutch — Oct 2–9 — waiting on L's dates and stuck it on the refrigerator door.
Three notes on that door now. Hers with the lodge number. Mine from October about blood or fire, which neither of us has taken down. And that one.
The third of October came and went while I was standing in a room with a woodstove.
The ninth anniversary of the day my mother-in-law died fell on the first morning of camp.
That's the morning I took the card off the corkboard and made Dutch say it back to me.
I gave my whole speech about being reachable, and then I went out and walked the north line, and I did not think about the date one single time.
She was home. She didn't say a word about it when I got back, not before Maine and not after. She'd have been at the pantry that day. Run the whole day, come home, heated something up. Nine years running.
So on the twelfth of November I got the new calendar out of the drawer under the phone and turned it to October.
Lois came in from the garage with the recycling.
"What are you doing?"
"Dutch wants the second to the ninth. So I'm looking at it."
She came and stood at my shoulder.
October. Thirty-one squares, and big ones, because the squares are the whole point of that calendar. She told me so in the drugstore-aisle voice she uses when she's already thought about a thing for a month.
"The third is a Sunday next year," I said.
She went still. I felt it happen beside me.
"October third. That's your mother. That's the day. Ten years, next year."
I didn't look up. I want to be honest, I couldn't look up.
"I missed it this year. I gave that whole speech about being reachable the same morning and never once thought what day it was. And you didn't say anything about it to me in October or November, and I'd guess you weren't going to."
"No," she said. "I wasn't."
"Okay."
"Are you going to tell me you won't go next year?"
"No." I put my finger on the square. "I'll most likely be at camp on the third of October next year. It's the Sunday of that week, second day in. And I'm going to know what day it is. That's all I've got. That's the whole offer."
She didn't say anything for a while. Then she put her hand on the back of my neck, which she does about twice a year, and left it there a second. Then she went and put the recycling bin back.
Forty seconds, maybe, and neither of us has mentioned it since.
The Saturday after Thanksgiving I got up early and went out to the garage.
The cooler was on the shelf where I'd put it when Dutch ran my gear down after camp.
Thirty-one years old, that thing. Marine cooler, the heavy kind they don't make anymore, hinge replaced twice.
My initials on the lid in white paint in my own hand from about 1997, when everybody at camp started showing up with the same model and Harv took the wrong one home.
I got it down, set it on the workbench, and took the acetone and a rag to my initials.
It took a while. Thirty years of paint down in the grain of the plastic doesn't come off clean. When I was done you could still see the ghost of them if you knew where to look, which I do, and which I've decided is fine.
Then I got the white paint pen out of the drawer, the one I use for marking parts, and did hers. Block capitals, the way you'd letter a panel. Did them twice, because the first L came out wrong.
Then I put the lid up so the paint could dry, and stood there in a cold garage at seven in the morning looking at my wife's initials on the good cooler.
I bought myself a new one in December. It's fine. Plastic, wheels, it'll last nine years and then I'll buy another one.
I didn't tell her. Didn't take a picture of it, didn't set it out where she'd trip over it, didn't say a word at supper. Put it up in the rafters where the gear goes, near end, where you see it coming in from the kitchen.
Then I went in, made coffee badly, read the paper.
She found it three days later. I know, because I heard the garage door from in the house. Then nothing at all for about four minutes. Then the door again.
She came in, got a glass of water, drank the whole thing at the sink with her back to me, and set the glass in the rack. Her coat was still on.
"Filter needs doing," she said.
"I did it in October."
"That was the furnace. I meant the water pitcher."
"Oh."
"I'll get it," she said, and went back out.