Chapter 15
LOIS
The pantry closed its season on the nineteenth of December. Del Ostrander read the numbers out at the board meeting in his four-percent-too-loud voice, and everybody clapped for themselves the way boards do, and then he got to the year-end thank-yous.
He thanked Marisol first. That was mine. I'd asked for it in October, on the phone, from a rental kitchen in Maine. It's the one piece of pantry business I did on my week, and I'd do it again.
I stood at the back by the coffee urn and watched a twenty-nine-year-old woman get thanked out loud by a county board for running the biggest day of our year.
She wasn't tired. That's what got me. Nineteen Decembers I have stood in that room at the end of a season with my back gone and my handwriting shaking, and there was Marisol up front looking like a woman who'd had a nice fall.
I clapped, and I meant it. I stood there with a paper cup in my hand thinking, nobody in this room needs me the way they did in August.
Marisol found me by the urn afterward with her coat already on.
"You should have been up there," she said.
"I was up there nineteen times." I put my hand on her arm. "Twentieth one's yours. Ask me for anything you want except the day itself."
She looked like she might say something else. Then she looked at the floor and let it go, and nodded once, the way people do when they've decided to take a thing instead of arguing about whether they've earned it.
I drove home in the dark and told Bud about it while he had his head under the sink doing something to the disposal.
"How's that feel," he said from under there.
"Both ways."
"Yeah. That's how the plant is when you train somebody good.
You spend four years teaching a kid the line.
Then one day you come in and he's got it running better than you had it, and you stand there like somebody took something off you.
" A grunt, a wrench turning. "Then you go home and sleep nine hours for the first time in a year. "
I stood in my kitchen and thought, that's the closest thing to a poem this man has ever said, and I didn't tell him so, because he'd never speak again.
Carleen's postcard came the week before Christmas. Not a Maine postcard — one of those cards out of a hardware store with a photograph of a lobster wearing a Santa hat on it, which is the worst thing I have ever seen, and entirely on purpose, and my sister all over.
Lo — same kitchen next fall, the good one, I've already told the woman it's spoken for. Bring the husband for the LAST weekend only. I hear he does dishes now. Two ovens, one sister, no notes. — C
I read it at the mailbox with my coat open in the wind, then read it again in the kitchen. Then I put it on the refrigerator door.
So that's what's on that door now. Four things on the right-hand side, where thirty years of yellow paper used to hang. The lodge number in my writing. Blood or fire in his. Dutch — Oct 2–9 — waiting on L's dates, which he will not take down. And a lobster in a Santa hat.
Nothing on it tells anybody where anything is.
Christmas ran worse. There were no labeled containers and no list of who got what taped inside the hall closet door, which meant that on the twenty-third I was standing in a store at eight at night with a cart and no plan, like everybody else in America.
Bud wrapped his own, badly, with about a mile of tape, and one had the receipt still stuck to the outside of the box in a way I can only describe as proud.
The ham was forty minutes late because two people each thought the other one had put it in.
Denise came in the kitchen at three and said, "This is chaos," and I said, "Yes it is," and she looked at me a second and then started setting the table without being asked, which she hasn't done since she was fourteen.
We ate at four-forty. Nobody died.
Bud hung the calendar on the nail by the back door on the twenty-eighth of December.
Same nail. There's been a calendar on that nail since 1997, and for thirty years I have been the one who hung it, usually on New Year's Day, usually while somebody else watched a bowl game.
He hung it without saying anything about it, and when I came in and saw it there on January's page with nothing written on it, I had to go stand in the pantry closet for a minute.
Then, on the second of January, he came into the kitchen with both pens.
I was at the table with my coffee and the seed catalog that comes every January, which I read every January, and which I have never once ordered from.
He put the green one down in front of me and kept the blue.
My shoulders came up. I didn't tell them to. Fifty-five years old, two months out from Maine, a piece of paper in that drawer in his own handwriting with his signature on it, and my whole upper back went hard.
Here it comes. First full week of October, so. The blue pen filling in his square, then the look up at me, pleasant, generous, ready to hear what I'd like to do with the rest of it.
Thirty-one Januaries. Nobody had told my back.
He sat down across from me. Then he set the blue pen on the table, capped it, and pushed it a couple of inches away from himself, which I'd have missed entirely if I hadn't been braced.
"Your dates first," he said. "Where to next fall?"
I looked at the calendar hanging on its nail, then at him, and it took me a second to get anything out.
"Third week of October. Same as last year. The eighteenth, if it lands right."
"Then that's it."
"Carleen says the last weekend you can come, if you want. If you?—"
"I want," he said. "But you write yours first, and then ask me later, because that's a separate thing and I don't want it in the same sentence."
He handed me the green pen. He'd already taken the cap off, which he must have done back in the drawer.
I took the calendar down off the nail and laid it flat on the table between the coffee and the seed catalog. Turned it to October. Wrote my name across seven squares in green ink.
LOIS — MAINE.
Then I gave it back to him. He uncapped the blue one and wrote CAMP across the second through the ninth, and that was the whole transaction. Ninety seconds. He hung it back on the nail, squared it, and left it squared.
Then he went out to warm the truck, because we were going to Denise's, because it was the second of January and she'd asked us for two o'clock.
I went out to the garage for the pie carrier.
It lives on the shelf over the deep freeze, which is under the rafters where the gear goes, so I had to reach up over my head for it. When I came down with it in my hands I was looking straight at the near end of the rafters at eye level.
The cooler's up there. Thirty-one years old, hinge replaced twice, the ghost of his initials still down in the plastic on the lid if you know where they were. I know where they were. I have looked at those two letters across a garage floor every autumn since 1997.
And over the top of them, in block capitals, in white paint pen, done twice because the first L came out wrong:
L.T.
I put my hand on the lid. Cold, the way plastic gets in a garage in January.
Then I got the step stool, because I'm five foot four and I have never once in my life let a thing stay out of reach. Brought the cooler down, set it on the workbench, opened it.
Empty. Clean. It smelled like nothing at all, which after three decades of venison chili is its own kind of work, done with a rag and a bucket and never mentioned.
I stood there in the cold with the truck running out front.
Then I went back in the house for the wool blanket off the shelf in the hall closet, the good one, and the paperback I've been meaning to start since August, and the thermos.
Three things. Nine months early, for a trip that isn't booked past a green square on a calendar.
I put them in the cooler and shut the lid. Then I got up on the step stool and put it back in the rafters, near end, where you see it coming in from the kitchen.
Then I picked up the pie carrier and shut the light off and went out to the truck, where my husband was scraping the windshield with the wrong side of the brush, the way he has done it wrong for thirty-two years, and I did not tell him.
THE END
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