Chapter 2 #2
He looked at her. And she watched him hear his own answer arrive, before he said it, watched the whole thing land in his face about a second and a half before his mouth caught up, and that was the moment — not the window, not the ditch, that — when something in her that had been holding on quietly for a year let go of the rail.
“Emerson,” he said.
“Emerson Roche.”
“She runs the deal team. Property sits under her, it’s a cost thing, she was doing a —” He stopped himself, because he could hear it too.
“I never said that,” Talia said. “I never said I didn’t want to come down. I’d have crawled to town for a warm room, and you know that, because you’ve been married to me for nine years.”
He did not argue.
“You were at the Ketch Sunday night.”
His face went white in stages.
“I saw you,” she said. “I was outside the window with a bag in my hand. You had your coat off and both hands going and you were telling her something, and you were —” Her voice cracked, once, and she hated it, and she went on through it.
“You looked like yourself. You haven’t looked like yourself at our table since I don’t know when.
I stood there and watched you be a person you used to be with me. ”
“I drove up,” he said. “Talia, I drove up to come home, the tree was across the road, they said the crew would have it open by nine, I sat down to wait—”
“I climbed over it.”
He stopped.
“On my hands and knees,” she said. “Both ways. It’s two miles. I walked it twice.”
There was nothing in the room after that. A machine somewhere down the hall, and a cart going past, and her husband standing at the foot of the bed with his mouth open and nothing in it.
“Talia,” he said. “I’m — God. I’m so sorry. I’ll fix the—”
“Don’t.”
“I only meant—”
“I know what you meant,” she said. “You meant the house. You’re going to fix the house.”
* * *
She discharged herself Wednesday morning against medical advice, which took twenty minutes and a signature and a woman who was very kind about it.
Bailey drove her. They came out of Traverse City with the whole world still in glass, every tree on M-22 bent over like it was looking for something it dropped, crews out on every side road and lines down in the fields, and the radio saying town was mostly back and the shore roads would come last.
Talia watched it go by with her hands in her lap in their wrapping.
“Your house is warm,” Bailey said, about two miles out. “He had a crew in there Monday. New generator, the whole—”
“I’m not going to the house.”
Bailey drove another half mile.
“Okay,” she said.
“Take me into the village.”
“To mine?”
“No.”
Bailey looked over at her, and then back at the road, and then she made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Tal.”
* * *
The Tierney House sits on the corner where the harbor road turns, and it has sat there since 1911, and for eight years it had sat there shut.
The front door stuck. It always stuck. You put your shoulder in it at the height of the lock and lifted, and it gave.
She stood in her own dining room in the dark with her breath showing.
Twenty-two tables under sheets. The long one along the window that her grandfather built out of one piece of hull planking.
The brass rail. The smell — dust and cold and floor wax and, under all of it and impossible after eight years, bacon fat and lemon, because a building remembers.
Bailey came in behind her and didn’t say anything, which was the best thing Bailey ever did for her.
Talia went round the room with her headlamp, slowly.
The chairs were up on the tables under the sheets, which meant somebody had done it properly on the last night, and she could not remember doing it and knew it had been her.
There was a wine list from eight years ago still in the rack by the door with a price on it that made her laugh.
The clock over the swinging door had stopped at twenty past four, which is when the battery died and not when anything happened.
She pulled the sheet off the long window table and it came away in one motion and the dust went up through the light of the headlamp like weather.
Her grandfather built that table out of a single piece of hull planking in 1953 and it has a shake in it at the north end that he filled with pitch, and she put the flat of her hand on the shake without deciding to.
“Tal,” Bailey said, from the door. “Your hands.”
Talia looked down at her wrapped hands.
“You’re supposed to be in a bed.”
“I know,” Talia said. “Go get the propane key off the hook in the pantry. It’s on a green fob.”
Talia went through the swinging door into the kitchen. The ranges were Vulcans from the sixties and they didn’t need a thing in the world but gas and a match, and the tank out back was half full, because she had never let them let it run dry, in eight years, and she had never asked herself why.
Her hands were wrapped. She couldn’t hold the match.
“Bailey.”
Bailey struck it.
The first burner went up blue and both of them stood there and looked at it like it was a fire on a beach.
Talia found her voice somewhere. “There’s a hundred pounds of dry beans in the cellar and the gas is on and every one of these ovens works. How many people in this village have been cold since Friday?”
Bailey was already reaching for her radio.
“All of them,” she said.
* * *
They were in by seven.
Not everyone. But the Dietzes came, and old Walt from the boat shed, and the Cutters, and a family from the Peninsula road with three kids and a dog, and by nine there were sixty people in the Tierney House dining room with the sheets pulled off the tables and every oven in the kitchen running with its door open, and it was eighty-one degrees in there and Talia could not have told you the last time she had been that warm or that busy or that entirely herself.
She couldn’t hold a knife. So she stood at the pass and ran the room with her voice, the way her father had, and people who had known her for thirty years did what she told them.
At half past ten somebody came in the front door and the noise changed.
She didn’t have to look. She could hear the room adjust.
Seth stood inside the door of the Tierney House with his coat on and snow on his shoulders, in a building he had helped close, holding his hat in both hands like a man at the back of a church, and there was nowhere in that room for him to sit down.