Chapter 3
He stood inside the door for a full minute before anyone spoke to him.
That was the thing about a village. In town he’d have been bought a drink and shown to a table. In the Tierney House on a Wednesday night in February, with sixty people in it who had all been cold since Friday, Seth Lassiter got what the room decided to give him, and the room was still deciding.
Old Walt looked at him over the top of a bowl and went back to the bowl.
Talia came out from the pass and crossed the floor, because the alternative was letting him stand there, and letting him stand there would have been a thing she did to him in front of everybody.
She had been raised better and she had also been raised in a room like this one, where nothing is ever really private.
“You can’t be here,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why are you here.”
He looked past her at the room. Sixty people eating beans and rice off her grandmother’s plates under a ceiling she’d had to sweep cobwebs out of with a broom taped to a pole.
“I wanted to see it,” he said. “Open.”
“Well. It’s open.”
He nodded. He didn’t move. His hat was still in both hands and she noticed that he’d shaved, which made her angrier than anything he’d said in the hospital.
“There’s a crew at the house,” he said. “New unit. It’ll be—”
“Seth.”
“—and the pipes held, most of them, there’s a couple in the north wall that—”
“I don’t live there.”
That stopped him.
“As of when?” he said.
“As of Monday morning, apparently,” she said. “As of whenever it was I figured out that nobody was coming.”
He took that. She’d give him that much, then and later: he took it standing up, in a room, with his back to sixty people who were all pretending not to listen.
“Can I —” He started over. “What do you need.”
“I need you to go home.”
He went.
* * *
The lights came on Thursday at two in the afternoon and half the village cheered in her dining room, which she thought was ridiculous, and then she had to go into the kitchen and stand by the sink for a minute.
Everyone went home. She hadn’t braced for that.
By four o’clock the tables were empty and somebody had stacked the chairs and Bailey had driven the last family out to the Peninsula road, and she was standing alone in a room with sheets on the floor and eighty dirty plates and no reason at all to be there.
She washed the plates one-handed. It took three hours.
She had thought she would fall apart when the room emptied, and she was braced for it.
It did not come. What came instead was a clarity that frightened her more.
She had run a dining room for sixty people on two hours’ sleep and a hospital discharge, with her hands wrapped, and she had done it well.
The rice had been right. No one had gone home hungry.
Her father used to say a full room forgives everything, and standing at the pass at nine o’clock she had understood what he meant for the first time in her life, because for four hours she had not thought about her husband once.
She was a woman with eighty plates and wrapped hands in a building she had shut herself.
That is why she washed them all before she went upstairs, one-handed, running the water too hot. Not because they needed doing.
Because if she stopped moving she was going to have to start.
Then she went upstairs.
The rooms above the dining room had been her father’s, and his father’s, and there were four of them and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Her dad had died in the one at the front. She hadn’t been up there since the week they emptied it.
There was a bed frame and no mattress and a dresser with somebody’s church programs still in the top drawer.
Four funerals and a christening, and she sat down on the floor with them in her lap and went through every one, which took about twenty minutes and cost her more than the whole of the week before it.
Her father’s was not in there. She had done that one herself at twenty-four, in this building, for two hundred people, and had gone into the walk-in twice and come out both times with her face fixed, and Marilyn Tibbet had plated every single course and never mentioned it afterward for eight years.
She put the programs back in the drawer and shut it.
The window in that room looked down onto the harbor road, which is why her father had it, because from that window you could see who was coming from the north side of the village and have the door open before they got to it. She stood there for a while with her hands in her sleeves.
You could see the roof of the Ketch from there. Not the front of it — the back, and the vent hood, and the yellow of the lamps going on the windowsills at dusk in the reflection off the building opposite.
She moved the bed the next day so it faced the other way, and told herself it was about the draft.
She slept that first night on two restaurant banquettes pushed together, in her coat, in a building with heat in it, and she did not cry, and she woke at four in the morning the way she had every morning for the eight years she’d run that dining room, which was a thing her body had apparently never stopped doing.
* * *
It started on Friday.
At eight in the morning a van came with a mattress. She hadn’t ordered a mattress. The driver had a delivery sheet with her name on it and the Tierney House address on it and he was from a place in Traverse City that did not deliver to Leland.
At ten, a woman from the propane company came to top off the tank, and when Talia asked for the invoice the woman got pink and said it was taken care of.
At half past eleven a florist’s car pulled up outside a building with no sign on it in a village with no florist.
At one, Dan parked the car across the street and sat in it.
She went out in her apron in the cold and knocked on the window and he put it down a few inches.
“Mrs. Lassiter.”
“How long are you planning on sitting there?”
“He said as long as you might need anything.”
“I don’t.”
Dan had a face like a man caught between two paychecks. “He said not to ask you.”
“Go home, Dan.”
“Ma’am—”
“You’ve got kids. Go home.”
He went. She stood in the street a second with her arms crossed over her apron and then she went back inside and stood in the middle of her dining room and said, to nobody, “He’s going to buy his way out of this.”
She sent the mattress back. She paid the propane company herself, in cash, which took two phone calls and all of her patience. The flowers she gave to the Dietzes.
And she understood, doing all of it, that she was enjoying it, and that enjoying it was not a good sign about her.
It went on all week and it never stopped being an argument conducted by other people.
No one Seth sent had the first idea what they were standing in the middle of.
The propane woman had been mortified. The mattress driver had a route and a clipboard and two more stops in Northport.
Every one of them looked at Talia Lassiter the way you look at a person who is being unreasonable about a kindness, and every one of them went away and told somebody, because that is a county for you.
That was the exact shape of the thing and she could not get anybody to see it.
He was not buying her. She would have found buying easier — buying you can be insulted by and throw back.
He was handling her. He had a problem called his wife and he had put it into the machine and the machine had produced a mattress, a tank of propane, some flowers, and a man in a car, and none of those things had a single one of his fingerprints on them anywhere.
She said as much to Bailey on the Sunday, standing in the empty dining room with her arms folded.
“So what would you want him to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Tal.”
“I don’t know,” Talia said. “Something with his own hands in it. I don’t know what that is and I’m not going to go and tell him, because a man who has to be told isn’t doing it.”
The propane woman came back on the Thursday, because Talia had insisted on paying and no one at that company had ever been asked to take cash from a Lassiter before.
Her name was Deb and she had been driving that route for nineteen years.
“I can’t put it on your account,” she said, unhappily, in the doorway. “That’s the thing. There isn’t one.”
“There’s an account. You filled the tank at the house twice a winter for nine years.”
“There’s an account for the house.” Deb turned her clipboard around, as though the clipboard would help.
“It’s not yours, is what I’m saying. It’s not in your name.
Never has been. It’s billed out of an office in Traverse City with a purchase order number on it and I’ve never once dealt with a person on it, and the only reason I know you is you gave me a coffee in 2019. ”
Talia stood in the doorway of her own building with a fistful of twenties.
“Say that again.”
“I shouldn’t have—”
“You haven’t done anything. Say it again.”
Deb said it again. And then, because she was a kind woman having a bad two minutes, she said the rest of it: the plowing came out of the same office, and the woman who did the floors, and the boats, and she thought probably everything else out there too, because she had never in nineteen years seen a Lassiter signature on anything.
“That’s how those places work,” Deb said. “It’s not a — it isn’t a bad thing, is it?”
“No,” Talia said. “It’s not a bad thing.”
She went inside and sat down on a stacked chair and did not get up for a while.
Because it was not a bad thing. That was the whole of it.
No one had hidden anything and no one had cheated her and there was no document anywhere with a lie in it.
She had simply lived nine years in a house where every single arrangement that kept her warm and fed and plowed out was made by somebody she had never met, on the instruction of an office, and she had never once been a party to any of it.