Chapter 4
The first morning she thought it was a plow.
Four-fifty in the morning, still black out, and headlights swung across the ceiling of the dining room while she was setting the big pot on to boil. She went to the window with a towel over her shoulder.
She watched it for a good ten minutes. It didn’t do anything.
At five she unlocked the front door, because she unlocked the front door at five, and she went back to the kitchen and did not look up when it opened.
He stood inside it.
“You’re not open,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“I know. I’m not asking you to be.”
She took the lid off the pot and put it back on. “Then what.”
“Can I sit down.”
“No.”
He sat down.
She came out from behind the pass with a rag in her fist and he put both hands up, flat, the way you would at a dog you’d startled.
“One question,” he said. “Then I’ll go, and I’ll go every time you say go. I’m not going to argue with you about anything ever again, I decided that in the car. One question.”
“Ask it.”
“Tell me about Sunday night.”
The rag went slack in her hand.
“No,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I told you in the hospital.”
“You told me the shape of it.” He was looking at the table, not at her.
“You told me what happened. I want — I don’t want the shape.
I want the three days. All of it. What you did with your hands, what you ate, how cold it actually got in that back room, what you were thinking Saturday at four in the afternoon. ”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have it,” he said. “Because when I try to think about it there’s nothing there, and I think that’s the whole problem with me.”
She stood in the middle of her own floor and felt something try to move and refused it.
“No,” she said again.
He nodded. He got up. He put his hat on and went out and got in the truck and drove away, and she stood there for a while with the pot coming up behind her.
* * *
He came back Tuesday.
She’d told herself he wouldn’t, and she had been perfectly sincere about it, and she had also woken at four with a specific feeling in her chest that she declined to name.
Same truck. Same spot. She unlocked the door at five and he came in and sat down at the table nearest the door — not the good one by the window, the bad one by the coat hooks — and said nothing at all.
“You’re not asking?”
“You said no.”
“So why are you here?”
“Because I said no for nine years,” he said, “and you kept making dinner.”
She went into the kitchen and shut the swinging door with more force than the door required.
He sat there until quarter past six and then he left.
She stood at the window and watched the taillights go up the street and turn, and then she went and looked at the table he’d been sitting at, which was an idiotic thing to do and which she did anyway.
Nothing. A dry ring where a cup would have been if he’d had one.
The thing about that table, the bad one by the coat hooks, is that it is the table you give people you do not want.
Her father had a whole theory about it. Two-tops go by the window, families go to the middle, a man on his own goes by the kitchen where there is somebody to talk to, and the table by the coat hooks goes to whoever has made the room worse.
Seth Lassiter had walked into a dining room he had only ever eaten in at board dinners and sat down at the coat-hook table without being shown to it.
She thought about that on and off for two days and decided it meant nothing, and the fact that she had to decide it twice told her something she did not want to know.
* * *
By Friday it was a thing.
That’s how fast a village does it. By Friday, Marla Cutter said “How’s your visitor” in a tone with three floors in it. By the middle of the next week, Walt had taken to timing his walk so he’d come past at ten past five and look in the window, and the plow guy would blow his horn.
There is no dignity in a place like this.
That was the part Talia understood and Seth did not, at first. In Traverse City a man sits in a truck and nobody knows.
In Leland a man sits in a truck outside a closed restaurant at five in the morning for nine mornings running, and by the second week the whole county knows what he did, knows what she did, knows she was in a ditch, and knows he is out there in the cold with the engine off because he is not allowed inside until she unlocks the door.
He never put the engine on to keep warm. She checked. That was a thing she caught herself doing, standing at the window with her coffee — checking whether the exhaust was going.
It wasn’t. Twenty-two degrees on the Thursday and it wasn’t going.
“He’s going to give himself pneumonia,” Bailey said, sourly, from a stool.
“He can go home any time he wants.”
“That’s true.”
“He’s a grown man with three vehicles.”
“Also true.” Bailey picked at the label on her bottle. “I’m just saying it out loud so that when you start feeling sorry for him you’ll remember somebody else said it first and it sounded stupid then too.”
* * *
She didn’t talk to him. Not for twelve days.
He didn’t try. He had two speeds her whole marriage — absent and fixing — and this was neither one.
He sat at a bad table in his coat in a cold dining room while she scrubbed a hood filter or ran the numbers on a compressor, and every so often she’d come out and he’d still be there, and eventually he’d go.
Twice he brought coffee from the Mercantile and left it on the table and didn’t say anything about it.
The first one she poured down the sink in front of him.
The second one she drank, at about half past seven, after he’d gone, standing at the pass with the order book open and her thumb going back and forth on the lid, and she could not have said which of those two mornings she was more ashamed of.
He got it right, was the trouble. Black, one sugar, which is not a thing anybody guesses.
Nine years and the man had never once made her a cup of coffee in their own kitchen, because their own kitchen had a machine in it that did six kinds and he had bought it, and she had stopped using it in about year three because it took nine minutes and she left at four in the morning.
She never told him she drank the second one. There were a dozen things that spring she did not tell him, and she kept a list of them somewhere behind her sternum, and that one sat at the top.
Once, on a Tuesday when she was up on the ladder with a wire brush at the top of the swing door frame, she looked down and he had moved to the bottom of the ladder and put one hand on the rail, and he didn’t say anything and he didn’t look up, he just stood there holding it steady, and when she came down he went back to his table.
She thought about that one for three days.
Marla Cutter had seen it, because Marla Cutter had been putting the papers out at ten past six and there is nothing else to look at on that street at that hour.
“He held the ladder,” she said, on the Friday, over the register, in the tone of a woman reporting weather.
“He did.”
“Huh,” Marla said, and rang up the coffee filters, and then, at the moment Talia had relaxed: “Frank says he’s been at the fire hall.”
“He’s been what?”
“Wednesday nights. The county did the after-action on the storm, all the crews, three sessions.” Marla shrugged. “He sat in the back. Didn’t say anything. Bailey about had a fit.”
Talia stood in the Mercantile with a box of coffee filters in her hand.
She had not known that. That was becoming a pattern and she did not like the shape of it — not because it was secretive, but because it was the opposite. He was not hiding any of it. He was simply not telling her, and the village kept handing it to her sideways.
* * *
There were four mornings that month that do her no credit.
Four times, in those first weeks, she nearly told him.
Not the whole of it. She had no intention of giving him the three nights and she had already refused.
What she nearly did, four separate times, standing at the pass at half past five in the morning with a man sitting at the coat-hook table twenty feet away, was say the small thing — the generator ran forty minutes, or I drained the lines myself, or I counted the rooms and there are nine — and let him have one piece of it.
Every time, she got as far as the shape of the sentence in her mouth.
And every time, the thing that stopped her was the same thing, and it was not pride and it was not cruelty.
It was that she knew what he would do with it.
He would take the piece and he would go home and he would work on it, because that was what the man did, and by Thursday there would be something in her alley — a wood delivery, a generator, a man with a clipboard — and the piece she had given him would have come back to her as a purchase.
She could not risk it. That is the whole and honest reason.
Which means that for most of those weeks there were two people in that dining room at five in the morning, each of them holding something back for excellent reasons, and neither of them saying a word.
Then he ruined it, because of course he did.
She came down on a Monday morning and there were two trucks outside and a man on her kitchen roof.
She went out in her apron in eighteen degrees and stood in the alley and shouted up at him, and the man came down the ladder looking apologetic and said the work order was for the flashing and the section over the walk-in, and that the whole thing had been paid on Friday.
“By who.”
The man looked at his boots.
She went and stood in the middle of the street. Seth’s truck was in its spot and Seth was in it because it was ten past seven and he hadn’t gone yet, and she crossed the street and pulled the driver’s door open with her bandaged hand, which hurt, which she did anyway.
“Get them off my roof.”
“Talia—”
“Off. Now.”
He got out. He looked at the trucks and then at her and she watched him work out that he had done something and not know yet what it was.
“The roof leaks,” he said carefully. “Over the walk-in. You told Bailey—”
“I told Bailey. Not you.”