Chapter 4 #2
“It’s going to rain Thursday and the whole—”
“Do you know what I have been doing for two weeks?” Her voice was up.
She hated it being up; the village was awake; Marla Cutter was in her doorway across the street with her arms folded, frankly watching.
“I have been making a list. I have a list this long of every single thing wrong with that building, and I have been going down it, and I have been deciding what gets fixed and in what order and what I can pay for. That list is the only thing in my life right now that is mine.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You took a thing off my list, Seth.”
He stopped.
“You took it off without telling me, the way you’d take a folder off a desk.
That’s how you do it. That is exactly how you do it, and it’s how you closed this building, and it’s how your mother ended up in a hotel room and I ended up in a ditch.
Somebody hands you a problem with my name on it and you fix it or you delegate it and either way I’m not in the room. ”
The word ditch went down the street. She heard it land.
He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t say I was trying to help, which she had braced for and which would have ended it. He stood in the road in his coat and he went white around the mouth, and then he said:
“Can I take them off the roof?”
“Yes.”
“And can I pay for the flashing and never mention it.”
“No.”
“Okay,” he said.
He sent them away. He came back an hour later with the paperwork and the amount and he put it on the bad table and left it there, and she paid it, and it cost her more than she had, and every time she thought about it afterward she could not decide whether she had won.
Frank Dietz got the story inside the hour and had it improved by dinnertime.
By the version that reached the fire hall she had thrown a hammer. By the version that came back to her from Ruthie Danko via Marla Cutter on the Wednesday, she had thrown a hammer at him and missed on purpose, which Ruthie apparently thought reflected well on everybody.
“I didn’t throw anything.”
“No,” Marla said, ringing up the filters. “I know. I told her.”
“Did she believe you?”
“No.”
That is what a village is. Talia had spent eight years in Traverse City rooms where people said nothing and meant several things, and she had come home to a place where people say everything and about a third of it is true, and she would take the second one every day of the week and could not have explained why to anybody who had not lived in both.
The part that did travel accurately, because Marla had heard it herself from her own doorway with her arms folded, was the sentence about the list.
You took a thing off my list.
It went round the whole county in four days and it came back to her in June out of the mouth of a woman she had never met, at a wedding in Northport, who said it to her own husband across a table about a kitchen faucet.
* * *
Emerson Roche came through the village on the last Friday in February.
Talia saw her from the window. A silver car she didn’t know, parked at the Mercantile, and the woman getting out of it in a wool coat the color of oatmeal, and standing a second in the street looking at the harbor.
She didn’t look at the Tierney House. Talia noticed, and could not stop noticing.
She didn’t so much as turn her head at it, and a stranger would have — there’s a building on that corner with nine tall windows and a stone step worn down in the middle, and everyone who comes into that village looks at it.
Emerson Roche went into the Mercantile and came out with a bottle of water and got in her car and drove out the north road, toward the point.
Toward the house.
Talia stood at the window with a hood filter in her hands for a long time after the car was gone.
She told herself a dozen different things about it. That the house was company property in some way she didn’t understand. That there were a hundred reasons a woman drives up a county road. That it was nothing, that it was a road, that roads go places.
She did not tell Bailey. She couldn’t have explained why not.
* * *
That night she came down at midnight because she could not sleep and did the thing she had been not doing for two weeks, which was stand in the dark dining room and go through it in order.
The call at six. I’ve got the generator. The forty minutes. The text with a phone number in it and a hotel room in it that was not for her. The candle in the window. The beans. The shed roof. The saw.
The lamps in the window and his hands going.
She got that far and stopped, the way she always stopped, and then for the first time she went past it.
She thought about a man sitting in a truck at twenty-two degrees with the engine off, nine mornings running, in front of a village that knows what he did.
She thought about the ladder.
And she thought — precisely, in words, standing in her own building — that was not like the flowers.
It landed somewhere under her ribs and she stood very still until it stopped.
“No,” she said, to a room with twenty-two tables in it. “Not yet.”
She went upstairs. She did not sleep. At ten to five she heard the truck come up the street and stop, and she lay in the front room where her father had died and listened to the engine go off.