Chapter 5 #2
At about half past midnight Marilyn Tibbet, who had not said more than ten words all night, came out of the kitchen with her clogs in her hand and sat down across from her.
“Your dad used to count it at this table,” she said.
“I remember.”
“He’d count it twice and get two numbers and go with the bigger one.”
Talia laughed into her own arms.
“He did not.”
“He did. Every Saturday for twelve years.” Marilyn put her feet up on the chair beside her. “You know what I thought when you called me. I thought, she’s going to open it for the summer people and shut it at Labor Day, and I’ll have quit a job for four months.”
“And now?”
Marilyn looked out at the empty room for a while. She had been on her feet for nine hours at fifty-four years old and she had burned her thumb on the salamander at seven and had not mentioned it.
“Now I think you’re going to still be doing this when I’m dead,” she said, “and I’d like that on the record so my kids can read it out at my funeral.”
* * *
Jared started the jacking on the Monday.
Quarter turn a day, and every morning at seven he’d be in the cellar with a light on a hook and a bottle jack and a length of oak, and every morning he’d come up and say the same three words — “Went up fine” — and go do something else.
On the Thursday he stayed for a coffee.
“That door swings,” he said.
“I noticed.”
“Another week and you’ll be able to close the walk-in with one finger.” He turned his cup around on the pass. “You could do rooms upstairs, you know. Four of them and a bath. There’s nowhere to stay in this village between Labor Day and Memorial Day.”
“There’s nowhere to stay because nobody comes.”
“Nobody comes because there’s nowhere to stay,” he said. “One of those has to go first.”
“My father said that.”
“Your father said it to me,” Jared said. “In this kitchen. I was about twenty-two and I was putting a door on for him and he stood right there and told me the whole plan. Four rooms and a bath and he’d have them going by the next summer.”
Talia put her cup down.
“He never told me that.”
“You’d have been fifteen.”
“He never told me that after,” she said. “I ran this building for five years and he never once said he’d wanted the rooms.”
Jared thought about it.
“Well,” he said. “He’d have thought he was handing you a debt.”
She looked at him. He had a face like a man who’d spent thirty years outside and enjoyed most of it.
“You’ve thought about this building,” she said.
“Everybody in this county has thought about this building.” He drank his coffee. “It’s the best building on the shore and it’s been dark for eight years. It’s like having a tooth out.”
* * *
The thing she noticed, and noticed herself noticing, was that he talked to her.
Not about her husband. Not about the ditch. No one in that village had gone a week without mentioning the ditch, and Jared Soto had been in and out of her cellar for two weeks and had never said the word.
He talked to her about joists and about the Boyles’ septic and about a boat he was not going to finish, and he asked her what she thought about things, and when she answered he’d stop and consider it, and twice he’d said “huh” and changed his mind.
On the second Friday, at the end of service, he came in the back to drop a key and she was sitting on an upturned crate with her boots off, and he looked at her — just looked, a half second longer than a man looks at a contractor’s client — and said, “Long one.”
“Long one.”
“Night, Talia.”
And he went.
She sat on the crate with her boots off in her own kitchen and felt her face get warm, and said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”
She did nothing about it. She was not going to do anything about it, and she knew that the way she knew the ranges.
But she had been somebody’s wife for nine years and before that she had been her father’s daughter, and it had been a long time since anybody had looked at her and seen a woman standing there.
It landed. That’s all. It landed, and she put it somewhere, and she was going to remember where she put it.
* * *
The last Wednesday in March she went the whole day without thinking about him.
She didn’t notice it happening. That’s the point; you never do.
She got up at four, did the order, took delivery, broke down two cases of fish, taught Cody a knife thing he’d been doing wrong, argued with Dot about the table by the coat hooks, ran eighty-one covers, and came out at half past ten to count the drawer.
She was two thirds of the way through the twenties when it hit her.
She put the money down.
The whole day. From four in the morning to half past ten at night, nineteen hours, and she had not once thought about her husband, or the window, or the lamps, or the ditch.
The room had been full and the room had been hers and she had been busy, and somewhere in the middle of all that she had stopped carrying him around.
She waited to feel good about it.
What she felt instead came up out of nowhere and sat on her chest, and she had to put both hands flat on her grandfather’s table.
Because if she could do one day she could do a week. And if she could do a week she could do a year, and the year after that, and she could be fifty-four years old in this room with the drawer counted and the lights off, and it would be a life. A good one. Better than the one she’d had.
And every single day of it would be a day she’d chosen not to go back.
She sat there with the drawer half counted and the ovens ticking behind her and understood, for the first time since February, that nobody was going to make this decision for her. Not Bailey. Not Cheryl. Not the village. Not him, no matter how many mornings he sat in that truck.
“Well,” she said, to twenty-two empty tables. “That’s worse.”