Chapter 6
The township board met on the second Tuesday of the month at seven, in the hall behind the fire station, under fluorescent lights that had been buzzing since the Reagan administration.
A dozen people usually came. In April, a hundred and forty came, and they had to open the doors into the bay and put folding chairs in among the trucks, and people stood along the back wall in their coats.
Talia came because Bailey made her.
“It’s the storm review,” Bailey said. “It’s my report. You don’t have to say anything, you just have to be a person in a chair so they stop talking about you like you’re a weather event.”
So she sat in the fourth row with Dot Feddema on one side and Frank Dietz on the other, and she listened to Bailey Sheehan stand at a folding table and read out what had happened to this county in February.
It took twenty minutes. Two hundred and six households.
Four days for the shore roads. One woman on the Peninsula road who went most of a day without oxygen because the crew couldn’t get up her drive, and lived.
Two heart attacks, both in men shoveling.
Property damage in the millions and nobody counting.
And at the end, without looking at anybody in particular, Bailey said:
“The county has one generator that runs a building the public can sit in, and it’s the one you’re sitting in now. It holds ninety people if you don’t mind standing. We had four hundred cold households and one warm room and no plan for getting anybody from the first thing to the second thing.”
She sat down. Nobody clapped. That’s not what that room does.
Talia sat in the fourth row with her hands in her lap and found that she was fine.
She had been to two hundred of these. That is not an exaggeration and it is the thing about a township that no one from a city ever gets: a road commission report is a piece of theater with a cast of forty and a run of thirty years, and she had sat through drain assessments and culvert disputes and one four-hour argument about a stop sign, first on her father’s knee and then beside him and then, for eight years, not at all, because Lassiters do not go to township meetings.
That was the part that got her, sitting down. Not the numbers. The chairs. She had stopped coming to this building somewhere in the second year of her marriage and she could not now remember deciding to.
That surprised her. She had spent two days deciding not to come and then come anyway, and she had expected the numbers to go through her like a draft. She had lived inside one of those figures and she had assumed that hearing it read out at a folding table would take something out of her.
It did not. It was a report. That was the whole of Bailey’s gift and always had been — she had a way of putting a terrible night into flat sentences that made it into a problem instead of a story, and a problem is a thing a township board can vote on.
Frank Dietz leaned over at one point and said, “You all right?” and Talia said, “I’m fine,” and meant it.
She thinks now that if the meeting had ended there she would have gone home and slept, and the spring would have been a different spring.
Then the chairman asked if there was any comment from the floor, and a chair scraped at the back.
* * *
Talia knew the sound before she turned around. You know a person’s chair.
Seth came up the center aisle in his coat.
The room went the particular kind of quiet that isn’t silence — it’s a hundred and forty people all deciding at once not to look at the same thing. Somebody’s kid was talking in the back. The lights buzzed.
He didn’t go to the microphone. He stopped about a third of the way up, where he could turn and see the whole room, and he stood there with his hat in his hand.
“Most of you know who I am,” he said.
Somebody near the trucks said, “Yep,” and there was a little noise, not friendly.
“I’d like to pay for it.”
He said it flat, like a man reading a list, which she realized afterward was the only thing that saved him from being run out of the building.
“A standby unit at every year-round household in this township. Not a generator you have to go start in a storm — the kind that comes on by itself, on the propane, installed and tested and on a service contract that somebody other than the homeowner pays for. Every house. No income test, no application, nobody has to ask me for anything.” He looked at the floor and then up.
“And a building. This one’s too small. There’s the old school on Pine Street, which I’d buy and fix and hand to the township, with a kitchen in it, so there’s somewhere in this village that’s warm when the power goes and it’s not somebody’s living room. ”
No one said anything.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the whole of what I came to say. You can vote it down. I’ll leave the number with the clerk either way.”
The chairman, whose name is Gil Rausch and who has run that board since before Talia could drive, took his glasses off and put them back on.
“Mr. Lassiter,” he said. “You understand a thing like that’s got to go to the attorney.”
“I do.”
“And the township can’t be taking on maintenance on ninety-odd private units.”
“It isn’t maintenance on ninety units. It’s one contract, paid out of an instrument that can’t be touched, and the township isn’t a party to it.” Seth said it evenly. “If the board would rather not be involved, I’ll do it as a private matter and the township never hears about it again.”
“Then why bring it here at all?”
And that was a good question, and the room knew it was a good question, and Gil Rausch had been asking questions like that in that building for thirty-one years.
Seth looked at the floor.
“Because I’ve spent twenty years getting things done without going to the room,” he said. “And this is the room.”
And then he did the thing.
He turned his head, and he found her in the fourth row, and he said, in front of a hundred and forty people:
“I’m not doing it to be forgiven. My wife nearly died on the county road because there wasn’t one warm room she could get to, and there wasn’t one because nobody in this township has the kind of money that fixes that and I do. That’s all it is. That’s arithmetic.”
Every head in the building came around.
* * *
She sat still.
That was the only thing she could think to do, and she did it well, and she thought afterward that she’d probably looked calm, and she had not been calm at any point.
Because here was the thing about it. It was a good idea, and it was the right amount of money, and it would keep somebody’s grandmother alive in ten years, and standing in that hall there was not a person who could argue against it and everybody knew it.
And he had made her the reason. In front of Dot and Frank and Marla and Walt, in front of the people she served dinner to on Fridays, in a room where she had sat through forty years of drain commissioner reports, he had put her nearly dying on the table like a line item.
It was not a lie. That was what made it unforgivable. Every word of it was true, and he had spent it.
The chairman cleared his throat and asked for a motion and somebody moved to table it for the attorney to look at, and somebody else seconded, and people started talking, and under the noise Frank Dietz leaned over and said, “Well, hell, Talia,” in a voice full of something she could not use.
She stood up.
The room noticed her stand. She had not planned to stand and had no idea what she was going to say until she heard herself say it.
“Mr. Chairman.”
“Mrs. Lassiter.”
“You should take the generators,” she said.
“Every one of them. Don’t let anybody in this room vote against a good thing because they’re embarrassed on my account.
” She had one hand on the back of the chair in front of her and she made it let go.
“But I want it in the minutes that I was not asked. I found out what my name was going to be used for at the same minute all of you did.”
She heard somebody behind her say oh under their breath.
“I’ve been in this hall my whole life,” she said. “I’d like to be able to come back to it.”
Then she walked out, up the center aisle, past her husband, without looking at him, and she got the door open and got out into the cold and made it around the corner of the building before she had to stop and put her hand flat on the block wall.
* * *
He came out about two minutes later. He must have gone straight for the side door.
“Talia.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t think—”
“You did think.” She turned around. “That’s the thing.
You sat in your truck at five in the morning for two months not pushing me, and I thought — I actually thought — okay, something’s different in there.
And then you get one good idea and you can’t hold it for one day. You couldn’t come to me first.”
“You wouldn’t have taken the meeting.”
“No, I wouldn’t have.”
“So then it doesn’t get—”
“Then it doesn’t get done my way, Seth, and you’d have had to sit with that.” Her breath was going up white between them. “You could have asked the board and never said my name. It would have been the same generators. Every single one of them would still get installed.”
He opened his mouth. Then he shut it.
“You wanted them to know why,” she said.
“…Yes.”
“Why?”
He stood in the parking lot of the fire hall with his hat in his hand and he did not have a good answer, and to his credit he didn’t manufacture one.
“Because I wanted somebody to say it out loud,” he said.
“Because for two months I’ve been sitting in a truck in a village where everybody already knows, and nobody will say it to me, and I think I wanted to be — I wanted it said in a room.
By me. So it’s not something people mouth at each other in the Mercantile. ”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“That’s for you,” she said. “Not for me.”
“I know,” he said. “I worked that out about four seconds after I sat down.”
* * *
She should have gone home.