Chapter 7
The village took about four days to decide what it thought.
That is fast for out here. Normally a thing like that sits for a month. But there was a board vote coming and a hundred and forty people had been in that hall, and by Saturday Talia could not go into the Mercantile without somebody having a position.
The positions came in three kinds and she got all three inside one week.
Frank Dietz’s kind, which was that the man had stood up in a room and said the true thing out loud and how many of those do you get.
Marla Cutter’s kind, which was quieter and went: well, it’s the least he could do, said in a voice with a floor under it.
And Dot Feddema’s kind, which Talia got on the Sunday, leaning on the pass at ten in the morning with her coat still on.
“I’m going to say it once and then I’ll be done,” Dot said.
“Go ahead.”
“My Ken did a thing like that. Not the same, I’m not saying the same.
But he stood up in front of people and said a true thing about himself, and I cried for two days and everybody told me what a wonderful man he was.
” Dot looked at her steadily. “Then we went home and it was Tuesday, and he was exactly who he had been on the Monday, and the difference is that now I couldn’t say anything, because he’d been so brave. ”
Talia put down the order book.
“Dot—”
“That’s all. That’s the whole thing. Watch what he does on a Tuesday.” She buttoned her coat. “Now where do you want the linen, because I’m not having it in the back hall again.”
* * *
The thaw came the third week of April and the house came apart on a Thursday.
She heard about it from the insurance adjuster, which was its own particular humiliation, because the insurance adjuster assumed she lived there and Talia had to say I’m at a different address to a stranger on the phone at nine in the morning.
Two lines in the north wall had frozen in February and held. That’s what pipes do — they split and the ice plugs the split, and the whole thing sits there looking fine until the day it gets above forty and stays there.
It ran for most of a day before anybody noticed.
“It’s in the ceiling of the dining room,” the adjuster said. “It’s in the floor of two bedrooms. It’s in the library. It’s a total on the plaster and we’re going to want to talk about the floors.”
“Talk to my husband.”
“Ma’am, the policy is in both names and I’m required—”
“Then talk to both of us,” she said, and hung up, and stood with her hand over her eyes in the middle of her own kitchen while Marilyn broke down a case of chickens and pretended not to be there.
* * *
There is no getting out of a wet house.
That’s the thing she had not understood when she said, in February, I don’t live there.
A house in both names that has had two thousand gallons through it is not a thing you can decline.
Somebody has to be in it. Somebody has to pull the wet insulation before the mold goes, and somebody has to decide about the floors, and somebody has to stand there with a man in a respirator and say yes or no about a wall.
The restoration outfit could not start for nine days.
Nine days is the whole ballgame in a wet house. Everybody in this county knows that.
So on the Saturday morning, on her day off, Talia Lassiter drove two miles up the county road for the first time since February and turned in at her own gate.
Seth’s truck was already there.
He had the tailgate down and a wet-vac in the back and a case of box cutters, and he was in a Carhartt and work boots, and he had — she stopped the truck and looked at it — he had brought a hundred feet of six-mil plastic and a staple gun and a box of N95s, which meant somebody had told him what to bring, and knowing him, he had asked.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” he said.
“I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I can go.”
“It’s your house.”
“It’s yours too.”
They stood in the drive.
“How bad,” she said.
“Bad.”
“Show me.”
* * *
It was bad.
The dining room ceiling had come down in one piece and was lying on the table like a dropped sheet.
The library carpet squelched. The whole north side of the house smelled like a basement and a wet dog and, underneath that, faintly, of woodsmoke, because the stove in the back room had been running for three days in February and a house keeps that.
She stood in the doorway of the back room.
The couch was still where she had slept on it.
The three blankets were still on it, and the dog quilt, folded the way she folds things, and the stove door was open, and there was a ring of ash on the hearth where she had swept it out one-handed with a dustpan on the Sunday morning before she walked to the village.
Nobody had touched it. In two months, no one had gone in that room.
She heard him come up behind her and stop.
“I couldn’t,” he said.
“No.”
“I’ve been in this house maybe six times since February and I’ve never once—” He stopped. “It’s stupid.”
“It isn’t.”
She went in and stripped the couch herself. He didn’t offer to do it and she was grateful in a way she resented.
The dog quilt went in the bag last.
It is not a dog quilt. There has never been a dog in that house.
It is a quilt Talia’s grandmother made out of shirt cotton in about 1961 and it has a dog on it, badly, in brown, and her father called it the dog quilt and so did everybody after him, and it went into a contractor bag in the drive because it had been under a woman for three nights in a house at forty degrees and then sat in that room until the end of April.
She stood at the tailgate with it in her hands for a second.
“Do you want—” Seth started.
“No.”
“Okay.”
“It’s a quilt with a dog on it,” she said, “and I’m not going to be a person who keeps a thing because of what it means,” and put it in the bag and pulled the tie.
* * *
They worked.
That’s the part that could not be explained afterward to Bailey, who wanted to know why she hadn’t paid two men to do it, which was a reasonable question with no answer in it.
They worked for sixteen days. Eight hours a day, nine on the Saturdays.
They cut plaster in four-foot squares and carried it out in bags.
They pulled two hundred feet of wet insulation out of the north wall and stacked it in the drive until the roll-off came.
They ran fans. They moved furniture up out of the library, which meant carrying a piano upended on a dolly through a doorway three quarters of an inch too narrow, which took forty minutes and two arguments and ended with both of them sitting on the floor of the hall laughing so hard she had to put her head between her knees.
That was day four. She thought about day four for a long time afterward.
She was better at it than he was. That was the other thing.
She had grown up in a building that was always failing somewhere.
She knew how to cut plaster so it came off the lath instead of crumbling; she knew to score the paper on the insulation; she knew, without being told, to open the windows on the lee side and shut them on the weather side so the fans moved something. Twice she took a tool out of his hand.
He let her. He did what she told him. He said “yeah, okay” about thirty times a day and did not once explain anything to her, and on the Wednesday of the second week she caught herself saying, “Hand me the — the thing, the—” and he had it in her hand before she finished, because they had been married for nine years and there were some things the affair had not touched at all.
She hated that more than she could account for.
They did not talk about February. Not for two weeks.
That was not an agreement either. It simply turned out that there is a way two people can work in a wrecked building where the work does all the talking — lift, other end, watch the nail, I’ve got it — and that if you do that for eight hours a day you go home hoarse and you have not said one true thing.
She noticed on about day six that she was doing it on purpose.
She noticed on about day nine that so was he.
The difference was that she was protecting herself and he was obeying her.
He had not asked her a question about herself since the morning she told him no, and she understood on the second Tuesday, up to her elbows in wet insulation, that he was never going to ask again — that he had decided somewhere that asking was a thing he had used up, and that if she wanted to tell him she would have to arrive at it entirely on her own.
It was the single most infuriating act of restraint she had ever been on the receiving end of.
“You can talk, you know,” she said, at one point, into a wall cavity.
“Can I.”
“You’re allowed to say words.”
“Last time I said words in this county a hundred and forty people looked at you,” Seth said, and went on cutting.
She laughed. It came out of her before she could get a hand up, and it was a short ugly bark of a laugh in a wrecked bedroom, and neither of them acknowledged it, and she thought about it in bed that night for longer than she would have liked.
* * *
The old rhythms came back like a song you didn’t know you still had.
The shorthand. The way she’d say half a sentence and he’d answer the other half. The way he’d start humming without knowing he was doing it and she’d tell him to stop and he’d stop for a minute.
The way they worked a room. God, they were good at it.
Nine years of galas and board dinners and the Christmas thing, the two of them splitting a room down the middle without a word, and it turned out it worked just the same on a wet house — she’d take the north end and he’d take the south and they’d meet in the middle and it would be done.
On the second Friday he brought lunch and they ate it sitting on the tailgate in the sun with their masks around their necks, and he told her a long ridiculous story about Ian Teague and a boat, with both hands going, and she laughed before she caught it.
She caught it about half a second late.