Chapter 7 #2
And he saw her catch it. That was the worst part. She watched him watch her put it away, and she watched him not say anything about it, and both of them looked at the drive for a while.
“This is a nice day,” he said, eventually. Carefully. Like a man setting something down on ice.
“Don’t.”
“Okay.”
They ate the rest of it without talking, and she looked at the lake, and about a hundred yards out a pair of mergansers were doing the thing mergansers do in April, and she found that she was enjoying herself and that enjoying herself had no floor under it.
Here is the trouble with sixteen days.
Grief you can hold. Anger you can hold; anger is portable, you can carry it into a room and set it down and pick it up on the way out.
What you cannot hold, over sixteen days, eight hours a day, in the same rooms, is dislike — because dislike is a thing you have to keep producing, and the body will not keep producing it for a man who is handing you the right tool before you ask.
She understood that on about day ten and it frightened her badly enough that she nearly stopped coming.
What she decided instead, driving down the county road that night, was the thing she would still defend: that she was not going to protect herself by pretending.
If she was going to end this marriage she was going to end it with her eyes open, knowing what she was giving up, and not by carefully arranging never to be in a room with him.
* * *
It poisoned on the Tuesday of the third week.
They were in the front bedroom pulling up subfloor, and she reached past him for the pry bar and her sleeve caught, and he steadied her elbow, and it was nothing at all, and for about two seconds it was very much not nothing.
She stepped back.
And to cover it — to cover it, and for no other reason — she said the first thing that came into her head, which was, “Do you remember when we did the floor in the kitchen?”
The second year. They’d pulled up the linoleum themselves because she’d wanted to and he’d taken a week off, an actual week, which he had never done before or since, and they had done the whole floor badly and lived with it, and there is a board by the sink that has been proud by an eighth of an inch since 2018 and every single person who has ever cooked in that kitchen has caught a toe on it.
“Yeah,” he said. He was smiling. “The board.”
“The board.”
“You still won’t let anybody fix the board.”
“No.”
And she was going to say something else — she had something, it was going to be funny — and instead she heard herself say:
“Did you tell her about the board?”
The room stopped.
He didn’t ask who. That told her.
He sat back on his heels in the wreck of the floor with a pry bar across his knees, and he looked at the wall, and she watched him decide to answer it honestly, and she would have given a great deal in that moment for him to have lied.
“Yes,” he said.
She put her hand on the doorframe.
“When.”
“I don’t know. February. January. It came up.” He stopped. “It wasn’t — Talia, it wasn’t a—”
“I’m not asking whether it was a something.” Her voice had gone completely flat and she could hear it and could not do anything about it. “I’m asking whether you sat in a restaurant and told a woman about my kitchen floor.”
He didn’t answer, which was the answer.
“That’s mine,” she said.
He did not argue.
“That’s mine, Seth. That’s a week in 2018. That’s a board by a sink. You didn’t have anything else to talk about? Nine years of this marriage and the thing you take out of your pocket to be charming with is the floor I wanted?”
“There isn’t anything I can say to that.”
“No, there isn’t.”
She stood in that doorway and felt the whole of it go through her again, worse than the window, because the window had been a picture and this was inside the house.
Every good thing they had ever made together was in his mouth somewhere.
Every one of them was available. The board, and the first winter, and the way her father talked, and whatever else, all of it handed across a table by lamplight to a woman who said the house was checked.
She got her coat.
“Talia—”
“I’m going to work.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“I’m going to work,” she said, “because I have somewhere to go.”
* * *
She sat in the truck in the drive for a while first, which she did not tell anybody.
What she had wanted to ask, and did not, was whether he had told Emerson Roche about the board fondly.
That was the whole of it. Not whether he had told her. Whether he had told her the way you tell a story you love — with both hands going, leaning in, taking twenty minutes over it.
Because if he had, then the best week of Talia’s marriage had been handed across a table in a restaurant in the village she grew up in, and the woman across that table had got the good version, and Talia had been living in the kitchen with the actual board for eight years without either of them mentioning it once.
She did not ask. She started the truck and went to work.
She came back Thursday.
Because the house still needed doing, and because she had said she’d do it, and because whatever else was true she was not going to be a woman who quit halfway through a job.
They finished the north wall on the Saturday, which was the first of May.
It was warm enough by then to have the windows open, and the house smelled like wet lumber and fresh air instead of a basement, and the fans were off for the first time in two weeks, and the quiet in a house with no fans running is a particular quiet.
She went down the back stairs to get her coat and he was on them.
Sitting, three steps up, in the dark of the stairwell, with his forearms on his knees, not doing anything at all.
“Sorry,” he said, and started to get up.
“It’s fine.”
He got up anyway, and she came down, and the back stairs at that house are thirty inches wide with a turn in them, and there was no version of that where they didn’t end up a foot apart on the same tread.
Neither of them moved.
She could smell the dust on him. His shirt was open two buttons and there was plaster in the gray at his temple and he had a cut on the back of his hand from the subfloor that she had put a bandage on herself on Tuesday, before the floor, before the question.
He looked at her mouth.
He did it for about a quarter of a second and then he looked at the wall, which was the most decent thing he had done since February, and which did not help at all, because she had already seen it and — this was the part she would take upstairs with her and lie in the dark with — she had already leaned.
Not much. An inch. Less than an inch.
Enough that her hand had come up and taken hold of the front of his shirt.
They stood on the back stairs of a gutted house with her fist in his shirt and neither of them breathing, and outside somebody’s dog was going, and the light through the little window on the landing was the long gold kind you get at the end of April.
“Talia,” he said. Not asking. Just her name, the way you’d say it to steady yourself.
She let go of his shirt.
She went down the last four steps and out through the kitchen and past the board by the sink and got in her truck, and she sat in the drive with both hands on the wheel for a good while before she could start it.