Chapter 9
The generator crews came into the village the last week of May, because the township had voted the thing through in a room Talia was not in, which was the one favor Seth Lassiter ever did her without being asked twice.
Four trucks, eight men, and a schedule taped up in the Mercantile with every year-round address on it in order.
One of the men was Ed Coughlin.
He’d been servicing standby units on this shore for thirty years.
He had come to the Lassiter house twice a year for eight years, every spring and every fall, and he had sat at Talia’s kitchen table with a coffee and complained about his knees, and on the Wednesday of that week he came into the Tierney House at four in the afternoon looking for a phone charger and stopped dead when he saw her at the pass.
“Oh, hell,” he said.
“Hi, Ed.”
“Talia. Jesus. I have wanted to —” He took his hat off, which nobody does anymore. “I heard about it in the fire hall and I have not slept right since.”
“It’s not on you.”
“It is a little bit on me.”
“Ed.”
“No, listen.” He came up to the pass. “I’ve been trying to work out how to say this to you for three months and every way I say it in the truck sounds like I’m covering myself, so I’m just going to say it. I didn’t come in the fall.”
She had a leek in one hand and she put it down.
“What?”
“The fall service. October, I’d have been up.
I didn’t go.” He turned the hat around. “I got taken off the account. Whole thing — the house, the boathouse, the two rentals, all of it came off my board at the end of October and I figured you’d gone to somebody cheaper out of Traverse, which happens, it’s no hard feelings. ”
“Nobody went to anybody.”
“No,” Ed said. “I know that now.”
The room had gotten quiet around her, or she had.
“Who took you off.”
“It came out of the office. Property review, they called it, one of those things where somebody goes through and closes out every contract that isn’t load-bearing.
” He looked unhappy. “I called about it, because that unit’s a 2016 and the fuel solenoid on that series is a known thing, they all go, and I wanted it in somebody’s ear.
I got a woman on the phone. Polite as anything.
She said the property was being reviewed and the contract was closed and thank you for my service. ”
Talia’s own voice came out level, which surprised her.
“Did she have a name?”
“She did,” Ed said. “I wrote it on my board and I looked at it again the day I heard about you and I’ve been looking at it since.”
* * *
She did not do anything that night.
Bailey did not expect it, and Talia never entirely explained it. She ran a hundred and six covers, she counted the drawer, she slept four hours, and the next morning she made a phone call, and then another one, and then she went about her week.
It was not mercy and it was not restraint. It was that the county dinner was on the Saturday.
Bailey came at midnight and Talia told her, and Bailey went white and then red in about four seconds.
“I’ll go out there tonight.”
“You will not.”
“Tal, that woman cut the service on your house—”
“In a cost review. Which is what she’ll say, and she’ll be telling the truth, and there is not one person in this county who can prove she knew that unit had a bad solenoid.
” Talia was cutting leeks and did not look up.
“If I go out to a rented house on the Peninsula road at midnight and shout at her, I’m a woman who went out to a rented house at midnight and shouted.
That’s the story. That’s the whole story forever. ”
Bailey sat down on the crate.
“So what, then.”
“So Saturday.”
“What happens Saturday?”
“Ninety people,” Talia said, “in my dining room, with Ed Coughlin at table six.”
Bailey looked at her for a long moment and then made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
“Your father would be unbearable right now,” she said.
“My father,” Talia said, “would have done it at the fish course.”
* * *
The Leelanau County dinner has been held on the last Saturday in May since 1958, and for forty of those years it was held in the Tierney House, and for the last eight it had been in the fire hall with the tables in the truck bay.
In January the committee had booked the fire hall. In April they had come to Talia, hats in hand, and asked whether she’d take it back.
Ninety people. The whole shore. The township board, the road commission, the two supervisors, the drain commissioner, the men who plow, the women who do the food pantry, and the people who own what there is to own out here — including, that year, a Chicago development outfit that had bought the old Redmond orchard and wanted very much to be liked.
They sat at table seven. Six of them.
And the woman they had hired in April to run their Michigan side, who would not start in Chicago until July, and who was extremely good at her job, sat at their right hand in a green dress.
Talia had known since Tuesday. Renata’s mother did the seating chart.
* * *
She worked the room the way her father had worked a room.
That is not a figure of speech. There is a way of moving through ninety people with a towel over your shoulder, stopping at every table for exactly as long as the table needs and not one second longer, and her father had done it for thirty years and she had watched him do it from the time she could see over the pass.
There is a lot of talk in this county about that night and most of it is wrong in one particular way, which is that people remember it as a thing Talia Lassiter did to Emerson Roche. It was not. It was a thing she did in front of ninety of her neighbors, and the ninety were the point.
She had worked it out on the Wednesday standing at her ranges, and it had come down to one question: who is in the room.
If she said it to Emerson alone, it was two women in an argument and whoever told it best won. If she said it in Traverse City, it was a scene. If she wrote it down anywhere it became a document and her whole marriage had nearly died of documents.
But at a county dinner, in the building her family had fed this shore out of for four generations, with the drain commissioner at table two and Ed Coughlin at table six and every person present having spent a night in February either cold or looking for her — there she was not making an accusation.
She was answering a question the whole room had been carrying since the storm, which was why didn’t that generator run.
That is the difference.
Jared Soto was at table five with his sister and her husband, because Jared Soto is at everything, and Talia put a hand on his shoulder on the way past, as she did with everybody and felt the whole of table five register it.
She knew what she had done about a second later.
In a village that size you cannot touch a man’s shoulder in front of ninety people without it being an item, and by Monday it would be one, and the worst of it was that a part of her had known that going in and had done it anyway — not to be seen, exactly, but not entirely not.
He looked up at her with no idea at all.
“Whitefish is unbelievable,” Jared said.
“It’s the same whitefish you’ve been eating your whole life.”
“Yeah, but you cooked it.”
Talia went on down the row with her ears hot, furious at herself, and thought: that is a thing I will have to be honest about later, and I will not enjoy it.
She did the far side first. Then the middle. She got to table seven at twenty past eight, between the fish and the pie, when a room is at its loudest and everybody is turned in their chair.
“Evening,” she said. “Everything all right over here?”
Five of them said lovely, wonderful, best meal in the county. The man at the head — Doyle, the one who’d bought the orchard — said something enthusiastic about the morels.
Emerson Roche looked up at her and said, “It’s very good. Thank you.”
Nothing in her face at all. Talia gave her that. It was a remarkable piece of work.
“Mr. Doyle,” Talia said. “Can I ask you something, since you’re new out here?”
“Please.”
“Did anybody tell you what happened in February?”
The table went pleasant and attentive.
“The ice storm,” Doyle said. “We heard. Five nights, wasn’t it? Extraordinary.”
“Six out here. Town got it back sooner.” She shifted the towel on her shoulder.
“The reason the township’s putting a generator into every house on this shore is that I spent three nights of it in a house that had one and it didn’t run, and then I walked two miles in the dark and ended up in a ditch on the county road, and the woman who found me is sitting at table four. ”
“My God,” said somebody’s wife.
“It’s a small place. Everybody here knows it. I’m only telling you because you’re new and it’s going to come up.” Talia let that sit for the right length of time. “The part nobody knows is why the generator didn’t run.”
* * *
She did not look at Emerson. Not once, not yet.
“The fuel solenoid,” she said. “It’s a known fault on that model. It’s the first thing the service man checks and he’d have caught it in October.” She turned her head slightly, toward the far side of the room. “Ed, you want to tell them, or shall I?”
Ed Coughlin was at table six with his wife and he had been waiting for it since he sat down.
“I never went in October,” he said, into a room that had started, table by table, to go quiet. “I was taken off that account at the end of the month. I called about it because I knew what that solenoid does, and I got told the property was under review and the contract was closed.”
“Who told you, Ed?”
He said the name.
He said it plainly, without relish, in the flat voice of a man who has driven that road for thirty years, and it went across ninety people in a dining room like a dropped tray.
* * *
Emerson Roche did not move.
Talia turned to her then, and only then.
“You cancelled the service on my house in October,” she said. “That’s one.”
“Talia—” said Doyle, half up out of his chair, not yet knowing what he was objecting to.