Chapter 10
She did not talk to him.
She had said it to Bailey in a room with forty people still in it — I’m going to have to talk to him — and then she had gone twelve days without doing it, because May turned into June and June is when this county wakes up.
The first of the summer people came the second week. Then the boats. Then the Friday when they did a hundred and thirty-one covers with four people in the kitchen and Marilyn burned her wrist to the bone on the salamander and would not go home.
Talia was working an eighteen-hour day and sleeping on top of the covers.
It was not avoidance. Or it was, and she would have told you so if you’d asked, and she’d have been telling the truth and also lying, which is a thing people can do.
The rooms were the thing that changed the arithmetic, and she had not expected that.
Jared had been right about it and she had spent two months telling him he was wrong.
Four rooms at a hundred and ninety a night from the Fourth, booked out through Labor Day, and the whole of it handled by a woman out of Northport who does three other places on the shore and charges a flat fee, and the money comes in whether or not anybody sits down to dinner.
That is what a restaurant is missing and always has been. A dining room is forty people who have to be persuaded, every night, forever. Four rooms upstairs is a floor under the whole building.
She sat down in the second week of June and did the year properly and found that if nothing went wrong she would have the walk-in, the hood, the dining room floor, and the roof over the private room paid for out of the summer, and be into next winter with money in the account and no note on anything.
Her father never had that. Not one year of it in thirty.
She sat at his table with his ledger open beside hers and had to go and stand in the walk-in for a minute, which is a family tradition.
June in that village is a different country.
From the second week the population goes up by a factor of nine and the whole shore turns into somewhere else.
The harbor fills. The Mercantile puts the rack of sunscreen out front and doubles the milk order.
There are cars on that street with Ohio plates and people walking down the middle of it at ten at night with ice cream, looking at the water, entirely happy, with no idea at all that four months ago every building they are looking at was dark.
Talia found she liked them. That surprised her; she had spent her twenties resenting summer people on principle.
But they came into her dining room and looked around it and said how long has this been here and she got to say since 1911, and it was shut for eight years and I opened it in March, and watch their faces do the thing faces do.
Eight years of being Mrs. Lassiter at galas in Traverse City where people asked her what she did and then looked over her shoulder while she answered.
Three months of being the woman whose room this is.
There is no contest.
* * *
Walt told her.
That was the whole of it, in the end. It did not come from Seth and it did not come from Bailey and it did not come out of an envelope.
It came from Walt Ostrom, eighty-one years old, at the pass on a Tuesday in the second week of June, waiting for a fish sandwich he was going to eat standing up because he never sits.
“Cold snap coming Thursday,” he said.
“In June?”
“Twenty-nine overnight, they’re saying. It’ll take my tomatoes.”
“Put a sheet on them.”
“I’ll put a sheet on them.” He turned his hat around. “Anyway. Your fella’ll be up.”
Talia had a knife in her hand and she kept it moving, because you do.
“What?”
“Lassiter. He’ll be up Thursday.” Walt said it the way you’d say the mail comes at noon. “He does the three of us any night it goes under thirty-two. Knocks on the door, waits till you open it, asks if the heat’s on and if you’ve got anybody coming, and goes.”
She put the knife down.
“Since when.”
Walt looked at her.
“Since February,” he said.
* * *
She got it out of him in pieces, because Walt Ostrom is not a man who understands that a thing is news.
It had started the week after. Not the week after the storm — the week after her, after the hospital, after she moved into the Tierney House. He had come up the county road on a Tuesday night in the last week of February, when it went to nine below, and knocked on Walt’s door at half past eight.
Walt had thought somebody died.
“I said, what do you want. He said, is your heat on. I said yes. He said, have you got somebody coming if it goes off. I said my daughter’s in Cadillac, which is two hours. He said okay and wrote something down and went to Ruthie’s and then to the Pelkeys’.”
“And then?”
“Then he came back Thursday. And the Saturday. Any night it’s under thirty-two.” Walt shrugged. “Four nights that week. Then March, he was up most of it. He’s put a phone number on all three of our refrigerators on a bit of tape.”
“Walt.”
“He fixed Ruthie’s back step in April,” Walt said. “Didn’t say anything about it. She went out for the paper and the step wasn’t broke anymore.”
Talia stood with both hands on the stainless.
“Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
Walt looked puzzled by the question.
“Well,” he said. “We figured you knew.”
* * *
She counted it out that night with the drawer half done, which is where she did most of her thinking that spring.
February the twenty-fourth, near enough, to the second week of June. Three and a half months. Every night under thirty-two, which in this county between February and May is — she stopped counting at sixty.
Sixty nights of a man driving two miles up a dark road to knock on three doors and ask a question and leave.
He had never mentioned it. Not at the pass at five in the morning through all of March. Not on the tailgate in the sun. Not on the back stairs. Not in the street when she took his roof crew off her building and told him he decided things about her without being in the room.
He had sat in a truck outside her restaurant for three months and never said by the way, I have been driving up the hill.
And the thing that took the legs out from under her, sitting on a crate at midnight with the twenties in her hand, was not the generosity of it.
It was the shape.
Is your heat on. Have you got somebody coming.
That is the question. That is the entire question, the one that was not asked in a conference room doorway in February, the one that would have taken four seconds and changed everything, and he had been driving up a hill sixty times in the dark to ask it of three old people who were not her and who could not tell her about it because they assumed she knew.
She sat there for a long while.
“Oh, you idiot,” she said, to nobody, and she could not have told you which of the two of them she meant.
She went out the next morning and drove it herself.
Not to check on him. She drove up the county road at seven in the morning in June with the windows down and she did the two miles slowly and looked at it, which she had not done since the night she walked it.
The ditch is not dramatic. It is a five-foot bank of grass with a fence line past it and a culvert, and in June it is full of daisies, and there is nothing to see and there has never been anything to see, and she sat in the truck at the spot with the engine running for a few minutes.
Then she went on up to the gate. The house had scaffolding on the north end and a dumpster in the drive and two trucks she did not recognize, and she did not stop.
Walt’s place. Then Ruthie’s, which has a back step that is plainly newer than the rest of the house, sitting there in the sun being newer, with nobody to mention it to.
Then the Pelkeys’. She turned around in their drive and came back down.
* * *
She did not acknowledge it.
That was deliberate and she knew it was deliberate.
He came Thursday, because it went to twenty-nine.
She knew because Walt told her Friday, cheerfully, and because she had stood at the window of the front room above her own dining room at nine o’clock and watched the F-250 go up the county road, and she had stood there again at twenty past nine and watched it come back down and not stop.
He did not know she was at the window. He had no reason to look up.
She stood there a while after the taillights had gone.
The hill in June is not the hill in February. You cannot see the house from the village in summer — the leaf comes in and the whole ridge closes up and there is nothing up there but green going black as the light goes.
But she knew where it was, and she stood in the window of her father’s room and traced the road in her head: the bend, the culvert, the stretch with the fence line, the drive.
Three doors. Twenty minutes, probably, if you do it properly and wait for each one to open.
Somewhere up there tonight an eighty-one-year-old man had put a cardigan on and come to his door and said yes, the heat’s on, and gone back to his television, and thought nothing of it whatsoever, because by June it had been going on so long that it had stopped being remarkable to anybody except the one person nobody had told.
She stayed at the window a long while after that.
She was thirty-eight years old and she had not been touched since February, and she had spent every one of those months finding out that she was better at her own life than she had known.
None of that had done a single thing about the fact that she could still hear the way he said her name on a staircase.
That is the part she could not get anybody to understand, and did not try.
Wanting him was not weakness and it was not forgiveness.
It was simply true, the way the harbor was out there in the dark whether or not she looked at it, and pretending otherwise had been the work of five months and she was tired of the work.
She went and sat on the edge of the bed for a while.
Bailey found out on the Saturday, because Frank Dietz found out on the Friday, and there is no gap between those two facts.