Chapter 13
The whole county told her not to.
That is the part she thinks about now, years on, when people ask her about that summer and expect a story about a woman being talked into something.
Nobody talked her into anything. Every single person who loved her stood in a doorway that July and told her to walk away, and most of them were right on the evidence, and she did it anyway.
Bailey first, because Bailey is always first.
“You slept with him.”
“Yes.”
“Tal.”
“I’m not going to lie to you about it and I’m not going to be ashamed of it in my own kitchen,” Talia said. “I wanted to. I did. It’s done.”
Bailey put both hands flat on the pass and looked at them for a while.
“I had your head in my lap,” she said.
“I know.”
“That’s the only card I’ve got and I’m going to keep playing it, because it’s the true one.
I had your head in my lap in a ditch at ten past six in the morning and you were the color of a dishrag and I’m going to be angry about it for the rest of my life, and I don’t care if he gives the county his house, his truck, and both his kidneys. ”
Talia said nothing.
“Do you actually want me to stop?”
Talia thought about it properly, because Bailey deserved that.
“No,” she said. “Don’t stop. I need somebody in the room who won’t.”
Bailey nodded once and went and got a beer after all, and drank about half of it.
“Can I say the other thing?”
“There’s another thing?”
“There’s always another thing.” She picked at the label. “I’m scared of what happens to me if you go back.”
Talia put down the towel.
“What?”
“I’ve been the person who’s angry on your behalf since February.
That’s been my whole job. I’m good at it and I like it and I’ve been doing it in the fire hall and at the bar and at my own kitchen table, and if you take him back I have to stop, and I don’t know what I am after that.
” Bailey said it to the bottle. “So when I tell you he’s not good enough, some of that’s the truth and some of it’s me not wanting to hand the thing back. ”
“Bailey.”
“I’m not saying ignore me. I’m saying weight it properly. You’re the only one who was in that house.”
Talia came round the pass and sat down on the crate next to her, and the two of them sat there in the kitchen with the ovens ticking, thirty-eight and forty, in a building they had both worked in as teenagers.
“For the record,” Talia said, “if I take him back you are going to be exactly as angry and exactly as loud, and I’m going to need you to be, and nothing about that is going to change.”
“Yeah?”
“You’ll be at my table at Christmas telling him about the ditch until one of you dies.”
“Well,” Bailey said, and drank. “That’s something.”
* * *
Cheryl second, on the telephone, twice.
The first call was the week after she’d come to the dining room, and it was almost kind. The second one was not.
“You’re going to go back to him.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You do know. I could hear it in you in that chair.” Cheryl let a beat go by. “I want to say a thing and then I won’t say it again, because I have no right to it and it’s the only thing I have.”
“Say it.”
“I stayed,” Cheryl said. “That’s all. I stayed, and the man was not cruel, and the years were mostly pleasant, and I would not have called it a bad life.
And I have spent the last five months realizing that I have no idea what I’d have been.
Not a single idea, Talia. Seventy years old and I could not tell you what I’d have been. ”
Talia stood in the kitchen with the phone against her ear.
“You could be angry at your son instead of at me,” she said, gently.
“Oh, I’m perfectly capable of both,” Cheryl said. “Goodbye, dear.”
* * *
Third, and worst, the village.
Not because they said anything. Because of what they’d stopped saying.
By the middle of July it had gone round that the truck had been in the street at one in the morning and Talia Lassiter had walked up to it in her apron.
In a place like that, that is the whole of the news.
No one was rude to her. Marla Cutter went slightly careful with her at the register, in a way she had not been careful since February, and Talia had known that woman thirty-eight years and could read her like a road sign.
Walt asked her, straight out, over a fish sandwich, because Walt is eighty-one and has stopped seeing the point.
“You taking him back?”
“I don’t know, Walt.”
He chewed.
“He’s better than he was,” he said. “I’ll say that for him. But better than he was isn’t the same as good, and you were in that ditch a long while.”
“Everybody keeps saying that.”
“Everybody was up all night looking for you.”
She had not known that.
She found out later it was fourteen trucks and forty people and half of them still had their coats on at noon the next day.
* * *
So she had a week of that, and at the end of it she did the arithmetic that mattered, which she did on the back of a delivery sheet, at the long window table, at one in the morning with the drawer counted.
What she had. A building, free and clear.
Four rooms upstairs full every night until October.
A room that did a hundred and forty on a Saturday.
Forty-one thousand dollars in the account since March.
Marilyn and Dot and Renata and Cody. A village that had carried her out of a ditch.
A man who had stood in a hallway in June and told her, straight, that she would have made a hell of a life without anybody.
What she wanted. That was the harder column and she sat at it a long time.
She wrote: I want to be married to him.
Then she looked at it, and crossed it out, and wrote the true one underneath:
I want to be married to a man who goes and looks.
And that was the whole thing. That was the entire five months on one line on the back of a delivery sheet, and she put the pencil down and sat in her own dining room and knew what she was going to ask for.
* * *
She went up the hill to tell him on the third Sunday in July.
He was not at the house anymore — there was nothing in the house, it had a county padlock on the gate by then and a fit-out contract starting in August. He was in two rooms over the old freight office at the end of the harbor road, which is a building with a scale house and a yard full of trailers and a smell of diesel that gets into everything.
She had never been there. She had to ask Frank Dietz where it was, which cost her about a day of privacy.
She had driven past that yard four hundred times in her life.
Everybody in the village has. It is the last building on the harbor road before the road stops being a road, and it has a scale house and a chain-link fence and a sign that has said LASSITER FREIGHT in the same eight-foot letters since her father was young.
What she had not known, and found out standing in the gravel at four in the afternoon in July, is that the freight yard is a place where people are pleased to see him.
There were two men in the shop with a trailer up on stands and one of them put his head out and said, “He’s upstairs,” and then, “You’re Talia,” in a tone that had nothing in it but friendliness.
“I am.”
“Huh,” the man said, and went back under the trailer.
She stood there a second.
Nine years. Nine years of being the Lassiter wife at every function in Grand Traverse County, and it had never occurred to her to come to the yard, because the yard was the part of it no one talked about — the old business, the embarrassing one, the one his father bought his way out of.
Forty-one people worked there. She could not have named one of them.
He came down the outside stairs in a T-shirt with a dish towel in his hand.
“Talia.”
“Are you going to ask me in or are we doing this in a truck yard?”
He asked her in.
Two rooms. A bed, a table, two chairs, a hotplate, a window looking at the scale house, and a box of his father’s papers he clearly had not opened. It was clean in the way a man’s rooms are clean when he is being careful with himself.
She sat in one of the two chairs.
“I’ve got a condition,” she said.
* * *
He put the towel down slowly, like a man who has been waiting five months for a sentence and is afraid of frightening it.
“Okay.”
“Don’t say okay yet. Hear the whole thing first, because if you say yes in the next four seconds I’m going to get up and leave.”
He shut his mouth.
“It isn’t money,” she said. “It isn’t the house. You’ve done the house and I’m not going to pretend it didn’t move me, but the house doesn’t buy this, and I think you know that or you’d have told me about it in June.”
“I know it doesn’t.”
“And it isn’t a promise. I don’t want a promise. I’ve had nine years of a man promising me things at the right moments.” She had her hands flat on her knees. “Here’s what it is.
“I’m going to tell you the three nights.
All of it, hour by hour, everything, start to finish — Friday at four when the ice came in, to ten past six on the Monday morning.
Every hour. What I did, what I ate, what I was thinking, what I did with my hands, what it was like in that back room at four in the morning on the Sunday, and what it was like lying in the ditch.
“And while I’m doing it you don’t get to fix any of it.
You don’t get to say sorry — not once, not at the end, not in the middle when it gets bad.
You don’t get to explain where you were.
You don’t get to hold my hand and you don’t get to leave the room and you don’t get to cry in a way that makes me stop and look after you.
” Her voice stayed level the entire way through, which she had practiced in a kitchen for two days.
“You sit there and you take it, and when I’m finished you say nothing at all. ”
He had gone white.
“And then,” Talia said, “it’s your turn.