Chapter 13 #2
“Seven weeks. Every dinner. Where you went and what you ate and who else was there. Every single thing you told that woman that you should have been telling me — the board, the floor, your father, whatever it was, all of it, said out loud to my face. Nothing softened, nothing rounded off, nothing left out because you think it’ll hurt me. I’ll decide what hurts me.
“And I want the Saturday. In your own words. What Ian said to you, what you said back, what she said in the doorway, what you said after that, and exactly how long you thought about it before you asked about the numbers.”
The room was quiet. Out in the yard somebody was moving a trailer.
“That’s the condition,” she said. “That’s all of it.”
* * *
He did not answer for a long time.
When he did, it was not what she had braced for, and she had braced for a dozen different things.
“How long do you think it’ll take?” he said.
“What?”
“Hour by hour. Three nights.” He was looking at the table. “That’s — Talia, that’s most of a night.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’m not —” He put a hand over his mouth and took it away again. “I’m asking because I want to get it right, not because I’m looking for a way out. Where do you want to do it?”
And she said the thing she had decided in the kitchen and had not been sure she could say out loud.
“The house.”
He looked up.
“The county takes it at the end of the month,” she said.
“The power’s off at the meter. There’s nothing in it — no furniture, no lights, nothing to look at.
I want to do it in that house in the dark before it stops being ours, because that’s where it happened and because I don’t want either of us to have anything to do with our eyes. ”
Something went across his face that she could not read at the time and understood about a week later.
“Yes,” he said.
“You’re allowed to say no.”
“I know I am.” He put both hands on the table. “I’m not going to. But I want to say one thing now, before, because I won’t be allowed to say anything after and I don’t want you sitting in the dark wondering.”
“Say it.”
“I’ve wanted you to make me hear it since February,” he said.
“I asked you for it in March and you said no and you were right to, because I wasn’t ready and I was asking for me.
I’ve been ready since about April and I haven’t asked again because it isn’t mine to ask for.
” He stopped and got his voice back under him.
“I’m not doing this because you’ve set me a test. I’d have done it in March.
I’m glad you’re finally going to let me. ”
Talia sat very still in a wooden chair in two rooms over a truck yard.
“One more thing,” she said, from the chair, “because I’ve thought about it and it’s not fair otherwise.
“You’re allowed one.”
“One what?”
“One question, at the end. After I’ve said mine and after you’ve said yours.
” She had her hands flat on her knees again.
“I’m not going to sit in a house for a whole night taking a thing from you and not give you anything back.
So you get one question, and I’ll answer it honestly, whatever it is, and then we go home. ”
Seth looked at the table for a long moment.
“I don’t want one,” he said.
“You might by four in the morning.”
“No, I—” He stopped and started again. “Talia, I’ve had one question since February and I already know the answer and I don’t need you to say it in a cold room at four in the morning.”
“Ask it anyway. That’s the deal.”
He shook his head slowly and did not argue, and she left it there, because she had said what she meant to say and there was nothing in her that wanted to win it.
“The last Thursday of the month,” she said.
“I’ll be there.”
“Eight o’clock.”
“I’ll be there at eight.”
She stood up and got as far as the door and then turned around, because there was one more thing and she was not going to be the kind of woman who left it unsaid.
“Seth.”
“Yeah.”
“If you get through the whole of it,” she said, “I’m not promising you anything. You understand that? There’s no yes at the end of this. There’s just — after it, I’ll know something I don’t know now, and so will you, and then we’ll see.”
“I understand.”
“You could do all of it and I could still say no.”
“Talia.” He had not moved from the table. “I gave away the house knowing you’d never hear about it. I’m not doing arithmetic anymore.”
* * *
She did not sleep that night, or the next, or particularly well for the ten days after.
She ran the restaurant. It was what got her through July.
Her father used to say that a kitchen will hold anything you bring into it.
It isn’t true, but it is true enough between four in the morning and midnight, which is most of a life.
A hundred and fifty-two on the Saturday.
Two rooms turned over twice. Renata got her hand caught in the slicer and needed four stitches and was back Wednesday.
But she would come up at four in the morning out of nothing at all, flat awake, with her heart going, and lie in her father’s room and hear herself begin it.
Friday. The ice started a little after four, and by five I could hear the trees.
And then she would have to get up and go down to the kitchen and do something with her hands until it was light, because she had understood, somewhere in the second week, what she had asked for.
She had spent five months keeping the three nights in a box where no one could get at them. It was the one thing that was entirely hers. Nobody could argue with it, nobody could explain it away, nobody had been there.
And on the last Thursday in July she was going to take it out and hand it to the man who caused it, in the dark, and never be able to put it back.
She got the worst of it on the Tuesday before, at half past four in the morning, sitting on the bottom stair with a dish towel in her hands.
“Oh, God,” she said. “What have I done.”