Chapter 15
He came in the front door at eight o’clock on the first Thursday in August, into a full room.
Which was the point. She had thought about it for six days and that was the whole of the design: not at five in the morning, not from a truck, not in an empty house.
At eight on a Thursday in August with every table in the Tierney House sat and Dot working the floor and forty people who had known Talia Tierney her entire life turning around to look.
The room did the thing rooms do. A little dip, then back up, louder.
She came out of the kitchen with her apron still on and met him halfway across her own floor.
“You’re on time,” she said.
“I’ve been in the truck since seven.”
“I know. Everyone knows. Frank Dietz came in and told me.”
She put him at the long window table, her grandfather’s, the one built out of a single piece of hull planking, which Dot had held all night on instructions and had been unbearable about.
“Sit there,” she said. “I’ll be an hour and a half.”
“Take two.”
And she watched him from the pass for most of it.
He did not look at his phone once. He talked to Dot for a few minutes when she brought the bread and made her laugh twice.
He got up at one point and helped a woman from Ann Arbor get a high chair out from behind the coat rack, and did it badly, and the woman thanked him and he said something self-deprecating and sat back down.
Frank Dietz came over and shook his hand, which the whole room saw.
Walt Ostrom came over and did not, which the whole room also saw, and then came back twenty minutes later on his way out and put a hand on Seth’s shoulder for about a second and kept walking, and Talia had to go into the walk-in.
That is how a village does it. Nobody votes. It just goes around, table by table, over the course of an evening, and at the end of it a thing has been decided that no one said.
She took two.
* * *
At half past ten she untied the apron and hung it on the hook by the service door and came out and sat down across from him with two glasses and the bottle her father had kept for weddings, which had about four inches left in it and had been opened in February.
The room was down to a dozen. Somebody had the radio on low. Cody was singing in the dish pit.
“All right,” she said. “I’m going to say a lot of things and I’ve written none of it down, which is a first this year.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t say okay. You say okay and then you sit there taking it, and that was right for July and it’s not right now.
” She poured two inches into each glass.
“I need you to actually be in this conversation. You’re allowed to disagree with me.
I’d like it if you did at least once, because if you sit there agreeing with everything I say I’m going to think I’m still talking to a man doing penance, and I’ve got no use for one of those. ”
He looked at her for a second.
“That’s the first thing you’ve said to me since February that scared me,” he said.
“Good. Drink that.”
* * *
“Here’s where I am,” she said.
“I’m not going to hand you a list of terms. I had one.
I wrote it at this table in July and there were six things on it and I read it again on Sunday and it was a parole sheet, and I’m not running a probation and I’m not going to be your supervisor for the next thirty years.
That’s not a marriage, that’s a job, and I already have one. ”
“Okay—” He caught himself. “Go on.”
“So here’s the shape of it instead, and it’s not conditions, it’s a description of what I’m actually offering, and you can tell me if you want it.
“One. I live here. Not for a year, not until we sort something out. This building is mine and this room is mine and the thing I do is run it, and I’m going to be doing it when I’m sixty-eight.
If you want to be married to me you’re going to be married to a woman who leaves the house at four in the morning five days a week and smells like a fryer at Christmas. ”
“I know what you do.”
“You didn’t for eight years.”
He took that. “No. I didn’t.”
“Two. Nobody handles me. Not your office, not a partner, not a woman on a phone, not you. If there is a thing about my life to be decided, I am in the room, and if you can’t get me into the room then the thing doesn’t get decided.
” She turned the glass on the table. “That’s not me punishing you for the generator.
That’s the one I’d have asked for in year three if I’d had any sense. ”
“That one I’ve got,” he said. “That one I’ve had since March.”
“Three.” She stopped, and made herself do it properly. “I’m not going to be careful with you.”
“What?”
“Your mother’s been careful for forty-seven years.
She told me on the phone she couldn’t tell me what she’d have been.
” Talia looked at him across her grandfather’s table.
“I’ve watched what that does to a woman and I’m not going to do it.
If I’m angry you’re going to hear about it that day.
If I think you’re sliding back into the man who sends people, I’ll say so at the time, in plain words, and it won’t be a crisis, it’ll be a Tuesday. ”
“Good.”
“You say good now.”
“No, I mean it.” He put the glass down. “Talia, the whole thing — the entire thing — is that for a year and a half nobody in my life told me anything true and I didn’t notice. If you’re angry at me on a Tuesday I’ll take a Tuesday over another February for the rest of my life.”
* * *
“Now you,” she said.
“Me what?”
“You’ve sat in a truck outside this building for six months and you’ve never once told me what you want.
You said it in July, once, in the dark, and then you went back to being careful.
So say it here, with your face where I can see it, and be greedy about it.
I mean that. I want to hear a man want something. ”
He was quiet for a second, and then he did it, and she was glad she’d asked.
“I want to come home,” he said. “Not to this building — I mean I’d live in a shed, that’s not what I’m saying.
I want there to be somewhere that’s home and for you to be in it and for me to be a person who comes back to it, every night, whether or not anything’s wrong.
That’s the whole of it. I’ve had a year and a half of a life where coming home was a thing I did if there was a reason, and I want a reason to stop being the qualification. ”
“All right.”
“And I want to be in the room, too.” He said it more carefully.
“That’s my one. You said disagree with you and I’m not disagreeing, but I want it going both directions.
I’ve been so far outside your life this year that I found out from a fish-sandwich conversation that Walt Ostrom had told you about the hill.
I don’t want to be handled either. If you’re deciding something, I’d like to be there. ”
Talia looked at him.
“That’s fair,” she said. “That one’s easier than you think. I’ve spent five months being the only person in my own life and it’s exhausting and I’d like to stop.”
“And there’s a fourth thing,” she said, “and it’s the one I’ve been putting off since Tuesday, so I’m going to do it badly.”
“Go on.”
“I want you at this table on Thursdays.” She turned the glass.
“Not helping. Not in the kitchen — you’d be a liability in that kitchen and we both know it.
At this table, in the room, on a Thursday, where the village can see you, for the rest of your life.
Because in nine years you came to my father’s dining room exactly twice and both times it was a board dinner, and I’m not going to be married to a man who doesn’t know what I do. ”
Seth sat back.
“That’s not a condition,” he said. “That’s a Thursday.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all night.”
“No, I mean—” He rubbed his face. “Talia, I thought you were going to make me earn something. I’ve spent since July working out what I’d say when you did. I had it ready.”
“What was it?”
“Yes,” he said. “Whatever it was. That was the whole speech. It was a very short speech.”
She laughed, and he did, and Dot Feddema walked past with an armload of linen and said, “About time,” which set them both off again.
“And one more.”
“Go on.”
“I want the board fixed.”
She blinked.
“What?”
“The board by the sink,” he said. “It’s an eighth of an inch proud and everybody who has ever cooked in that kitchen has caught a toe on it and you wouldn’t let anybody touch it because it was ours.
” He turned his glass around. “That house belongs to the county now. That board’s going to get walked on by people getting warm, and the first thing a county maintenance man is going to do is plane it flat, because it’s a trip hazard.
And I want it planed by us, before they do it, so it’s us that decided. ”
She sat there with her mouth slightly open.
“That’s the stupidest thing anybody’s said to me all year,” she said.
“Probably.”
“We can’t. It’s not ours. There’s a padlock on the gate.”
“I’ve got the key till the fifteenth.”
“Seth—”
“You said be greedy,” he said. “That’s what I’ve got. That’s my greedy thing.”
And Talia put her hand over her eyes and laughed until she had to put her head down on her grandfather’s table, and it was the first time she had laughed like that since a hallway with a piano in it in April, and when she came up she found she had made her decision somewhere in the middle of it without noticing.
* * *
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, yes.”
He went still.
“Say it properly,” he said. “I’m not going to assume anything ever again as long as I live.”
“Fair.” She put both hands flat on the table.
“Yes. I want to be married to you. Not on trial, not let’s see how it goes, not one day at a time — I’ve heard people say that and it’s a way of not deciding, and I’ve watched two women I love spend their lives not deciding.
” She held his eyes. “I’m deciding. I decided on the steps of that house at half past five in the morning and I’ve spent a week checking it and it hasn’t moved.
You’re my husband and I’d like you to come home. ”