Chapter 15 #2
He did not say anything for a moment.
Then he said, “Okay,” and his voice came apart in the middle of two syllables, and Dot Feddema, who was wiping a table six feet away and had abandoned all pretense of not listening, made a noise into her cloth.
* * *
“One more thing,” she said, “and then I want to stop talking.
“I’m not going to say we’re starting again, because we’re not.
I’m thirty-nine in November and you’re going to be forty-two and we’ve got nine years behind us and four months of this year that I wouldn’t wish on anybody, and none of that goes anywhere.
It’s in the account. The good years are in there too. ”
“Okay.”
“So we’re not starting again. We’re going on.
” She turned the empty glass around on her grandfather’s table.
“I’ve thought about this a lot and it’s the only part I’m sure of.
People kept telling me this spring that I’d know when I was ready to forgive you, like it was a door that opens.
It isn’t. I looked for it. There’s nothing there.
“What there is, is that I’ve watched you for six months and I know what you do on a Tuesday now, and I’d rather have the rest of my life with you than without you, and I’d have said that in a courtroom in March and it would have been a lie, and I’m saying it in my own dining room in August and it isn’t. ”
Seth put his hand flat on the table, palm up, and did not say anything, and she put hers in it.
“That’s the whole thing,” she said.
“That’s the whole thing,” he agreed.
She locked the front door at midnight herself.
Cody went out the back with his headphones on. Dot left last. She got as far as the doorway with her coat over her arm and stopped, and stood there a second with her back to the room.
“Well,” she said.
“Dot.”
“I’m not going to say anything.”
“You’ve been not saying anything for four hours.”
Dot Feddema turned around. She is seventy years old and she buried a husband she stayed careful with for thirty-one years, and she looked at Talia across twenty-two empty tables.
“You’ll hear me on a Tuesday,” she said. “That’s all. That’s the only thing I wanted and you’ve gone and thought of it yourself, so there’s nothing for me to say, is there.”
“No.”
“No.” She put her coat on properly. “Don’t let him touch that stove.”
And she went.
And then it was the two of them and twenty-two tables and one light on over the pass.
“Come up,” Talia said.
* * *
It was different, and she had known it would be, and she had not known in what direction.
In July it had been a wall coming down. This was not that. This was slow, and it was appallingly unguarded, and neither of them had anywhere to be at four in the morning for the first time since she could remember.
He undressed her in the front room with the window open on the street and the curtain moving and the harbor making its summer noise, and he did it the way he did everything now, which is to say he went and looked.
He stopped at her hands. He turned the right one over and put his mouth on the three fingertips where the new skin was, one after another, and she let him, and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say about it that was not smaller than the thing itself.
“You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t.”
“They’re not — it’s not a shrine, Seth, it’s a scar on my hand.”
“It’s not a shrine.” He laid her palm flat against his chest. “It’s yours. I’m just looking at it.”
She kissed him, then, properly, with her hands in his hair and both of them going down onto her father’s bed, and after that there was a while where neither of them said anything at all.
He was unhurried in a way he had never been in nine years of marriage, and she understood about halfway through that it was not technique and it was not penance.
He was not in a hurry because he was not going anywhere.
That was the whole of it. There was no dinner, there was no call, there was no ten o’clock.
There was a man in a bed in August with his whole night free and nothing in his head but her.
She said his name twice and the second time it did something to him and he stopped.
“What,” she said.
“Nothing. Say it again.”
“Seth.”
“God,” he said, into her throat.
She laughed, and then she wasn’t laughing, because he had moved his hand.
* * *
Afterward she lay half on top of him with the sheet somewhere around their knees, sweating, breathing, with the curtain going in and out at the window and a boat somewhere out past the point.
“I’ve got a delivery at seven,” she said.
“I know. You’ve got a delivery at seven every day of your life.”
“You’re going to have to get used to it.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
She lifted her head and looked at him.
“Don’t get sentimental about the fish,” she said. “It’s a truck. At seven. It’s not romantic.”
“Talia.”
“What.”
He had his hand in her hair and he was looking at the ceiling, and he was smiling, and she had not seen him smile like that — easy, at nothing, with his whole face — since some summer she could not place.
“It’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said.
* * *
Downstairs, at half past four, she came down the back stairs in his shirt and put the big pot on, because the pot goes on whether or not your life has changed.
He came down twenty minutes later with his hair wrecked, and stood in the middle of her kitchen, and looked around it properly for a while.
“What can I do,” he said.
She thought about giving him something small. The old answer. Nothing, go sit down.
“Potatoes,” she said. “Forty pounds, in the cellar, second rack. Peeler’s in the drawer by the sink and you’re going to be terrible at it.”
“I’m going to be terrible at it.”
“Catastrophically.”
“Okay,” Seth said, and went down the cellar stairs of his wife’s building at ten to five in the morning to get the potatoes, and she stood at the pass and listened to him swearing at the light cord, and it was the first day of the rest of it.