Chapter 16
A year on, the ice came back.
Not like the first one. Nothing since has been like the first one and the county has a way of saying so — people out here now divide time into before the storm and after it, the way they used to divide it into before the mill closed.
But on the first Thursday of February the freezing rain came in off the lake again at four in the afternoon, and by six the power was out from the point down to the village, and Talia stood on the back step of the Tierney House with an armload of wood and listened to the trees.
Then she went inside, and called the fire hall, and said: “How many?”
“Forty-one so far,” Bailey said. “We’ve got the school open and the units are holding at every year-round address south of the bend. It’s the summer rentals with people in them and two roads out past the Pelkeys.”
“Send them up the hill.”
“Already did.”
The Leelanau County Emergency Shelter has nine rooms, bunks in the two long bedrooms on the north side, a generator sized for the whole building, and a kitchen that Talia specified herself in October because the township asked her to and because she was not going to let a county architect put a residential range in a building that might have to feed sixty people.
There is no name on it anywhere. There is a sign at the gate that says what it is and a notice board with Bailey’s number.
By the kitchen door there is a list on the wall, in Bailey’s handwriting, copied out of a card that spent a winter in Seth Lassiter’s coat pocket: every year-round household on the shore, and beside each one the name of the person who would come for them and how long it would take.
Beside Walt Ostrom it says daughter, Cadillac, two hours.
Under that, added in a different pen, it says Talia, ten minutes.
By eight o’clock that night there were thirty-four people in it and the lights were on and somebody had the radio going, and Talia Lassiter cooked in her own old kitchen for two hours and then came home.
* * *
Home is the four rooms above the dining room.
That is what she means now when she says it, and it took about three months for her mouth to stop doing a small stumble on the word.
The front room is theirs. The other three let to summer people from May to October, and in the winter they sit empty with the doors open and the heat low, and Seth complains about it exactly once a year.
He moved in on the fourteenth of August, which is a date the village noticed, because he did it in one load in the F-250 and it took him twelve minutes and Marla Cutter timed it from her doorway.
“That’s everything?” Talia had said, standing in the street.
“That’s everything.”
“You had a house.”
“I had a house,” he agreed, and carried a box of his father’s papers up the outside stairs, and that was the whole of the Lassiters coming to the Tierney House.
The box went into the linen cupboard Jared had built out of the old wainscot, and it is still in there with the tape on it. Seth says he knows what is in it, which is a man who was ashamed of the wrong thing, and that he does not need to read it to be finished with it.
* * *
They planed the board on the thirteenth.
The last day but one of the county key, in the kitchen of an empty building, with a block plane Jared Soto lent them and would not be paid for. It took about forty minutes and they argued twice about which way the grain ran and Seth was wrong both times.
When it was flat she stood there with her hand on it.
“Huh,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s just a floor now.”
“It is.” He was crouched down with the plane in his hand, and he looked up at her. “Do you mind?”
She thought about it properly, because he had asked properly.
“No,” she said. “Somebody’s going to be standing barefoot on that in a storm in about ten years and they won’t know a thing about us, and that’s —” She stopped, because she did not have the end of the sentence.
“That’s good,” he said.
“That’s good,” she agreed.
They left the shavings on the windowsill, which was childish. As far as she knows no one ever swept them up, and she has never gone and looked.
Cheryl is at the dinner tonight, and the thing between the two of them took about eight months to find its shape.
It did not turn into mother and daughter. Talia had wondered, that fall, whether it might, and it did not, and she is glad.
What it turned into is two women who tell each other the truth on the telephone on Sunday evenings, which neither of them had ever had.
Cheryl sold the apartment in Traverse City in the fall and took a place in the village three streets from the harbor, which caused approximately as much comment as everything else that year.
She eats at the Tierney House on Wednesdays.
She has opinions about the wine list and expresses them.
In November she came into the kitchen at half past four in the afternoon, which no one does, and stood there in a good coat among the crates and said, “I’ve joined the historical society and I’m going to be perfectly insufferable about it,” and Talia said, “Yes, you are,” and that was the whole conversation and both of them thought about it for a week.
* * *
The business is trucks now.
Forty-one people, a yard, a route book, and a scale house at the end of the harbor road, and her husband is in it at half past six in the morning most days and home by six at night, and once a month he is in Detroit overnight and calls her from the hotel and talks for forty minutes about nothing in particular.
He is not a smaller man. She had braced for that in the fall — that she’d married a big one and would end up with a careful one — and it did not happen, and she thinks now that it was never going to, because whatever he gave away in that year it was never the part of him that wants things.
He argues with her. Thank God. He argued with her for three weeks in November about whether to take the building next door for banquets, and he was right, and she told him he was right on a Tuesday in front of Dot, and he was insufferable about it until Friday.
Once, in the fall, she caught him at it — a thing about her insurance, handled quietly, nearly.
She said his name from the doorway of the kitchen in a particular tone and he stopped with his hand on the phone and said, “Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Come here, I’ll start again.”
And that was it. It took ninety seconds and it was a Tuesday, exactly the way she had said it would be, and they had dinner.
There have been four of those since August and she has counted every one, not out of suspicion but because they are the load-bearing thing.
The insurance. A thing about the roof, in October.
A conversation he had with Bailey about the shelter that he should have had with both of them.
And the worst one, in November, when he booked a week in Charlevoix for her birthday and did not mention it until three days before, and she stood in the kitchen with the tickets in her hand and felt the whole floor go for a second.
That one took longer than ninety seconds.
That one took an evening and most of a Sunday, and there was shouting in it, which there had not been before, and at the end of it he said, “I know. I know exactly what I did. I wanted to give you a thing you’d never let yourself book,” and she said, “Then say that to me in October and let me be the one who can’t book it,” and they went to Charlevoix and it was lovely.
The point is not that he never does it. He is a man who was forty-one years old before anybody made him look at it, and he is going to do it, on and off, until he dies.
The point is that it is a Tuesday. It is a conversation, and then there is dinner, and nobody spends three days in a cold house finding out.
* * *
The winter dinner started as an accident and the village turned it into an institution inside one year.
It was Walt Ostrom’s idea, in the way that things are Walt’s idea, which is that he said it out loud at the pass and then denied it for the rest of his life.
The first week of February, on the anniversary.
Everybody. No charge, because Talia would not take money for it and got into a fight with the township about it that she won.
The first one was the year after, the Saturday after the second storm, and two hundred and six people came through the door of a dining room built for a hundred and four.
They ate in shifts. Dot ran the floor at seventy and would not be talked out of carrying four plates.
Marilyn and Renata and Cody and two of Renata’s cousins did three services back to back.
Ed Coughlin brought a ham he had smoked himself and was unbearable about it.
Cheryl Lassiter came, and sat with Bailey Sheehan of all people, and the two of them got quietly drunk at the corner table and had to be driven home by Frank Dietz.
Jared Soto came with a woman from Northport who does the glass at the church, and she was funny, and Talia liked her very much and said so, and Jared looked pleased in a way that made everything all right in that particular corner of the world forever.
At half past nine Talia came out of the kitchen with a towel over her shoulder and the room caught her and would not let her get back in.
So she stood on a chair, because her father had always stood on a chair.
* * *
“I’m not making a speech,” she said, “because if I make a speech Marilyn will burn the fish.”
“Already burned it,” Marilyn called.
“There it is.”
She waited for the room to come down.