Chapter 16 #2
“A year ago last Friday the power went out and I was up on that hill on my own for three days and nobody came, and the reason nobody came is that everybody in this room knew I was fine.” She said it lightly, and the room let her, because by then it was a thing that could be said lightly and that had taken a year.
“And then fourteen trucks and forty of you were out all night looking for me, and Bailey Sheehan cut a tree off a road at five in the morning and found me in a ditch, and no one in this county has ever let me pay for a single thing since, which I’d like to say has been humiliating. ”
Somebody shouted something. There was a noise.
“So here’s the whole of what I want to say.
This building was dark for eight years because I let somebody talk me into it being a nice idea for someday, and then I opened it because I had nowhere else to go, and you people filled it up the same night.
” She had to stop for a second. “There’s nothing else.
That’s it. That’s the toast. It’s open every February for as long as I’m standing, and when I’m not, somebody else in this village had better keep doing it. ”
She got down off the chair.
Seth was at the end of the long window table, which is where he sits, and he had been watching her with his chin on his fist and his whole face doing something unguarded and stupid, and she went and stood in front of him with her towel in her hand.
“You’re not going to make me talk,” he said.
“I’d like you to.”
“Talia.”
“One sentence. There’s two hundred people in my dining room and most of them spent a year watching you sit in a truck.”
He put his napkin down and stood up, and the room went quieter than it had for her, which she enjoyed a great deal.
“Right,” he said. “One sentence, then.”
He looked at the room, and then at her.
“I stopped going to see for myself,” he said, “and my wife nearly died of it, and every one of you has been better to me since than I had any right to. I’m not going to be that man again. You’d all know inside a week.”
He sat down.
There was about a second of nothing, and then Walt Ostrom, who is eighty-two now and has earned the right to do whatever he likes, banged the table twice with the flat of his hand, and the whole room went up.
Once, only once, Cheryl said the other thing.
It was later that night, with the room half down. She had had two glasses of wine and she put her hand flat on the table and said: “I want to say that I was wrong, and I want to say that I would tell you the same thing again tomorrow.”
“Both of those?”
“Both of those,” Cheryl said. “He is not the man he was and I did not think he could be, and I was wrong about my own son at seventy years old, which is a thing to find out.” She turned the glass.
“And if you had asked me again in July I would still have said leave him, because I had nothing to go on except forty-seven years, and a woman my age has to give you what she actually has.”
* * *
There is one more thing about that night, and she has never told him.
At about half past eleven, with the room down to the last twenty and Marilyn sat on a crate with her shoes off, Talia went out the back for two minutes.
It is a dozen steps from the service door to the end of the alley and from the end of the alley you can see up the hill.
The shelter windows were lit — all of them, the two long north bedrooms and the kitchen and the room over the porch where Gordon Lassiter died — and somewhere in that building thirty-nine people she mostly knew were warm, and a generator she had never seen was running, and a woman from the Peninsula road was probably complaining about the coffee.
Behind her, through the wall, she could hear her own dining room: the last twenty of them, and Ed Coughlin saying something, and the whole room going up at it.
And Talia Lassiter stood in an alley in February in her apron with her breath going up white, and laughed at nothing at all, alone, for a good few seconds, because there was nowhere left in her to put it.
That is the part. Not a grand thing and not a sad one. A woman standing in the cold outside a building full of everybody she has, with a hill lit up in front of her and her husband inside at the long table, laughing in an alley because her chest would not hold it.
Then she went back in, because there were twenty people in the room and Marilyn had her shoes off.
Upstairs, at half past one, with the dining room dark and the dishes done and two hundred and six people gone home into the cold, Talia stood at the window of the front room in her socks.
The village was black except for the harbor lights and the glow up on the hill, where nine rooms full of strangers were warm.
Seth came up behind her and put his arms around her and his chin on the top of her head, which he can do and has always been unreasonably pleased about.
“You’re looking at the hill,” he said.
“I’m looking at the hill.”
“Thirty-nine in there tonight. Bailey texted.”
“Good.”
They stood there.
“Can I say the thing I’m not allowed to say?” he said.
“You’re not allowed to say it.”
“I’m going to say it.”
“I know you are.”
“I’m glad we’re here,” Seth said, into her hair.
“That’s it. That’s the whole illegal sentence.
Not glad about any of the rest of it — I’d give everything I have to take February off you and I’d do it tonight.
But I’m glad we’re standing in this room.
I love you and I’m glad we’re here and I’m going to keep saying it until it stops being remarkable. ”
Talia turned around inside his arms.
She was thirty-nine years old. Her hands smelled of lemon and fry oil and there was flour on her sleeve and she had been on her feet for nineteen hours, and there was a man in her father’s house with his hands at the small of her back looking at her the way he had looked at her across a table when she was twenty-eight.
“It’s not going to stop being remarkable,” she said.
“No?”
“No. You’ll be saying it when you’re seventy and I’ll still be putting the pot on at four, and we’ll have had about nine thousand more Tuesdays, and you will still be catastrophically bad at peeling potatoes.”
“I’ve gotten better.”
“You have not gotten better.”
“Talia—”
“You have gotten faster,” she said. “You have not gotten better.”
And he laughed, and picked her up off the floor a few inches, which he does and which she pretends to object to, and carried her away from the window and put her down on the bed in the room where her father died, in a building that is hers, in a village that came out with fourteen trucks for her.
Out on the hill the shelter windows stayed lit all night, and nobody in them knew whose house it had been, and that was how he had wanted it.
And down in the village, above a dining room that will open again on Wednesday at five, Talia Lassiter put her hand on her husband’s face in the dark and told him she loved him, out loud, in the plainest words she had, and meant every one of them.