Chapter 7
She went down to the wide spot on the first Sunday in November.
It took her four Sundays to do it. She had written it in the back of the call book in October — ask him — and then she had let three Sundays go by watching a truck sit at the end of the road from a window forty feet up, which she was aware was a ridiculous way for a grown woman to spend a month.
The fourth Sunday she put her coat on at ten past four and went down the stairs and walked the quarter mile in the cold with her hands in her pockets.
He saw her at about a hundred yards. She watched him see her. He did not get out and he did not start the engine, and by the time she came up alongside the driver's door he had the window down and both hands on the wheel like a man being pulled over.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
Their breath went up together in the cold.
He had a thermos on the seat and a paperback face-down on the dash and the cab smelled like coffee and wet wool.
There was a grocery bag on the passenger floor with a loaf of bread in it, which meant he had been to the store himself, which was a thing she had not seen him do since the first year.
"Are you all right?" he said. "Is Tilly—"
"She's fine. She's old."
"Okay."
She looked at the lake for a second. She had not planned any of the words and she had decided that was correct, because if she planned them she would soften them.
"I need something from you," Kristin said. "It's not a door opening. I want to say that first so you don't spend a week thinking it was."
Blake nodded once.
"The letters were shredded in March. The purge.
There's a certificate." She kept her voice level.
"But the estate never threw anything away, and Jocelyn's working files went under hold in April, and there are boxes in that house and in the records room downtown, and there's a chance a copy or a scan of one of them is in there. "
"You want to look."
"I want to look."
"When?"
She had been ready for six or seven answers and not that one, and it took her a second.
"Whenever you can—"
"Tomorrow," Blake said. "I'll have everything from downtown out to the house tonight. I'll be there at seven. If you'd rather I wasn't there, I'll leave the door open and go stay at the club and you can have the house for a week."
Kristin stood in the road.
"No," she said. "It's forty boxes. It's a two-person job."
"Okay."
"Blake."
"Yeah."
"If you make this into something," she said, "I will walk out of that house and you will never see me again, and I mean that in the plain way, not the dramatic way."
"I know what you mean," he said.
She turned and walked back up the road. She got about fifty feet before she heard his engine start, and he drove past her going the other way and did not slow down or look over, which she thought, walking, was the single most tactful thing he had done in eleven years.
The drive was full of leaves nobody had blown.
That was the first thing. Eleven years of a man coming twice a week in a truck with a blower on the back, and the drive was ankle deep and the gutters were full and there was a limb down across the ditch that had been there long enough to go gray.
The house looked the same. That was the second thing, and it was worse.
She sat in the truck in the turnaround for a minute with her hands on the wheel. Then she got out and went in the front door, which she had used for the last four months she lived here anyway, so at least that part was familiar.
Forty-one boxes on the floor of the long room, in four rows, with the coffee table pushed against the wall.
Blake came in from the kitchen with two mugs and set hers on the arm of a chair and went away again to the other end of the room, which was the correct distance, and which he held for three days without ever once making a point of holding it.
"There's a list," he said. "It's not a good list."
"Show me."
Here is what nobody tells you about a marriage.
You can hate a man for eleven years' worth of good reason.
You can have his whole interior life printed out and read it twice.
And you will still, inside of one hour, fall straight back into the way the two of you do a job together, because that is muscle and it does not care what you have found out.
They had a system. They had invented it nine years ago over a boathouse inventory for the insurance, drunk, in one evening, and it was stupid and it was extremely good: everything got a called-out category and a called-back confirmation, so neither of you ever had to look up.
"Vendor," Blake said.
"Vendor."
"Vendor."
"Vendor."
"Something with a ribbon on it."
"That's not a category."
"It's got a ribbon on it, Kris."
"Miscellaneous with a ribbon."
"Miscellaneous with a ribbon," he confirmed, and put it in the pile, and Kristin heard herself make a sound that was not quite a laugh and got very interested in the next box.
They worked from seven in the morning until nine at night for three days.
He brought food in and did not make anything of it.
He put a space heater in the long room because the furnace could not keep that end of the house and he did it while she was in the bathroom so she would not have to say thank you.
He did not ask her one single question about herself for two and a half days.
He did not say Jocelyn's name once. When his phone rang he looked at it and let it go, every time, nine or ten times a day, and on the second afternoon she said, "You can take that," and he said, "It's not important," and she said, "It might be," and he said, "Nothing is," and went back to the box.
That was the whole trouble with it.
Because the man on the floor of that room was the man she married.
Not a repentant version. Not a performance.
Just a big tired guy in a flannel shirt with a marker in his teeth, saying vendor and miscellaneous with a ribbon, and Kristin sat four feet away from him for three days with her heart doing something complicated and unforgivable.
The second evening was the worst of it, and nothing happened.
That is what she could never explain afterward, to Brynn or to anybody: nothing happened, and it was worse than the third afternoon by a distance.
They had been going fourteen hours. It was raining on the water.
The space heater was ticking and she had her boots off and her feet under her on the floor, which she had done without noticing, and at some point around eight o'clock Blake said, out of nowhere, "Do you remember the woman with the parrot. "
And Kristin said, "Don't."
"I'm just asking if you remember her."
"I remember her."
"She wrote to the foundation four times about the parrot."
"I know she did."
"She wanted us to endow the parrot," Blake said, into a box, not looking up.
And Kristin laughed.
Out loud. Genuinely. Her whole body did it before she had any say in the matter, one real laugh in a cold room, and she heard it come out of her and she heard what it sounded like — it sounded like the two of them at ten o'clock on a Tuesday nine years ago — and she stopped so fast that her hand went to her mouth.
Blake did not look up. He kept sorting. He had the sense, or the mercy, or the fear, to keep his eyes down on the paper in his hands, and after about four seconds he said, "Vendor," and she said, "Vendor," and they went on.
But it was in the room after that.
She drove home that night on the county road with the wipers going and thought, with total clarity: this is the dangerous part. Not the letters. Not the sun room in Wayzata and not the Club and not Jocelyn Harlow in an oatmeal dress. This. A cold room and a bad joke about a parrot.
Every gesture he had made since April, she had been able to close a hand on and refuse.
You cannot refuse a Tuesday.
They did not find the letters.
They found everything else. They found the estate's insurance correspondence back to 1989.
They found the security review — the real one, the whole thing, all fourteen recommendations and a cover memo — and Kristin read the cover memo and set it aside for Lena without a word and Blake said nothing at all.
They found a folder of Jocelyn's with the intake summaries in it, which was as close as they got. Sixty-one lines of shorthand. Nothing from Anoka. It had been culled.
"It was culled after," Blake said. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the couch and the folder in his hands. "Look at the numbering."
She looked. There was a gap.
"When?"
"I don't know."
"Blake."
"I genuinely don't know," he said, "and I'm not going to guess out loud in front of you, because if I guess and I'm wrong you'll carry it, and if I guess and I'm right I'll have handed you a thing I don't actually know.
" He put the folder down. "I'll find out.
It'll take a while and I'll tell you the day I have it, whatever it says. "
Kristin sat back on her heels.
That was not a sentence the man she married could have produced in April. She knew it and he knew it and neither of them said so.
"Ask me something," she said.
He looked up.
"You haven't asked me one question in two days. You're being careful and I can feel you doing it from over here and it's making my teeth hurt." She wiped her hands on her jeans. "Ask me something ordinary."
Blake thought about it for a good while, which she appreciated.
"Is the truck any good?"
"It's got two hundred and ten thousand on it and the heater only works on four."
"Are you going to fix the heater?"
"No," Kristin said. "I'm going to drive it on four."
He nodded slowly, like a man being given a report.
"Okay," he said, and went back into the box, and did not ask her anything else, and she found — sitting on the floor of a house she had walked out of — that she was disappointed about that, and had to go and stand in the hall for a minute.
The third afternoon was the one that broke it.