Chapter 9 #2
"I have been polite in that room since 1979," Adrienne said. "It has never once occurred to me that it was available to simply say a true thing in it."
"It's not available," Kristin said. "It costs."
"Yes." Adrienne almost smiled. "Was it worth it?"
"Ask me tomorrow."
Jocelyn came out to the lot at ten past two.
Kristin was at the truck. She had been at the truck for a while, doing nothing, with the tailgate down and her hands in her pockets and her breath going up, because she was not able to drive yet and she knew it.
Jocelyn had her coat over her arm and no gloves and she came across the salt-white asphalt in the wrong shoes.
They looked at each other.
"I'm going to bring you the letters," Jocelyn said.
"I didn't do it for the letters."
"I know you didn't. That's why I'm bringing them." Her voice was steady and her hands were not. "I'll be an hour. Where do you want them."
"Here."
"All right."
She turned to go and then stopped, and stood in the lot with her back half to Kristin, and said, "You could have said the other thing."
"I know."
"About him. Any of it. Nobody in that room would have thought less of you for it. Half of them wanted it."
"That's why I didn't," Kristin said.
Jocelyn nodded slowly at the ground.
"Do you want me to say I'm sorry?"
Kristin thought about it. She thought about it honestly, standing in the cold with a tailgate down.
"No," she said. "I want you to never write the word personal again in your life."
Jocelyn Harlow got into her car and drove to Deephaven and came back at twenty past three with a shoebox, and handed it over without saying anything at all, and got back in and left.
There was no sentence to trade for anymore.
Kristin understood that later, driving to Delano — the only thing Jocelyn had ever wanted from her was a version of the story she could survive, and there was no more version left to buy.
Holding three letters over a woman with nothing left to lose costs the woman doing the holding, and Jocelyn Harlow did not do anything that cost her for free.
Kristin never saw her again.
She sat in the truck in the lot with the shoebox on the bench seat and the engine running for the heat.
Three photocopies, three staples, in date order. She was grateful to Jocelyn for the date order and hated herself for being grateful.
She read the September one.
I am writing about my wife Dorothy Halliday, who died on the ninth of this month at Northaven in Anoka, where she had lived for two years and four months.
He had good handwriting. That was the first thing. A steady, taught, old-fashioned hand, the kind they beat into people in the fifties.
He described the night. He described it flatly and in order, the way Kristin's father wrote up a case, and there was one aide on that floor and Dorothy had a fall at some point between ten and four and was found at four, and he did not use one single adjective about it.
Then, at the end:
I am told the company is privately held and that Mr. Ellison lives at the lake. I do not know Mr. Ellison. I am told his wife is a veterinarian and that she is well thought of. I am writing in the hope that in a private company a letter still reaches a person.
Kristin put her hand over her mouth.
I am told his wife is a veterinarian and that she is well thought of.
That was what she was, in September, to Bruce Halliday. She was the reason a company might turn out to have a person in it.
She sat in a parking lot in December and cried the way you do when nobody has ever taught you how, ugly and inefficient, with both hands over her face and her elbows on the wheel, for about four minutes.
Then she stopped, and blew her nose, and read the other two.
The November one was angrier. The January one was not a letter a well man writes, and it had her name in it twice, and the second time it said she is there alone — and reading that, in a truck, in a coat, at four in the afternoon, Kristin found the thing she had not expected to find, which was that she was not afraid.
She had been afraid of that sentence for ten months without ever having read it. Now she had read it. It was three words in a dead woman's husband's handwriting, and it was terrible, and it was the truth, and it sat there on the page and did not move.
She put the three of them back in the shoebox in order and closed the lid.
Then she drove to Delano, because she had a herd check at five and she was not going to be late for it.
Brynn called at half past four, and Kristin put her on speaker and kept driving.
"I have had," Brynn said, "fourteen phone calls."
"Okay."
"Nan Petree called me. Nan Petree, who has never once called me in her life, called me at two o'clock to say — and I want you to hear this exactly the way she said it — your friend Kristin stood up at the Club."
"That's about right."
"Kristin." Brynn's voice went. "You went alone."
"I did."
"Why didn't you—"
"Because you'd have come," Kristin said, "and then it would have been two women who came to make a scene, and I needed it to be one woman reading out a date."
There was a long silence on the line, and Kristin drove past the co-op and the shut café and the Lutheran church with its sign about Advent.
"Was he there?" Brynn said.
"No."
"Does he know?"
"He'll know by tonight. Everybody's going to know by tonight." Kristin put her blinker on for the Delano road. "He doesn't get to have had anything to do with it, Brynn. Not one part. That's the whole reason it counted."
She did the herd check. Forty-one head, and she was fine for all of it, and the farmer's wife brought out coffee at six and did not mention a thing, which meant she had not heard yet, which was restful.
It was on the drive home, in the dark, somewhere past Loretto with the heater going on four, that Kristin understood what was different.
The ground was steadier. That was all. Somebody had shimmed the whole world about a quarter inch and it had stopped rocking.
She had not gotten anything back. Dorothy Halliday was still dead and the building on the lake road had a paw print on it and her left hand was never going to close. Nothing had been returned to her.
It was just that the thing had been said out loud, in the room where it happened, by the person it happened to.
Ten months, she thought. Ten months of everybody in her life being so extremely careful.
She turned the radio up and drove home to her dog.