Chapter 14
It sold inside a week of the open house, to a family from Chicago who paid cash and did not negotiate.
Kristin heard the details secondhand, from Brynn, who had them from Nan Petree, who had them from a woman whose daughter cleaned for the listing agent: three children, a wife who cried in the boathouse, a husband who asked whether the dock could take a bigger lift.
They wanted to be in for the Fourth of July.
The closing was set for the last Friday in May at ten in the morning.
On the Thursday, Blake came to the shed at six with nothing in his hands, sat on the feed sack, and said, "The house is empty. They took the last of it out today."
"Okay."
"I'm at the club until Saturday."
"Okay."
He looked at the floor for a while.
"I'm not asking you anything," he said. "I want to be clear about that, because it's the hour. But the gate's open tonight and it'll be open tomorrow morning and after that it isn't mine."
Kristin turned the thermos cup around in her hands.
"Are you going to be there?" she said.
"Do you want me to be?"
"That's not what I asked."
"I'm going to be there at nine tonight," Blake said, "because I'd like to stand in it once without any furniture in it, and I'd have gone at nine whether you'd asked me or not."
At seven he stood up and said, "That's the hour," and left, and did not look back from the door.
She got there at twenty past nine.
She had spent two hours in the brown house on County 110 pretending to sand a doorframe, and at nine o'clock she had put the sander down and gone out to the truck and sat in it with the keys in her hand for nine minutes, and then driven the twenty-two miles.
The sign was still at the end of the drive with SOLD across it. The gate was open.
The drive in the dark, the last time, and she went slow because of the deer.
His truck was in the turnaround. There was one light on, downstairs, at the far end where the long room was, and the rest of the house was dark, and the water beyond it was doing the thing water does at the end of May, black and moving and full of frogs.
She went in the front door.
An empty house is not a quiet house. It is the loudest thing there is. Her boots on the boards went off the walls like somebody following her, and the whole place had that flat, ringing, drained sound of a building that has had everything taken out of the middle of it.
Blake was standing in the long room with his hands in his pockets.
They had put every stick of it into two trucks that morning — his grandfather's desk, his father's chair, four generations of furniture that nobody in that family had ever chosen — and what was left was eight hundred square feet of floor, a bare bulb, and a fireplace, and the marks on the wallpaper where things had hung for eighty years.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"You did it fast."
"I did it the way you asked." He looked around at the room. "Somebody offered me twelve percent over asking on the second day if I'd take it off the market before the open house. Quiet, off-market, nobody walks through. I said no."
"Blake."
"You said listed like anybody's house," he said. "So it was listed like anybody's house."
Kristin stood in the middle of the room in a jacket with hay on it and did not trust herself to say anything at all.
They walked it.
Neither of them suggested it and both of them did it, which is the whole of that marriage in a sentence.
Upstairs first, because that was easiest — bedrooms she had slept in for eleven years that were now just rooms with windows, the bad bathroom with the pipe that knocked, the north wing where a plastic tub of day-books had sat in a closet since her wedding. The closet door was open. It was a closet.
Down the back stairs. The hall. The room that had been his office, which was smaller than she remembered, which they always are, and Kristin stood in the doorway of it and looked at a bare floor and a window on the water and did not go in.
"You want a minute?" Blake said.
"No."
She looked at it anyway from the doorway, because you do.
Fourteen months ago there had been a desk in that corner and a rug on that floor and forty boxes had come through that door in April, and a woman had sat down on the rug with a register book across her knees at about ten in the morning and had still been sitting there when the water went black.
The rug was gone. The floor underneath it was a different color than the rest — a big pale rectangle where eighty years of sun had not reached — and Kristin stood in the doorway and looked at the shape of a rug that was not there anymore.
"I got everything out of here first," Blake said, behind her. "Before any of the rest of it. I didn't want the movers in this room with you upstairs somewhere in my head."
"That's a strange thing to say."
"It's a strange room to be in," he said.
They went on down the hall.
Then the kitchen.
She stopped inside the door.
It had been stripped like the rest of it, but a kitchen is built in, so it was still a kitchen: the counters, the sink under the window she had stood at ten thousand times, the outline on the wall where a calendar had hung. The sugar bowl was gone. The chart had been gone since November.
And ten feet to her left, the mudroom door.
Kristin looked at it and the sound went out of the room the way it does.
"Kristin."
She did not turn around.
"I'd like to say something," Blake said, "and it isn't an apology.
I want to be straight about that before I start.
I've apologized to you about nine hundred times since April of last year and every one of them was worthless, and I've worked out why, and it's because an apology is a thing you hand somebody so they'll do something with it. "
"Then don't."
"I'm not going to."
He was standing in the middle of his own kitchen with the bare bulb on in the next room and half his face in it.
"I never stopped loving you," he said.
Kristin closed her eyes.
"That's not the good part. That's the worst part and it's where I have to start, because it's the true thing and everything else comes off it.
" His voice was completely level. "I loved you the whole time.
Through all of it. On the twenty-ninth of December and on the twelfth of January at four in the morning and on the ninth of February at four fifteen in the afternoon.
I have never once loved anybody else and I did not want her and I never touched her and none of that is a defense, it's the charge. "
"Blake—"
"Let me get it out, Kris. I've had fourteen months."
She did not turn around. She stood facing a door with a slate floor behind it and let him.
"I stopped counting you," Blake said.
The refrigerator was gone. There was nothing in that house making a sound.
"That's the sentence. That's the whole thing and it took me until about March to be able to say it in that order.
I didn't stop loving you and I didn't stop wanting you and I didn't get bored of you.
I stopped counting you. I stopped putting you in the arithmetic.
" He stopped, and started again, and his voice went for the first time.
"Somewhere around the fourth year I started doing the sums of my life without you in them.
Not on purpose. I just — you were the one thing that was fine.
Everything else needed handling and you were fine, you never complained, you never asked me for anything, you had a whole practice and you sold it and you didn't even ask me about that, you just did it, and I let you, and I have thought about that specific fact every day for a year. "
"You didn't make me sell it."
"I know I didn't. That's worse." He said it flatly. "If I'd made you, you could hate me clean. I just wasn't in the room."
Kristin turned around.
He was crying, which she had seen twice in eleven years and once in a treatment room in a different decade, and he was not doing anything about it and not apologizing for it and not asking her to look away.
"And then I paid a woman to do the counting," he said.
She put her hand out to the counter.
"That's the part I want to say in this room, because I have said it to myself in a lot of rooms and this is the one it belongs in.
" He did not come any closer. "I had a whole life full of things I could not stand to look at, and I paid somebody a salary to look at them for me and tell me which ones I had to know about.
And it worked, Kris. It worked beautifully.
It worked for two years. Then in October a man in Anoka whose wife had died wrote a letter and it came to my office and a person I paid decided it did not rise to me, and in November he wrote again, and in January he wrote a third one with your name in it twice. "
He stopped.
"And in December," Blake said, "my wife sat next to me in a car and told me something was wrong with the woman who decides what reaches me."
Kristin's hand was flat on the counter, taking her weight.
"And I said the word jealous."
The house did not make a sound.
"I want you to hear what I actually think about that, because I've had fourteen months and I've got it down to one sentence now." His voice was steady and absolutely ruined. "That sentence is the thing that put Bruce Halliday in this kitchen."
"That's not—" Kristin heard herself start and stop. "That's not fair. There's no straight line from—"
"There is, though."
"Blake, a jury wouldn't—"