Chapter 14 #2
"I'm not a jury and neither are you," he said.
"I had the same thought you had. I wrote it down on my own calendar on the morning of the sixth.
And then my wife said it out loud that night and I called it jealousy, because saying yes to it meant a hard conversation with the person who ran my life, and I did not want to have a hard conversation, and I have never wanted to have a hard conversation, not once, not since I was six years old.
" He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, once, and left it at that.
"If I'd said you're right in that car, I'd have gone into that office in January and asked her what was in the mail.
That's it. That's the whole distance. One conversation in a car on the sixth of December, and you'd have both your hands. "
Kristin stood in a kitchen with her back against the counter.
She had wanted this. That was the thing going through her while it was happening. Fourteen months and she had wanted somebody to say it in exactly those words with nothing attached to the end of it, and now a man was saying it and it was not relief at all. It was like watching a barn come down.
"Say the rest," she said.
"There isn't any rest."
"There is. You've got a because somewhere. Everybody does."
"No," Blake said.
"You were raised in a house where—"
"Don't." He said it hard. "Don't you dare do that for me.
I'm forty-one. I've thought about my mother more this year than in the whole rest of my life and I know exactly what she is and exactly what she did and I am not putting one ounce of this on a seventy-year-old woman who thought she was loving my father.
" He took a breath. "It's mine. All of it.
I got handed a way of living and I was comfortable in it and I never once, in forty-one years, looked up. "
Kristin stood there.
"I'm not asking you for anything," he said.
"That's the last part and then I'm done.
I'm not asking you to come back, I'm not asking you to answer this, and I want to say plainly that I do not think what I did in January earns me anything, because it wasn't for you.
I don't have anything to trade. There's no arrangement here.
" His mouth moved. "I sold the house because you asked me to.
I'd have sold it if you'd told me on the same day that you were marrying somebody in Delano.
That's the only way I know how to say what I mean. "
Then he took the keys out of his pocket.
Two keys and a fob and a wooden tag with a burned E on it that had hung by the back door since before he was born.
He held them out.
"The closing's at ten," Blake said. "It's yours to walk into. I'd like you to be the one who hands them over."
Kristin looked at the keys in his hand for a long moment.
"That's not a small thing," she said.
"No."
"You understand what you're doing."
"Yes."
She took them. They were warm, from his pocket, and heavier than keys have any business being.
And then she turned around and looked at the mudroom door.
"Blake," she said.
"Yeah."
"Stay where you are."
She crossed ten feet of kitchen floor and put her right hand on the knob.
Her heart was going like something in a trap.
She could hear it. She stood there with her hand on cold brass in an empty house at ten o'clock at night on the last Thursday in May, and behind her a man she had been married to for eleven years stood absolutely still and did not say one word and did not come and did not offer, because he had learned, finally, at forty-one, that some doors you do not open for somebody.
She turned the knob.
It was a mudroom.
That was all. A bench, a row of hooks, a slate floor with a drain in it, a window with a spiderweb in the corner, a smell of cold stone and old boots.
Somebody had cleaned it, thoroughly, at some point in the last year, and there was nothing on that floor and nothing in that room and it was eight feet by ten.
Kristin stood in the doorway of it and waited to come apart.
She did not.
It was the fourth or fifth strangest thing that had happened to her in fourteen months and it was by a distance the best: she stood in the room where she had bled for nineteen minutes with her fist against a wound she could not close, and what she felt was not terror and not grief.
It was a kind of enormous, level sadness for the woman who had been on that floor. Somebody else's woman. Somebody she would have driven a long way at four in the morning to help.
She stepped in. Her boots on the slate.
She stood in the middle of it for about a minute and did not touch anything.
Then she came out and shut the door behind her, and looked at her husband across the kitchen with the keys in her hand.
Blake had not moved one inch.
He was standing exactly where she had left him with his arms at his sides, and his face was doing something she had no name for, and she understood — looking at him across twelve feet of empty kitchen — that he had spent that entire minute not knowing whether she was going to come back out of that room in one piece, and had stayed put anyway, because she had told him to.
Fourteen months ago he would have followed her in.
He would have followed her in and put his hands on her shoulders and said something kind, and she would have gotten through the door on his arm and never once done it herself, and she would have been grateful, and it would have been one more thing arranged for her by a man who loved her.
"You didn't come," she said.
"No."
"Was that hard?"
Blake let out a breath that had been in him for a while.
"That was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life," he said, "and I'd like you to know I nearly failed at about forty seconds."
"Okay," Kristin said.
That was all she said. She did not answer him. She did not say a single word about anything he had told her, and she went out through the front door and got in her truck and drove the half mile out for the last time.
He was still standing in the kitchen when she went.
At the mailbox she stopped.
The blinker going, for nobody, the way she had on a night in April fourteen months ago, and the county road black in both directions.
Left was Mound and a shed on County 110 and a dog with a year left in her.
She sat there a long time.
Then she said, out loud, in an empty truck, to absolutely nobody:
"I'm not going to be able to help this."
And turned left, and went home, and slept nine hours, and was at a title company in Wayzata at ten in the morning with a set of keys and a wooden tag with a burned E on it, and handed them across a table to a woman from Chicago who was crying, and who said, "I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm doing this," and Kristin said, "It's a good house. You'll be happy in it."