BOOK IV — REAGAN HALF
Chapter 27 His Side of the Bed
Saturday, 7:00 a.m. — Reagan's house off the bypass, the bedroom; the gray before the bar.
Six hours before she counts the till, she wakes the way she has woken for four years, which is on her own side, against the wall, with the whole rest of the bed laid out beside her like a field nobody planted.
She doesn't reach across it. She used to reach across it.
The clock on the dresser says 7:00 in the soft red of a thing that's been waking her too early since before she had a reason to be up, and the light coming around the blind is the gray of a Saturday that hasn't decided yet what kind of day to be, the flat early gray she has come to think of as her own light, the only hour the house is hers. Hers meaning not yet his, she thinks, and the thought is wrong by four years and arrives anyway, the way they all arrive, uninvited, conjugated wrong, the dead man tracking mud through the present tense. The house is not his. The house was never going to be anyone's after him, was the deal she made with herself in the cooler doorway the morning Oren held her up. And here it is asking again, in the gray, not yet his, like he's only sleeping in, like he'll come down at one with his coffee.
She lies still and lets the room be the room.
It is a small room in a small house off the bypass, the kind of house the corridor's good years built and its ordinary years kept, vinyl siding the green of a thing that wanted to be sage, a carport, a yard she mows herself. They bought it the same month they bought the bar, we'll own two things at once, Reg, two things with our names on them, who'd have thought it, Connor said, standing in this empty room with his arms out like he was measuring it for a life, and she'd thought names on things was a sweet way to say it, two kids from down the corridor with names on things, and she had not yet learned that a name on a thing is a place a debt can find you, that he was already, that month, that very month, putting both their names where the corridor could reach them, and saying it to her like a romance.
His side of the bed is cold and made.
She makes it every morning. That's the part she's never told anyone, would die before telling Gigi or Oren or the one regular who once asked her gentle if she'd thought about seeing somebody: that she pulls his side of the sheet tight and squares the pillow and runs her hand flat across it the way you'd smooth a tablecloth, every morning, four years of mornings, so that the bed reads slept-in on one side and waiting on the other. She does it now. She sits up against the wall and reaches over the cold field and pulls the sheet and the hospital corner comes up under her hand the way Connor never once in his life made it, Connor left a bed like a crime scene, sheets in a knot, said making a bed you're about to unmake again was the stupidest chore God invented, and she squares his pillow with the heel of her hand and there's the dip in it, the old dip, the one she has refused to plump out for four years because plumping it out is a thing she is not going to do.
She presses her palm into the dip. It's just a pillow. It went cold years ago.
He came to bed late and smelling of the back room, of other men's cigarettes and the bar's grease and underneath it the particular warm of him, and he'd put his cold feet on the backs of her knees on purpose to make her swear at him, and laugh, and she'd swear, and stay. Her hand is still on the pillow. The grease under her nails is the same grease. Four years of bar and four years of him gone into the same dark line at the quick that no soap clears, and she cannot, sitting here, tell which of them she's washing off and which she's keeping, and the not being able to tell is the closest she's come in a long while to the thing she does not let herself near.
She takes her hand off the pillow. She doesn't take her hand off the pillow. She leaves it there longer than she means to, the way you leave a hand on a fevered child to feel the heat come down, except there's no heat, there's a man-shaped cold she's been keeping warm with her own palm for four years and it has never once taken the warmth, never once held it, gives her hand back colder than her hand went down.
That's the trade. She does it anyway. Some mornings the cold is the only thing of him she gets to touch.
She comes down in his old robe — not his, hers, a robe, a robe she happens to wear — and the kitchen is the gray-lit dead quiet she comes down into every morning, the clock on the stove a minute fast the way he set it and she's never fixed, the chairs around the little table where two of them used to sit and one of them does. The empty chair across from hers is just a chair. She has had four years of practice at it being just a chair, and she is good at it, the way she's good at the cooler and good at the rail, and being good at a thing is not the same as the thing not costing.
She puts coffee on. The machine is the machine he bought, the loud one, Connor liked a loud machine, said a quiet kitchen in the morning was a kitchen where something was wrong, and it grinds and gurgles and fills the small kitchen with the only noise the house has got, and she stands at the counter with her back to the empty chair and her front to the window over the sink and waits for it, the wrist with the old fryer-shine resting on the edge of the sink, the gray yard going green as the light comes up.
The Post-it is on the fridge where it has been for eleven years.
She isn't looking for it. You don't look for a thing you live inside of. But the gurgle gives her nothing to do with her eyes and they go where they go, to the freckled door of the refrigerator and the square of paper behind the magnet shaped like a wedge of cheese, back by six, don't start the chili without me, love a dummy, in his loose backward-leaning hand, gone the deep yellow of a paper that has hung in a kitchen's grease for eleven years, the ink not faded so much as cured, browned in, part of the paper now the way the bar smell is part of the bar. She found it two months after, going through the magnets for a grocery list, and her knees went, and she has not been able to take it down since, not because she can't reach it — she reaches past it every day for the milk — but because taking it down would be a decision and she has made it instead into weather, a thing that is simply there, a Tuesday eleven years gone she lives next to.
Love a dummy. The dummy is a joke. It was the back half of a joke whose front half she cannot, this morning, standing at her own counter at seven a.m., remember. She has tried. She used to be able to call it up — something he said, something she said back, a Tuesday, the chili, his hand in the air doing the thing his hand did — and the front of it has gone the way the front of everything goes, worn off like the date off a coin, until what's left is a punchline with no joke under it, a dummy that lands on nobody, an inside thing with no inside left, just her, on the outside of her own marriage's last joke, reading the answer to a riddle she can no longer ask.
That's the part nobody warns you about, she thinks, and the coffee finishes, and she does not finish the thought because the thought has no floor. The grief she can carry has a shape. This other thing — the front of the joke gone, the warm half of the punchline died with the half of her that knew it — this doesn't have a shape, this is just subtraction, a thing taken and not put down anywhere she can go and visit it.
She pours the coffee.
She pours it into the mug that isn't his.
His is in the cabinet. It has been in the cabinet four years, washed, on the second shelf where the everyday mugs are, not put away high like a keepsake and not thrown out like a thing you're done with, just there, in the rotation she never rotates it into, the exact two things she will not do, drink from it, throw it out, the whole marriage in a cabinet. It's a bad mug. That's the part that gets her some mornings, the unfairness of which mug it is — not a wedding mug, not a mug with a meaning, just a brown diner mug from a gas station off the Clanton exit that he bought because it was a dollar and had a good weight, Reg, feel that, that's a mug that means it — a man who needed his objects to weigh something — and it is the heaviest thing in the cabinet and the lightest thing in the house and she reaches past it every single morning the way she reaches past the Post-it, choosing the lighter mug, the meaningless one, leaving the one with the weight for a hand that's been four years gone.
She has tried, twice, to drink from it. Both times she got it down off the shelf and held it and felt the good weight he meant and could not put coffee in it, could not be the mouth that drank from the mug after his mouth was done drinking from it forever, could not do that small ordinary unbearable thing, and put it back, washed, in its place. And she has tried, once, to throw it out, stood over the bin with it the first bad winter, and could not be the hand that did that either, could not throw a dollar mug into a bag of coffee grounds and tie the bag and set it at the curb for a truck, as if you could leave a man at the curb in a dollar mug, as if the truck would take him, and put it back, washed, in its place. So now it lives there, the washed mug she will not drink from and will not throw out, the two refusals that hold each other up, a thing she has stopped being able to either keep or let go of, suspended exactly between, the way she has suspended everything of him, hung just so, held level, four years.
She carries her own light mug to the table and sits down across from the empty chair and drinks her coffee in the gray and does not look at the cabinet because she's already looked at it, the way she does not look at the bed because she's already made it, the way she does not open the cooler because Oren opens it. A house she has arranged entirely out of things she has already done so she will not have to do them again with her eyes open.
The coffee goes half-cold while she sits. She drinks it anyway. He drank his cold half the time, came down late and let it sit and drank it cold and said cold coffee was just iced coffee for men who couldn't plan, and she'd warmed it for him anyway, in the loud machine's little carafe, because warming a man's cold coffee is a thing you get to do for a man, is one of the ten thousand small chores of him, and she would give the rest of the morning, she thinks, the whole gray hour that's hers, to have a cold cup to warm.
She washes the mug. Her own, not his; his stays in the cabinet, four years, washed.
She stands at the sink with the water running hot over the wrist with the old shine on it and the grease under her nails not coming out, the bar and the man and the fryer all worn into the one dark line, and out the window the yard is full green now, the morning decided after all on being ordinary, and she watches the water run and thinks about nothing, which is a discipline, which is the only church she's got, the bar by eight-thirty, the till, the band, the load-in, the day stacked ahead of her in logistics because logistics is the prayer that answers, the one liturgy that doesn't open a door she keeps shut. She lets the day stack. The day is a good day to think about. The day has a floor.
And under the day, the way water finds the low place, the other thing, the thing without a floor, the thing the running water can't outloud: that there will come a morning — not this one, but one of these gray ones, soon or not soon — when she can't bring up the front of the joke at all, when she reaches for the warm of him under the cigarettes and gets only the cigarettes, when the dip in the pillow has been pressed flat by her own four years of palms and reads like nobody, when the Post-it has cured so far into the paper that it's just a brown square and the bad good mug is just a mug and she goes a whole day, then a whole week, without the dead man tracking mud through her present tense, and that the day she stops grieving him right will feel, when it comes, exactly like losing him the second time, by her own slow hand, no cooler floor to blame it on, just the ordinary erosion of a woman who had to keep living, wearing him down to nothing the way her thumb wears a worry-stone smooth — and that there is no mug she can refuse to drink from, no bed she can keep waiting on one side, no chore of him she can do at seven in the morning, that will hold that morning off. She turns the water off.
That's the one she can't arrange around. That's the account with no register and no pen, the one that doesn't settle and doesn't keep, that just thins, daily, under the very living she does to honor it. She dries her hands on the towel by the sink, his towel, hers, a towel.
The pillow is squared upstairs. The bed reads slept-in on one side and waiting on the other and will all day, the way she leaves it, the way she'll leave it, and she goes up to shower in the small bathroom with the blind that doesn't quite close, and she does not look at his side of the bed on the way past because she's already made it, already smoothed it flat, already run her hand across the cold of it like cooling a child's skinned knee, and there is nothing left to do to it until tonight when she'll come home and lie down on her own side against the wall, and reach, out of four years of habit, across the made and waiting field beside her, and find, the way she finds every night, that the whole long competent day she's about to do — the bar, the till, the band, the binder by the register she went to bed angry at and woke up still angry at — will not, when it's done, bring her even the one small thing she'd trade all of it for, which is a set of cold feet put on the backs of her knees on purpose, in the dark, to make her swear, and laugh, and stay.
The water comes up hot. The blind won't close. The day starts being a day.
She is, for one more hour, a woman who still has every small chore of him left to do — the bed, the mug, the Post-it she lives next to — and does not yet know that this is the last quiet morning she will own one of them, that by Monday the corridor will reach into even this, will hand her one more thing of his to take down with her own hand, and call it mercy, and call it saving her.