Previously – Chapter 11: No, Thank You
The ice machine on the second-floor landing let go of a load at ten past eight, a sound like a small wall coming down two doors away, and Lila lay in the dark with her eyes open and did the arithmetic without deciding to. Three hours and fifty minutes. Enough to function on. Not enough to be pleasant about it.
She had booked the motel on Koval herself, eighty-six dollars, exterior corridors, because the client paid for the client’s rooms and she paid for her own now.
The settlement had come through at three-forty, with a final banquet check six thousand eight hundred over the estimate, which was correct: over is a party where people stayed, and under means they left. She signed the reconciliation on her phone. L. Brenner. It looked like a signature on a permission slip.
She opened the laptop to check the flight, and while it was waking she clicked once on the folder called `misc_v2`, typed over it, and hit return.
`Norwood`
Her father had texted at 5:40, so he’d been up in Rockford since seven and had waited a decent interval, for him.
Denny: Baby girl. Saint Casimir’s signed. So did two more. THREE lots, not one. Fifteen years on every kilowatt, you cannot beat a check that comes every month
Denny: don’t play the wheel
She wrote Congratulations on the three and sent it. Then she wrote love you and sent that too, separately, because it was true and because it was not a wire transfer.
* * *
Las Vegas at nine in the morning is a town with its makeup off. The Strip is half in shadow at that hour and you can see for the first time that the whole thing is a set of large buildings in a bowl in the desert with brown mountains standing all the way around it, close, unimpressed. It was cold and bright and did not look like it should be either one.
The fountains do not run in the morning. The lake sat there, eight and a half acres of green-brown water with the nozzles up out of it like plumbing, and out toward the middle a workboat went along with a man leaning over the gunwale with a net. Lila stood at the rail for maybe eight seconds, all she had, and went on up Flamingo with her hands in her sleeves.
* * *
The Blue Onion Coffee Shop was in a strip mall past the freeway, between a check-cashing place and a nail salon whose sign had been hand-lettered by somebody who ran out of room. The building was beige. Everything is beige.
Inside it was thirty degrees warmer and lit like a corridor. Eight fluorescent tubes, one running pinker than the others, which nobody was ever going to fix. Maroon vinyl, tables in wood-grain laminate with a chrome band around the edge, a ceiling fan turning at a speed with no purpose. At the counter there were eight stools, and six of the eight had video poker screens set flush into the countertop, glowing, waiting, in a coffee shop, next to the creamers.
Jake was in the last booth, facing the door. He had a cup already and a second one poured for the seat opposite. He was wearing a shirt she recognized from the Tahoe cabin. There was a canvas duffel on the bench beside him, packed, because he was not coming back here after.
“You walked,” he said.
“It’s eleven minutes.”
“It’s fifty degrees.”
“It’s fifty-two,” Lila said, and sat down.
The menu was laminated, twelve pages, with a section called SLIM ‘N TRIM where every item came on cottage cheese. A woman of about sixty came by with a pot in each hand, filled Lila’s cup without being asked, said, “Take your time, hon,” and kept going without breaking stride. The coffee was terrible.
“It’s bad,” Jake said.
“It’s bad on purpose. Cheaper to hold it than dump it, and at this margin she’s right.” She looked around the room over the top of the cup. “Four people. Sixteen guests. I have not seen anybody stand still.”
“She’s touched the pot once a lap,” Jake said. “She takes it with her and does the whole side and puts it down at the station on the way back.”
“It’s the best-run room I’ve been in this week.”
“It’s the best-run room in the state.”
“I was in a hotel last night that spent four hundred thousand dollars on a ceiling.”
“Sure. This place will be here in twenty years.”
The machines at the counter sat there lit up and nobody put anything in them, and Lila noticed that she had checked, and that he had chosen the booth, and neither of them said anything about it, and the ice machine behind the counter began to cycle.
* * *
“So I looked something up,” Jake said.
“Go on.”
“Properly. I got the actual studies, the ones with the numbers in them. It took a while, because you have to know the words to search for, and the words are horrible.” He turned his cup a quarter turn. “I did most of it at two in the morning, several times, over about four months.”
“All right.”
“Somewhere between a half and three-quarters of people who get treated for this go back to it, inside the first year.” He said it the way you read out a tracking number.
Lila put her cup down.
“And I want to be fair about it, so: that’s a bad number. Small samples. Everybody’s self-reporting. The population you’re studying is defined by the fact that it lies.” He looked at her. “It means the real one is probably worse.”
“You have a year,” Lila said.
“First one I’ve ever had.”
“You were nearly there the last time.”
“I was all the way there. That’s the part. I’d been out three weeks by the time the box came out.”
“You were carrying four hundred thousand dollars of somebody else’s opinion of you,” she said.
“That’s a good argument,” Jake said. “I could make it better than you just did. I’ve made it better than you just did, in a car, to myself, on the Kennedy. I’m not going to run it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m the best salesman you will ever meet and this is the one thing in the world I’m not allowed to sell you.”
She looked at the table.
“It won’t look like a casino,” he said. “If it happens it will look like me being twenty minutes late with a reason that holds up. It’ll be small and it’ll make sense and you won’t find it for a while, and when you find it you’ll have already been living inside it for weeks, and you will feel exactly as stupid as you felt the first time. I’ve done it.”
Neither of them said anything.
“You’ve been sober a year.”
“I’ve been sober a year,” he agreed. “That’s a fact about the past.”
* * *
Her phone went off on the laminate. It was Sophie, so she took it.
“Sixty percent rain in Winnetka Sunday,” Sophie said. “The mother of the bride has annotated a screenshot.”
“Sixty at two is thirty by four. Call Hector, ask for the twelve-foot runners, he’s got twelve behind the pipe and drape from the auto show. Then call her. Don’t email. Say we’re doing a covered walk because of her shoes.”
“Because of her shoes.”
“Because of her shoes.”
“This is why I keep you,” Sophie said, and then, “Where are you.”
“Having coffee.”
“Lila.”
“There’s a nail salon and a check-cashing place.”
A silence with a whole building in it.
“Okay,” Sophie said, in the voice she used on a client who had just asked for doves. “Whatever happens, do not fix anything. Don’t move the napkins.”
Lila looked down. At some point in the last ten minutes she had pushed the sugar caddy flush against the napkin dispenser and turned the ketchup so the label faced out.
“I have to go.”
“You have to go,” Sophie said. “Theo says hi. Theo has no idea what’s happening. Theo is delighted.”
* * *
“That woman at the place in the valley,” Lila said. “The family session. She asked me one question in an hour and a half. She asked me what I got out of it.”
“Yvonne. You were furious for a month.”
“I was furious for a year.” Lila found that her hands wanted the sugar caddy again and put them in her lap. “I’ve got an answer now. It isn’t a good one, so let me get through it, because you’re going to want to be kind to me in about a minute and I need you not to be.”
Jake sat back and put his hands flat on the laminate and said nothing.
“When you called me from that parking garage with the four hundred and twelve thousand, I sat on the floor of the corridor by the linen chute and my hands were shaking. Then they stopped, fast, because I had my phone out and a note open and I was already writing a list. Who to call. What order.”
“I felt useful. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and by the time I stood up off that floor I felt better than I had in six months. That’s what I got out of it.”
“Lila.”
“Don’t. You said you’d let me.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
He raised both hands an inch off the table and put them back down.
“The seed money,” she said. “Seventy-seven thousand two hundred and forty dollars, every other Friday for six years. That’s what I couldn’t get past Thursday night. Not the account, I understood the account inside a minute. It’s that you scrolled, and nobody has ever looked at that in six years.” She said the next part to the ketchup. “And there’s a version of me that was glad somebody finally had, which I’d appreciate you not touching. I wired it out on a Tuesday afternoon in January. Eleven minutes. Then I worked a shift, and I didn’t tell you or Sophie or my mother, and I have told myself for two years that I kept quiet to spare you.”
Jake didn’t move.
“I wanted to be owed,” Lila said.
The fan went around.
“In that bar, before we’d even left, I looked at your shoes and saw they’d been resoled twice, and I couldn’t tell whether that was money or the end of money, and not being able to tell made me want to go with you.”
“That’s a hell of a read,” Jake said.
“It wasn’t a read. A read is when you’re trying to find out. I had all the information. I did it anyway.”
“Two more,” Lila said, “and neither one is about me. Atlantic City. I’ve heard that story three times. The month moves and the money moves, and once it took an hour and forty minutes and once it took thirty-one hours.” She left it there. “I noticed inside the first year. I didn’t say anything.”
Jake did not offer her a fourth.
“The other one’s the legal pad.”
Jake put his cup down.
“You went into the kitchen and came back with it and sat three feet away and never said a word while I added the columns. Ninety-one thousand four hundred. I checked your arithmetic with you watching me check it, and what I thought, sitting on that floor, was: at least the man kept a record. You built that pad the night before, so that it would audit.”
“Yes,” Jake said.
She waited.
“That’s the whole answer,” he said. “There isn’t a second part. I’ve spent two years looking for one.”
The woman came past and left the check face-down and said, “No rush, hon,” and Lila flinched slightly, for reasons entirely her own, and asked her name, and was told Ester, and thanked her by it. Ester looked at her for a second and went on down the row.
“My year, since you’re not going to ask for it,” Lila said. “Gam-Anon a dozen times. Hated it. Kept going. I built the company and it’s real.” She turned the check over: twelve sixty, for two coffees and a slice of pie neither of them had ordered. “I also still write ‘no rush at all’ on invoices to people ninety days late, and I have taken it out and put it back in on the same invoice. I’m still terrible at wanting things directly. I’m telling you the state of the equipment.” She set the check back down. “But I can want the company. I can say that one out loud in the right order now. That’s the list. There’s one thing on it.”
Jake didn’t say anything.
“You could ask me,” Lila said.
“If I ask you, you’ll say yes. It’s nine in the morning, you’ve had four hours’ sleep, you’ve just told me the worst thing you know about yourself and I didn’t leave. You’d say yes in about a second and a half.” He put the spoon down. “I’ve been getting yeses off people that way my whole life.”
“That was a little bit of a move.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Sorry.”
Then he took a twenty out of his pocket and put it on the check, and she watched him do it.
* * *
She let the twenty sit for the length of two full turns of the fan.
“No,” Lila said. “I’m not letting you have that.” She pushed the check and the twenty into the middle of the table with one finger. “You ran my answer. You didn’t like the odds on it. So you took the question off the table, and then you apologized for the one small part of it that was a move, so we could agree we’d been honest with each other and get on with the morning.”
“That’s fair.”
“I’m not finished.” She kept her voice level. “Two years ago you decided on a balcony what I could handle hearing, and you were kind about it, and you were wrong. This morning you’ve told me the true numbers, which nobody has ever done for me, and then decided on my behalf that I’m not fit to be asked a question.”
“I was trying not to work you.”
“I know what you were trying to do. You have never once let a room tell you something you hadn’t already priced. I’ve spent a year on a folding chair learning to say the thing I want out loud. I’m bad at it. I just did it. And you handled it.”
“So ask me or don’t ask me. But do it because you decided to, and not because you ran the math on me and liked the number.”
* * *
Jake sat there. He opened his mouth and closed it, and Lila watched a man who had once talked eleven bankers into a wine program that did not exist fail to produce a single word, twice, in a booth, in front of her.
“Okay,” he said, and moved the sugar caddy an inch and put it back where it had been. “I’ve done this in my head four hundred times.”
She could feel the sentence coming. She had heard it in a half-empty apartment in Echo Park and at a table in a suite that turned out to be comped and once about a daiquiri, and some part of her got ready to stop loving him on the spot.
“I’m not going to promise you anything,” Jake said. “I’ve used up the promises.”
The ice machine finished its cycle and dropped the load into the bin, all at once, loud.
“Come to dinner,” Jake said. “In Chicago. Not at Tarrant’s, you don’t want to eat at Tarrant’s, the room’s loud and Sal seats to the window.” He put a hand up and then didn’t know where to put it and put it down. “There’s a place on Superior with nine tables. A Tuesday. I’m off Tuesdays.”
Lila did not move.
“That’s the ask. That’s all of it.” He looked at the table. “I’ve been building something for a year and it turns out to be dinner. I don’t have standing to ask you for a life. I worked out what I’m entitled to ask for and it came to two hours on a weeknight.” He stopped. “I’ll come to you. I mean, I’m already there, we live in the same city, that isn’t a concession, I don’t know why I said it like one.”
She still did not move.
“And I don’t know what you’re going to say,” Jake said, and put both hands flat on the laminate, and this time it was not the thing he did to make himself stop talking.
“I have walked into rooms my whole life knowing how they were going to end. Banks. Landlords. My father’s funeral.” He looked up. “This is the first one, and I want you to understand that I am not enjoying it.”
“No,” Lila said. “I can see that.”
* * *
Then he got the duffel up onto the bench and unzipped it, and it was the least graceful thing she had ever seen him do. What came out was a brick of envelopes with a rubber band doubled around it. He put it on the table and took his hand off it and did not slide it toward her, and sat back as far as the booth allowed, which was not far.
“These aren’t an argument,” he said. “I want that said before you touch them. If you read them and nothing happens, that’s the right outcome, because there’s nothing in them.”
Twelve envelopes, in ballpoint, in his terrible handwriting, going slightly downhill on every one.
“I wrote you one on the first of every month,” Jake said. “After the bank. It started by accident on the back of a prep list in December, and it went on for a year.” He was looking at the pie, which had arrived without either of them noticing. “There’s one about a wedge salad.”
“Why didn’t you send them?”
“Because a stamped envelope is a decision and an unstamped one is a piece of paper. I got to that in about March. I’d already done three.”
She turned the brick over. Three had stamps. The other nine had a bare white corner, and all twelve were addressed to apartment 3F on Leland Avenue in Lincoln Square.
“You addressed all of them.”
“Yeah.”
“To Lincoln Square.”
“Yeah.”
“I moved out of there the November before last.”
“I know,” Jake said.
He did not build anything on top of that.
“Don’t read them here,” he said. “I’d rather not be in the state.”
Lila put the rubber band back the way it had been, doubled, and slid the brick into the padded sleeve of her bag where the laptop went, which was the safest place she owned.
* * *
“Can I ask you one thing first,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“It isn’t about the odds. I heard the odds. The three weeks in the fall. All six of them.”
Jake did not move.
“You told Ray about the Tuesday at seven-fifteen the next morning, and then you said it out loud to nineteen people in a basement at St. Bonaventure, and a man named Phil thanked you for sharing. The other five I found by myself, in a search field, in a hotel in this city, at one in the morning. It was never the money. You were up four hundred and thirty-six dollars.”
“I know.”
“So the next time. I won’t insult you with if.” She looked at him. “The next time you’re twenty minutes late with a reason that holds up. Who gets told.”
He did not answer fast, and that was new.
“You do,” Jake said. “First. Before the room.”
“Why?”
“Because a room is built so you can put a thing down. That’s the whole design of it. If you’re in this, the first one goes to you and I don’t get the design anymore.” He rubbed his jaw. “I’ve been arguing about it with a man in Tempe for a year. He thinks it’s a bad idea for me and a necessary one, and he won’t say which is bigger, because he says that’s my job.”
“That’s expensive.”
“It’s all I’ve got left, because you know what I’d normally put behind a sentence like that and I’ve spent it.” He turned one hand over. “So it’s an arrangement. It’s worth nothing as a feeling. You can check an arrangement.”
“I might. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’ve stopped. I’ve got it down to about once a month, standing up in a kitchen, hating myself for eleven minutes afterward, and that’s the best I have ever done.”
“Once a month is two hours and twelve minutes a year,” Jake said.
“Don’t be funny.”
“I did the arithmetic. I do arithmetic when I’m frightened.”
* * *
Lila picked up her phone, did something on it for about forty seconds, and put it face-down again. He did not ask what it was. She watched him not ask.
“That was the car,” she said. “It was eleven-forty. It’s twelve-fifteen.”
Jake looked at the ceiling fan.
“The samples are bad in the direction that’s worse for you, and you did not have to tell me that, and that’s what I’ll be sitting with over Utah.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to say two things and the order matters, so let me have the order.”
“Take it.”
“I love you,” Lila said.
The fan went around.
“I’ve never said that to you. Not once, in two and a half years. You said it on the floor of that empty apartment with a lie sitting underneath it, and in that kitchen when it was too late to be any use, and both times I said I know you do and never said it back.” She kept her eyes on him. “So it goes on the table before the other thing, and neither of us gets to claim afterward that it was the reason. It isn’t the reason. It’s been true the whole time and it never once held anything up.”
Jake did not say it back to her.
She had not known, until he didn’t, how much she needed him not to.
“Here’s the second one. I’m not coming to fix you.” She looked at her own hands. “In your kitchen I said there was no version of this where I’m useful. You got sober in rooms I’m not allowed into, with a retired bus mechanic who is not me, in a year I wasn’t in the state for. If you go back out I can’t stop it. Not by loving you, not by counting, not by being early, and I am always early.”
“No,” Jake said. “You can’t.”
“So there’s nothing in it for the part of me that’s been getting out of bed for eleven years.” She looked up. “Which means if I come, it’s because I want to, and there isn’t a second one underneath it. I’ve been checking for one since the middle of Thursday night. I checked it the way I check a load-in.”
She squared the check against the edge of the table.
“Yes,” Lila said. “Tuesday.”
Jake sat very still.
“Not this week. I’m in Winnetka Sunday and I’ll be no good to anybody until Wednesday. The one after. And I’m not going anywhere. I have a lease and a van and a woman named Priya who I pay before I pay myself. This is dinner. That’s the whole thing that’s been agreed.”
“Don’t tell them anything about me.”
“No.”
“You will.”
“I will,” Jake said.
* * *
His hands were still flat on the laminate.
They had been there since he stopped talking, and Lila understood, looking at them, that he had decided somewhere between Chicago and this booth that he would not be the one who moved first, no matter what she said. The watch was gone. It had gone the week she cleared out the Echo Park apartment and found its case empty, and she had known inside a second where a 1968 Omega goes, and had never once said so.
She put her hand on the table.
Not on his. Six inches short of it, flat, fingers apart, next to a sugar caddy she had shoved flush against a napkin dispenser because she could not help herself.
Then she moved it across and closed the gap.
His hand was warm and dry and did not turn over and did not close on hers. It stayed where it was, and she felt his whole arm go rigid with the work of leaving it there, and she sat and let the year come up through the table into her wrist, and it took a while, and she said nothing through any of it.
There were two calluses at the base of his fingers that he had never had in his life.
“You’re carrying cases.”
“Wednesdays. The kid quit.”
She turned his hand over. She put her thumb on the inside of his wrist, on the flat of it where the tendons run, and held it there, and his pulse came up under her thumb and stayed up, and neither of them did one thing about that either.
Then his fingers closed, once, hard, and eased.
“Okay,” Jake said, to the table, in a voice she had never heard him use with anybody else in the room.
Ester came down the row with the pot and got as far as them and stopped, and looked at the two hands, and filled Lila’s cup from the wrong side without asking anybody to move anything. “There’s pie on that check, hon. You might as well eat it.”
They ate the pie. It was cherry, and it was not good, and they ate all of it.
* * *
Outside, the cold came off the parking lot flat and even. He came out behind her with the duffel on his shoulder and the door swung shut on the fluorescent light, and there was nothing out there but a plastic bag twenty feet up in a palm tree.
She stopped four feet out and turned around.
“Okay,” Lila said.
“Okay.”
She had two handfuls of the front of a jacket she had last seen on a chair in Echo Park before she’d finished deciding anything about it, and the first thing was not a kiss. It was her forehead going into his sternum and staying there, and both his arms coming around her slowly and then not slowly, and her whole face in a shirt that smelled like an airplane and a motel and, underneath that, unbearably, like him.
She stood in it and let it go through her, and it went through her a long time, and her hands did not do one competent thing during any of it.
When she came up he was not saying anything. She got a hand along the side of his neck and turned his face down to hers and looked at him for two full seconds first, which she had learned to do in a cabin at Tahoe and had never once managed since. He held still under it, and he had never been any good at that.
Then she kissed him in a parking lot next to a check-cashing place at twenty to twelve in the morning, and he made a sound with nothing performed in it anywhere, and said her name once against the corner of her mouth in a way that came out wrong, and his hand went flat and open between her shoulder blades and stayed there, holding, the way you hold a rail.
Behind them a man came out of the check-cashing place counting twenties and looked away, because he had seen worse before breakfast.
“Go to the meeting,” she said, because it was ten to noon and there was a church basement on Maryland Parkway, and he said, “I’m going to the meeting,” and did not let go of her elbow for another second and a half.
She got to the corner of the lot before she looked back. He was standing where she had left him, bag on his shoulder, not on his phone, not doing one thing with his hands.
He did not wave.
* * *
Ten days later the place on Superior turned out to have nine tables and one man working all of them, and they watched him do it for two hours the way other people watch a game. Neither of them said one useful thing about it, because there was nothing to fix. She paid half, and he let her, and said nothing about it.
Outside it was thirty-eight degrees and raining the way it rains in Chicago in November, which is sideways and not very much of it. The van was up on Huron with a ticket gone soft under the wiper. Lila got it off the glass and put it in her coat pocket without reading the number.
“Come home with me,” she said.
She had built nothing underneath it. No reason on the end of it, no version of it she could take back if his face did the wrong thing. She stood on the wet sidewalk with her keys in her hand and let it be a thing she had asked for.
“Yeah,” Jake said.
The back stairs had a bad tread, third down from the top. She did not mention it. He found it, and swore, and kept coming.
Inside she got the door shut behind him and did not turn on the light. She stood in her own kitchen with her coat still on and looked at him. He looked back at her. Neither of them made an occasion out of it. He did not ask her a question and he did not do one thing with his hands, and he stood there in the dark in a wet coat and let it go on for as long as she wanted it to go on, and when she was finished he was still standing there.
Then she crossed the kitchen.
She had a handful of his sweater and her mouth on his before he had gotten one arm out of the coat, and the coat came down and hung off his wrist and stayed there, and he did not do anything about it.
They got as far as the front room, where a six-foot folding table had been leaning against the wall since Sunday, and it went over flat and hit the floor like a shot. Downstairs a man knocked twice on his ceiling with something.
“That’s Vic,” Lila said.
“Does Vic do that a lot?”
“Vic has never done that in his life.”
Neither of them picked up the table.
His hands were cold off the street and he did not apologize for it. There were two calluses at the base of his fingers that had not been there two years ago, and she found them again in the dark with her thumb, and then stopped keeping track of them.
She said, “Here,” once, and moved his hand, and did not explain it and did not laugh at herself afterward.
He said her name against the side of her throat, and it came out right this time.
There was a point where he stopped and put his forehead down on her shoulder and held still, and she did not ask him what it was and did not do anything to it. She lay there with her hand flat between his shoulder blades and let it take the time it took. After a while he came back.
Later the rain got serious and went loud on the window over the alley, into a gutter she had told the landlord about twice and had stopped telling him about.
At twenty to twelve he was standing in front of the open refrigerator in his shorts, lit up by it, eating cold rice out of a container with a fork. She came in and got up on the counter.
“He owns it,” Jake said.
“He doesn’t own it.”
“He wiped down the reach-in himself at the end of service. Nobody wipes a reach-in for another man.”
“He’s married to the daughter.”
Jake stood there with the fork in the air and gave it up. “He’s married to the daughter.”
He put the container back and shut the door with his elbow, and stood a second in the dark with his hand still on it, and then came over and got her down off the counter.
* * *
The van was called Onward. Sophie had paid a man on Elston forty dollars to letter it on the driver’s door during a week when Lila was in Atlanta and could not stop her, and twice it had gotten her hired. Fifteen months later, it was backed into the alley behind the two-flat on Winchester at twenty to ten on the first Sunday in March.
She came up the back stairs in her boots with a quart container. Jake was at the kitchen table in a Tarrant’s polo with a spiral notebook open.
“There’s creamed spinach,” she said, putting it down.
“There’s always creamed spinach. Sal charges me for it now. It comes off the check every other Friday and he calls it employee meal and has never said a word about it to my face.”
The lease had been on the table in front of her chair for nine days. Twenty-eight hundred square feet on Kinzie, sixty-two months, made out to Norwood Events LLC, with a personal guarantee on page eleven. Six people on payroll. A client at a hundred and eighteen days. A job in June worth three hundred and forty thousand that she had turned down because she could not staff it and would not lie about it.
Jake wrote something and drew a line under it. The wire had gone out on the first. He was entering it now, the way he had entered it every month for three years: the six hundred, the date, the number underneath.
The number underneath was sixty-six thousand four hundred and forty.
She had opened the account in June. It had taken her from November to June, and then she had left the routing number on an index card on this table and said nothing, and he had put it in his wallet and said, “Okay.” She had not spent a dollar of it and had stopped requiring herself to have a reason. A hundred and eleven months to go, which put the last one in the early summer of the year he turned forty-six.
“You went to the eight o’clock,” she said.
“I went to the eight o’clock.”
He had been going to the Sunday eight o’clock at the church on Leavitt since January, on top of the Thursday, because in January the Sunday nights got hard and nobody could say why. Selection Sunday was two weeks out, and for the three weeks after it he would not be on the floor at Tarrant’s after seven, because there are fourteen televisions in that dining room and every one would have a bracket on it. He would do the ordering in the basement with the door shut and lose the floor, which was the part of the job he liked, and get it back in April.
One Wednesday in January he had sat in the car in the lot for forty minutes and then come up the stairs and told her from the doorway with his coat on, before hello. Nothing happened. That was the entire event, and it happened about four times a year. She still drove to a Wednesday thing in Ravenswood, still hated it, and still went.
Lila picked up the pen and signed her own name to a personal guarantee for three hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars. It took four seconds and her hand did not do anything interesting at all.
“Okay,” she said.
Jake looked at the page. “That’s everything you own.”
“That’s everything I own.” She put two fingers on page eleven. “Which is the unromantic part, and it’s already done. So the company’s ring-fenced, the accounts stay separate, and there’s an agreement at a lawyer’s office on Clark that I signed in February. It separates the assets and the debts. Nothing of mine goes behind anything of yours again. If you ever go back out, nothing that happens to you can come anywhere near the van. I’m not apologizing for it.”
“Don’t.” Something went out of his shoulders that she had not known was in them. “I’ve been trying to work out how to ask you for that since Christmas. You’ll want your own lawyer to read it.”
“I have my own lawyer. She wrote it.”
She put the lease square on the table, and then moved it a half inch off square, on purpose, because it was Sunday. “I want to ask you something. I’ve had it in my mouth since the second week of January.”
Jake put the notebook down.
“When I was twenty-four a man took me to a restaurant on Sedgwick and asked me to marry him and I said no, and I could not explain it to him or to my mother or to me, and I have been apologizing for it ever since,” Lila said. “I know why now. That took a year on a folding chair.” She was holding the capped pen in both hands. “So I’d like to be on the other side of the question once in my life. That’s the worst reason I’ve got, so I’m putting it first, because that’s the order we do now.”
“That’s the order we do.”
“Here’s the rest of it. You sit at this table on the first of every month and write a number in a notebook, and I have never once had to ask you what you were doing. Four hundred and fifty-one days. And yes, I counted.”
“I know you counted.”
“Of course I counted.” She looked at him. “Marry me.”
Jake did not say anything. The refrigerator cycled on, which in that apartment was an event.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” He took his hands off the table and put them in his lap. “The county building on Washington. License on the second floor, one-day wait, judge on the eighteenth at ten and at two. Eleven minutes and sixty dollars, more for the certified copies, which you want, for the insurance.”
Lila sat back. “You looked it up.”
“In September. I had no intention of asking you and I still didn’t twenty minutes ago.”
He stood up and put a hand on the back of the chair, and said, “I,” and stopped, out loud, in the middle, with his mouth still open, and Lila sat at her own kitchen table and watched him find the rest of that sentence and put it down where he had put down all the others.
“I know,” she said. “Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were absolutely going to.”
“I was going to,” Jake said.
He called Tempe, and Ray picked up on the fourth ring the way Ray picked up on the fourth ring. Jake said it in about seven words, and there was a pause, and then Ray said, “Okay,” and then, after a second, “Did you eat?” and then, “Put her on.”
“Lila.” Something dry and enormous behind him, a slider going. “Congratulations. Don’t buy a ring at a Costco. Everybody does, it’s fine, it’s still a Costco.”
She handed the phone back, and Jake hung up and stood in the middle of the kitchen holding it, looking at the floor.
She got up to put the container in the sink. On the way past the door she stopped, because the calendar from the linen company was hanging off one thumbtack at an angle that had been getting worse since the middle of February, and it was March now, and somebody had turned the page.
She put a finger under the low corner and brought it up until it sat true, and let go, and it went straight back down, because it was on one tack and there was nothing else holding it and there never had been.
“It’s the tack,” Jake said, from the table, behind her, out loud, which he had not once done in all the years he had been watching her do it.
“I know it’s the tack.”
“There’s a second hole up there. Somebody in 1961 put in a second hole.”
“I am aware of the second hole,” said Lila, and left the calendar hanging exactly the way it was.
She came back to the table and put her hand down flat on the wood beside his.
The End
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