PART 2: Nobody Had Ever Counted the Nights
Faye didn’t raise her voice.
“Dale. How many nights has Joanne slept on that couch?”
I was still holding my paper plate. White sheet cake, one pink frosting rose. I stood there with my little plastic fork like a guest at somebody else’s party.
Dale laughed. He has a good laugh. It has gotten us out of a hundred tight spots.
“Faye. Come on now. It’s a party.”
“I asked you a number.”
Somebody by the punch bowl set their cup down. Ms. Alvarez folded her hands in her lap.
Faye and I have been friends since the second grade. She was at my wedding. She drove me to the hospital the night Curtis broke his arm.
She is also the one I called from that couch, eleven o’clock at night, more times than I could tell you. When a kid was crying down the hall. When I didn’t want to wake Dale.
“I don’t have a number,” Dale said.
“No,” Faye said. “You don’t. That’s the thing, isn’t it.”
Dale put both hands up, the way he does when he’s calming a horse. “She’s tired. She’s been running on fumes since March.”
“She’s been running on fumes since 1996,” Faye said. “You never noticed because supper was on the table.”
There was a scrape of a chair at the back of the hall.
Curtis stood up. Thirty-two years old, an electrician now, still built like the skinny ninth grader who ate four pork chops at my table and then asked for a fifth.
He didn’t come up front. He just stood there by his chair.
“I lived in that house ten years,” he said.
Nobody said anything.
“I never knew that,” he said. “I never knew she slept on the couch.”
That was the part that got me. Not Dale. Curtis. That boy had been under my roof a decade and he never knew.
He sat back down and looked at his hands.
Dale turned to Ms. Alvarez and spread his arms out wide, like a man doing everybody a favor.
“Look. Bring the girl by Monday. We’ll manage. Joanne’s just—”
“No,” I said.
I set my plate down on the folding table. The fork slid off and hit the floor. Nobody picked it up.
“No,” I said again.
Dale looked at me. “Jo, everybody’s listening.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m saying it here.”
I could hear my own heart. I had not spoken up in that hall in twenty-seven years. I had just kept the coffee going and refilled the platters.
“You promised me in April,” I said. “You said, when you retire, that room is ours. A door that shuts. Nothing on the floor but our slippers.”
He looked down at his shoes.
“I have been waiting on that room since 1996,” I said. “I’m not waiting on it anymore. I’m taking it.”
“You call Ms. Alvarez in the morning and you tell her no. And tonight you sleep on the couch. I’m taking the bed.”
“Joanne.” His face was red all the way to his collar. “You’re embarrassing me in front of the whole church.”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said. “I’m just standing here.”
Ms. Alvarez stood up and put her hand on my arm. “Joanne, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked tonight.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “You asked a question. He answered it.”
She looked at Dale for a second, then sat back down.
People started moving again, slow, like the room had been holding its breath. Somebody cut more cake.
Faye picked my fork up off the floor and wiped it on her napkin and set it beside my plate. She didn’t say anything. That’s Faye.
Dale went and stood by the coat rack with his hands in his pockets.
I finished my cake. It was good cake.
*
That night I slept in our bed with the door shut.
Dale took the couch. I heard him down there thumping around, and then I heard the television go on low, and then off. I did not go down to check on him.
It was the first night in twenty-seven years that the couch wasn’t mine.
*
In the morning I heard him in the kitchen.
I stayed on the stairs.
He had the phone against his ear. “Ms. Alvarez. It’s Dale Rausch.” A pause. “No, we can’t take her. No. It’s not the room.”
Another pause.
“It’s me. I promised my wife something and I broke it in front of half the county.”
He was quiet a long while.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I know. You too.”
I went back upstairs and stood in the bedroom I had been waiting on for thirty years. There wasn’t anything on the floor but two pairs of slippers.
*
Three days later he tried to apologize.
“I’m sorry you got embarrassed at the party.”
I was drying a plate. I set it down in the rack and turned around.
“That’s not it,” I said.
“Well, that’s what happened.”
“No.” I wiped my hands on the towel. “What happened is you stood up in front of everybody and spent me. Like I was money in your pocket. Twenty-seven years, Dale, and you spent all of it in one sentence, and they clapped for you.”
He stood there in the kitchen with the dish towel over his shoulder.
“That’s the part I can’t get past,” I said. “The clapping.”
He didn’t say anything else that night. He put the towel on the counter and went out to the garage.
*
A week later Faye took me to the diner by the feed store.
I asked her why she stood up.
She stirred her coffee a long time.
“You’ve called me from that couch since 1996,” she said. “Two hundred times, maybe more. And not once, not one single time, did you say a bad word about him.”
She set the spoon down on the saucer.
“Somebody in this town had to say one,” she said.
“That’s why you stood up?”
“That’s why I stood up.”
We split a piece of coconut cream pie. Faye paid and wouldn’t take the money.
*
Ms. Alvarez called me at the end of September. Not Dale. Me.
There was a girl, fifteen, named Renata, living with a cousin who couldn’t keep her.
“I’ll take her one weekend a month,” I said. “That’s what I can do. Not because anybody said so. Because I said so.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “I just need it to be mine.”
The first weekend Renata came, she ate three plates of food and wouldn’t look at anybody.
“She’s not talking,” Dale said from the doorway.
“She’ll talk when she’s ready,” I said. “Sit down and pass the potatoes.”
*
We were three weeks into it when he came out on the porch with two cups of coffee.
He handed me one and sat on the step below me.
“I’ve been counting,” he said.
“Counting what?”
“Nights.” He turned the cup in his hands. “I got to four hundred and eleven and I couldn’t do it anymore. Then I couldn’t remember which ones I’d counted.” He looked out at the yard. “I’ve been in that house twenty-nine years and I never counted one of them.”
I let him sit there a minute. The porch light was on over his head, the way it has been on since 1996.
“You can come back upstairs,” I said. “But I am not going back to the couch. Not for you. Not for anybody.”
“I know,” he said.
“I mean it, Dale.”
“I know you do.”
*
Curtis came for Sunday dinner in October.
He brought a store pie in the box and set it on the counter and stood in the hallway a minute, looking at the couch. Like it was a piece of furniture he had never seen before in his life.
“What,” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just a couch.”
“It’s just a couch,” I said.
That night I carried the blue pillowcase upstairs, the one I had kept on the couch pillow since 1994. I put it in the drawer with the good sheets.
The bedroom door was shut, and the only things on the floor were two pairs of slippers.
At nine I stepped out and put my hand on the porch light switch, and I turned it off myself.