And the ordinariness of it felt like a gift. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop — for Mark to say something sharp, or for me to — and it never did. We just carried wood. We stacked it by the fireplace. He asked me if I thought the chimney needed sweeping, and I said I thought Margaret had had it done in October, and he said good, and that was that.
I thought about the porch talk we'd had during the sixty days — the night I'd found him drinking on the porch and talked to him like a brother for the first time in months. He'd admitted he was drowning, that the papers had been easy, that he'd told himself our mother didn't mind. I'd told him I believed he hadn't planned it cruelly, and that the belief didn't excuse it. We hadn't hugged. Something had unclenched anyway.
It struck me, carrying that firewood, how much of my life with Mark had been lived in these small physical tasks — carrying wood, washing dishes, moving boxes — while the big things went unsaid. We had grown up in this house together, fought over the bathroom, borrowed each other's cars, and then grown into adults who communicated mostly through our mother. Six years in Singapore hadn't helped. But the last fourteen months had forced us into rooms together — the mediation room, the kitchen, this yard — and rooms, it turned out, were where brothers and sisters actually talked.
On the last trip, standing by the woodpile with our arms full, Mark said, "Tina's doing well. The full-time job. She's — she's good at it."
"She told the table about it last time she was here," I said. "She seemed proud."
"She should be." He shifted his armload. "I don't tell her that enough."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and we carried the last of the wood inside, and the house was warm, and the turkey was nearly done, and for a little while, everything was simple. I thought about how much of the last fourteen months had been anything but simple — the demand letter, the fourteen days, the mediation room — and how strange it was that carrying firewood with my brother could feel like the most honest thing we'd done together in years.
Chapter 40: Tina's Pies
Dinner was at two, because Margaret had always served Thanksgiving dinner at two and saw no reason to change a system that worked. We gathered in the dining room — Margaret at the head of the table, me to her right, Eleanor to her left, Tina and Josh across from me, Mark at the far end — and the seventh chair sat empty at the corner, set with a plate and a glass and silverware, exactly like the others.
Nobody mentioned the empty chair. Margaret had insisted on it, and we had all, in our various ways, decided not to argue with her about it. It sat there through the blessing — Margaret said grace, short and heartfelt, the way she always had — and through the passing of the turkey, which she carved herself, standing steady on her healed hip while the table went quiet watching her, and then applauded, and she bowed like a performer and told us all to eat.
The food was everything it was supposed to be. The turkey was moist. The stuffing was Margaret's, which is to say it was perfect and beyond discussion. My green beans were, as Eleanor had promised, adequate. And Tina's pies — when we got to dessert, Tina's pies were a triumph.
"This is the best pie I've ever had," Josh announced, through a mouthful. "And I'm not just saying that because she made me one with extra filling."
"You're saying it because it's true," Tina said, but she was glowing. She told the table about her new full-time job at the dental office — the promotion, the raise, the dentist who had told her she was the best hire he'd made in ten years — and as she talked, Mark watched her with something on his face I hadn't seen in years. Something like pride. Something like a man looking at his wife and remembering why he married her.
Diane, I told myself, look away. Give them the moment.
So I looked away. I looked at Margaret, who was watching Tina with her chin in her hand and a soft expression I rarely saw on my mother's face in company. I looked at Josh, who was on his second slice of pie and listening to his mother with the particular attention of a boy who is proud and doesn't quite know how to say it. I looked at Eleanor, who caught my eye and winked.