You put your hand on my mouth to make me hush. Now, I saw you once in your Wisconsin phase, you said, when you came back to town for the holidays. It was Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass at the old Presbyterian church, lit up with the candles we were holding. You were with your family in front, and me and my family were in back, my cousin and me passing our traditional flask of bourbon under the hymnal. I look around, bored, and I see you there. Wearing this jacket with fur around the collar, holding the candle under your chin. One more inch and you burst into flame. So thin I could almost see through you. Then everything ends, we do the singing thing, blow out the candles, I was about to go talk to your parents and your brother, say hi to you, when you just walk by and I’m struck to stone. You looked sad, like you needed someone to just come along and make you happy. I took a good look at myself and knew I didn’t have what it took. So I let you walk away.
Oh, I said. That’s awful. Five years down the drain.
No, but, listen, you said, though I already was listening. Listen, if had I gone to say hello then, we wouldn’t be here now. Now we’re right, the timing’s right, but before we weren’t and it wasn’t. We were lucky, you said, turning your head and kissing my lowest rib, gently. Timing is everything.
In the window an icicle caught the sun and burst into a thousand shards of light on the walls. I watched it burn there, dripping. I said, Your story was better than mine.
AT THE END of that week, we emerged into the cold world blinking like newborns. In our absence, the village had been swaddled with thick snow. There was the first skim of ice stretched taut across the lake, a canvas waiting for the brush. When we crossed the crashing river, I couldn’t help myself, and said, Where a gluegold-brown marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.
You looked at me. That’s so damn pretty, you said, and, for such a tough country boy, there were tears in your eyes. That’s the prettiest thing I ever heard, you said in such a voice that I couldn’t ever tell you the words weren’t mine.
WE WENT TO BOTH Thanksgiving dinners, the early one at your mother’s, with her frozen corn and box stuffing, the later one at my house, with homegrown Brussels sprouts and orange-nutmeg cranberry sauce. I preferred your mother’s. Over dessert, we settled on late May for the wedding.
Immediately, the fights began.
In December, I scratched off the bumper sticker on your truck that endorsed the worst president in American history.
In January, when we started building the house, though you tried to stick to my eco-structure mandate, I freaked out when I saw the workmen lowering a standard septic tank into the ground.
In February, I decided I wouldn’t take your name, even though your mother sobbed over the dishes about it and your father stomped around saying that your name was as good a name as any name in the dadblasted town, and they’d been here longer than some snooty people he could name and where do I get off saying his name wasn’t good enough, he would like to know that, he would like to dadblasted know that.
In March, we almost came to blows over something you said that I wasn’t supposed to hear, a joke at the bar involving terrorists and nuclear bombs. I, who had just come into the busy place, and had been about to put my hands over your eyes and plant a kiss on the back of your neck, stalked out of the bar, your friends looking away.
In April, in the height of wedding planning, we fought once a day.
Still, there was no other valve for everything building up inside us, and we always made up beautifully. You were kind. You had a certain delicacy that, when either of us was at the point of broaching a real darkness, allowed you to suddenly capitulate. Your face would pale and you’d nod once and say, Okay. You’re right. I would stare at you, disbelieving, the horrid thing I was just about to say still crawling on my tongue.
Stupid me. Those months, I thought your capitulation was weakness. I now know it was everyday kindness.
IT WASN’T EASY to come back to a little town when I was used to cities. Our hometown is tiny and obscure, an upstate village with a cheap-looking Main Street, cracked sidewalks, public buildings of brown brick and particleboard, weathered plastic wreaths on the neighbors’ doors. Townspeople gave me befuddled looks when I said I was staying: Really? they said. I saw my stock sink in their faces. The produce manager in the grocery store snorted at me when I suggested he start up an organic section, and when I looked at the sorry state of the conventional pears he had, I understood what he meant. I couldn’t find enough space in town to walk, and when I went into the hills where the dogs are never locked up and unused to pedestrians, I was attacked by a furiously droopy basset hound. I was impatient with the Saturday night choices: the movies thirty minutes away, or television, or a bar, or a board game. I felt like a teenager again, stifled and bored, without even the possibility of babysitting and snooping around in other people’s business. I attempted to have a storytelling hour at the library, but the time ticked by and not one child came, and the librarian muttered with a sideways glance that I shouldn’t be surprised: there was a high school basketball game that afternoon, after all.
Yet, as winter dribbled into spring, I found myself paying more attention to the tiniest things: a crocus furling out of the ground, the way the two old women who sat in the diner from opening to closing greeted each other with only a wet sniff every day. Because I had nothing to do, I finally began to understand the rhythm of the village, its subtleties that I had been too impatient to recognize when I was young.
Are you happy here? my mother said once in April, pouring coffee into my cup. I don’t mean with him, she said, nodding toward the living room, where you and my father were shouting at some sports team thousands of miles away. But here?
I considered this, the bones of my hands warming against the mug. I said, slowly, I can feel the beginnings of happiness sort of seeping into me.
My mother nodded and looked out the window, though she couldn’t see anything through the downpour. She sighed and said, Oh, that damn rain.
IT HAD BEEN RAINING constantly since late February, and of course it rained at our wedding. In the receiving line, nearly everyone whispered into my ear, Rain on a bride means good luck, and kissed my cheek and went on to the buffet.
I didn’t care. I beamed. I’d had the flu for a week, but had taken nuclear doses of medicine and all night felt like I was floating. I danced and ate and drank, and when we came home to our new-smelling house, with the floors still unfinished and the walls still unpainted, you tossed aside the umbrella (we found it the next day halfway up a blue spruce), swooped me up into your arms, kicked open the door, and carried me over the threshold, to where it smelled of sawdust and plaster; you kicked the door shut behind us and carried me up the stairs and the rain on the roof was thrumming, and opened the door to the bedroom, the one room in the house you’d finished and furnished with castoffs from my parents’ house. Candles were aflame, and your florist father hadn’t held back, filling the room with ferns and lilac, lovely garlands across the walls, huge vases overflowing with greenery.
This was a surprise to you, too. You started and almost dropped me, then filled our new house with your honking laugh, populating it with an invisible skein of ducks, until I had to laugh, also, at your joy.
AND THEN, THE DENOUEMENT. One week and two days after the wedding, you were in your work clothes, crouching in the living room to put in a baseboard over the freshly painted walls. Outside it was raining, of course, but harder than it had rained for the past few months, so thickly we couldn’t see out the windows at all. I had squelched through the mud with eight sacks of groceries and had just finished putting them away in our cabinets.