Thursdays

The arrangement had a shape, and the shape worked for four months.

Tuesdays were the Tully place. Thursdays were the city. Friday mornings she came home with a roll of drawings in a cardboard tube she had bought for the purpose and left in the trunk of the car, and Wes never once asked to see the drawings, because he was a man who believed in the stated purpose of things, and the stated purpose of a tube was drawings.

On the Thursdays she actually went. This matters, and she insisted on it, to herself and to no one else: she went to class. She sat in a room on Thirteenth Street with nineteen other people and a woman who taught in a black turtleneck, and she learned the difference between a section and an elevation, and she was good at it, and she did not care about it at all. The class was not the lie. The class was the thing that made the lie possible, which is a different matter, and she understood the difference perfectly.

Between the two days there was the rest of her life, which continued, and which she performed with a competence nobody questioned.

The spending began with the boots.

He gave her the boots in November, in the house on Route 22, out of a box that had come from a catalog, and he had guessed the size wrong by half a size and would not exchange them because exchanging them would have required a conversation about how he knew her size, so she wore them a half size too small and liked it. They were brown, unlined, with a sole that would not survive a winter in the valley, and they cost four hundred dollars, which she found out by looking them up, and which he had not mentioned, and which she did not mention having looked up.

After the boots she began buying for the departure.

This is the part that the town later described as vanity, and it was not vanity. She bought because the departure had to be real, and a departure is only real if it has luggage. There was a week in January when she put on the account at Reyes Home: two suitcases, a set of four linen napkins in mushroom (the same ones, which she had carried in a cart for two years and had never checked out), a brass catchall, a candle described as fig and blackcurrant, a cashmere throw, six glasses, and a mirror with a beveled edge. Tobin wrote it in the ledger with the pen. The total came to two thousand one hundred and six dollars. She said, "Put it on the account," and he said, "Of course," and the statement went to her email, which was the only part of her life at that time she was truly careful about.

She also bought at night, on the phone, in bed, next to a sleeping man.

There was a button at checkout that said pay in 4. She used it. There was a store credit card offered at a register with ten percent off the first purchase, and she took it, and the rate was twenty-six point nine nine, which she did not read, and which she would have read if she had believed she would ever carry a balance, and she did not believe that, because she was going to leave in March and Grant would take care of everything, and the whole structure of the debt rested on a sentence he had said in a car: we'll work it out.

He had said it. He had said, "We'll work it out," in November, when she had raised the money for the first time, carefully, in the dark, and he had put his hand on her arm and said, "Maren. We'll work it out," and she had lain awake afterward turning those four words over the way you turn a stone that might be a coin.

In February she raised it again.

This time she had brought arithmetic, because she had finally done it: the account at Reyes, two cards, the buy-in-four balances, the tuition, and the fact that a departure in March needed cash. It came to a number she said out loud in a parked car at the turnout by the gravel pit, and the number was nine thousand dollars, and she had expected it to be smaller, and saying it out loud made it larger.

He said, "All right."

He said, "Let me think about timing."

He said, "March is tight for me, actually. The closing on the creek property is in March. It's a liquidity thing, not a willingness thing."

She said, "What's liquidity."

He explained it. He was kind about it. He took his time, and he did not make her feel stupid, and at the end of it she understood that a man with eleven hundred acres and a gravel pit could be temporarily unable to produce nine thousand dollars, and she said, "It's fine," and he said, "Two weeks," and she said, "Two weeks is fine," and she drove home and sat in the car in the driveway for eleven minutes with the engine off.

The letter came on the last Tuesday of the month.

It came by mail to the house, because she had given him the house address in January for a thing he had ordered for her and she had been reckless about, and because he knew she was there on Tuesdays and would take it in before Wes. It was one page, handwritten, on paper from the farm. There was a mark near the bottom where something had been wet and dried.

It said: I've gone to the city for a while and then possibly out west. I'm not going to pretend this is noble. But if I take you with me, I will make you miserable, and I have done that to two people and I am not doing it a third time. You are the best thing that has happened to me in eleven years. Don't write. —G.

Don't write.

She read it standing in the hall with the coat still on. Then she put it in her pocket and went upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed, and then she stood up, and then she sat down again, and then she began to shake, and the shaking went on for two hours, and when it stopped she was cold all over and could not feel her hands.

She was ill for seven weeks.

The doctor who came was Duane Pell, the surgeon from the clinic, who had delivered Willa and knew the family and said prostration and take her fluids and put a line in her arm in the front room because she would not be moved. Her father came and sat in the kitchen and said nothing useful. Doreen came and did the laundry, efficiently, in a way that Maren could hear through two walls and which she found, at the bottom of everything, unbearable.

Pastor Errol came on a Wednesday with a small bottle of oil and a form he had to fill in and asked whether she would like to receive. She said yes, because it was something to say. He anointed her forehead with his thumb and read a passage about a woman at a well, and she lay there thinking: he thinks I am a woman at a well. He asked if there was anything she wanted to confess, and she said no, and he said that was fine, and then he said — and she remembered this for the rest of her life — "The Lord is not asking you to be happy. He's asking you to be faithful," and she lay there afterward in the quiet of the front room with the paper lamp off and thought that if this was what was on offer, she would take the other thing.

In April she got up.

She got up, and she was different. The difference was not that she had recovered; it was that the part of her that had been waiting for permission had died in the bed. She dressed, she did the house, she fed the child, she was pleasant to Doreen. And on the first warm Thursday in May she put the tube in the trunk and drove to the city, not to class, and walked from Penn Station up to Thirteenth Street and then kept walking, past her own building, all the way to Fifth Avenue, and stood in a shop she could not afford and bought nothing, and stood outside afterward on the sidewalk in the crowd with her hands empty, and felt nothing except a flat, practical hunger that was newer and colder and would not be satisfied by a man on a hill.