WEDNESDAY
By noon there is more food in the house than the two of them will eat in a month.
It comes the way it comes.
A car pulls into the yard and somebody gets out with a roaster or a nine-by-thirteen under foil. They do not come to the door. They set it on the step, knock twice, and are back down the walk and into the car before anybody inside has to put a face on and come say something.
That is not coldness. It is the opposite of coldness, and every person in this valley learned it the same way, which is by having it done for them once.
There are eleven pans on the counter and two in the entry, and the freezer is full, and none of them are labeled with anything except masking tape and a first name.
Marianne stacks them. That is what she does most of the day. She stacks them and reads the tape and gets out the chest freezer inventory sheet she has kept since 2001 and writes each one down in her small square hand, because a thing that goes into a freezer without a date on it is a thing that gets thrown out in two years, and she is not going to throw out anybody's kindness.
It is the only job in the house that has a beginning and an end, and she does it four times.
There is a pan of scalloped potatoes from Arla Sedlak.
Emmett knows whose handwriting it is before he reads the tape.
He stands looking at it longer than he means to.
Dell hated scalloped potatoes.
Not disliked. Hated.
At fourteen he attended three funerals in one summer — a great-uncle, a neighbor, and a man from church whose name nobody in the family could ever afterward recall — and he ate around the scalloped potatoes at every one of them, and afterward, in the truck, he explained to his father that death did not improve potatoes.
Marianne laughed so hard she had to put a hand on the counter.
Dell spent two weeks pleased with himself over it. He worked that line into three more conversations, and it got worse every time, the way a boy's material does.
Emmett remembers the laugh before he remembers the potatoes.
Then Marianne picks the pan up and finds a place for it in the freezer, and the moment is gone, and neither of them says anything about it, and this is going to happen to both of them about nine times a day for the next year.
At some point in the morning there is a glove on the step.
Not with a pan. By itself, folded once, set square in the middle of the concrete where a man could not walk past it without seeing it.
Nobody knocked. Nobody says anything about it, that day or any other day, and Emmett never does learn which of them went out into that field in the dark and picked it up and thought about it the whole way up the field road, and decided that the step was better than the hand.
He brings it in and puts it on the shelf inside the entry door, above the boot tray.
That is where it stays.
At four, he goes out to do chores.
The hens are shut in and watered. The goats have hay. There is fresh bedding in the gelding's run, and the water tank is full and skimmed of chaff.
All of it was done in the last two hours, and Emmett did not do it.
He walks down to the parlor.
Ninety-one cows have been milked. The lines are washed, the receiver jar is clean and drained, the bulk tank is running and reading what it should for one milking, and the alley is scraped. Somebody has swept the step-up, which nobody ever does. Somebody has also turned the fan at the west end around, because it has been blowing wrong since August and Emmett has been meaning to get to it since August.
He stands in the middle of it.
There is not one thing in that building for him to do.
He knows who. It will have been the Vosbergs and Alvin and probably Larry Sedlak on the vacuum pump, because Larry is the only man left in this township who knows that pump, and none of them will ever mention it, and if he tries to thank them they will look at their boots and change the subject, and this is how it is done here and he has done it for other people four times in his life.
And standing there, he works out the other thing.
Alvin was on the loader behind the barn yesterday at twenty to five and he stopped, and he did not come. Emmett has had it in the back of his head since last night that his neighbor did not come, and he has not had anywhere to put it.
Now he does. Alvin did not come because coming would have meant that Emmett had to stand in front of one more person.
He puts his hand flat on the pipeline for a second.
Then he retrieves the scraper and re-scrapes an alley that has already been scraped, the whole length of it, and does a good job of it, because he cannot think of anything else to be.
He comes in at seven.
Marianne is at the sink washing a CorningWare dish that is already clean. He knows it is clean because he watched her wash it before he went out.
He gets a plate and puts something on it from one of the pans and eats standing at the counter and does not taste any of it.
"Tank heater's out," he says.
She keeps washing.
"In the horse run. It's out. It'll be all right for a couple weeks but it'll want doing before it goes cold."
"Is it the element or the cord."
"Cord, I think. Something chewed it."
"Then you should get a new one and not splice it."
"I was going to splice it."
"Don't splice it," she says.
That is the whole conversation.
It is the longest one they will have for seven weeks, and neither of them says the name, and it is not because they are avoiding it. It is that they cannot find the place in a sentence where it would go. Every sentence either of them has is about a cord or a pan or a heater, and there is no door in any of them.
She goes up at eight-thirty.
He sits in the kitchen with the light off and the television off, because the television is not on in this house yet, that comes later, and the loudest thing in the room is the refrigerator.
And he sits there with the word.
He gave it to them himself. He stood in his own field and said I thought it was a stone to three men who wrote it down, and one of them underlined it, and he watched the pen go across under it and did not open his mouth.
Nothing came up out of any row. The header was shut. He knew that before the ring was finished, the way he knows the difference between the note at the end of a row and the note in the middle of one, which is a thing he cannot teach and has never had to.
He is not sure yet what he thinks he was protecting.
At ten, the phone rings.
Neither of them answers it. It rings twelve times and stops.