What She Knows

The Habit

Chapter 26: What She Knows

Christmas Day ended with dishes.

This felt correct to Noel in a way theologically brighter people might have found insufficiently celebratory. There had been gifts that morning — Lila immediately naming the blue shooter Bishop for reasons she did not fully explain and Noel wisely did not interrogate — then lunch at Edna's with enough food to satisfy several denominations at once, then a slow afternoon of pie, television too low to count as watching, and Lila sprawled on the living room floor teaching herself a game with marbles that used rules only loosely tethered to physics.

By nine-thirty the child was asleep in the back bedroom, one hand still curled around a red swirl marble she had been assured did not need overnight guarding. The house had gone soft around the edges. Wrapping paper in a grocery sack by the table. Pie plates soaking. Two coffee mugs at the sink. The kind of end-of-day disorder that proves a room has been used for the right things.

Renee stood at the counter drying the last plate while Noel put it away.

"She likes it here," she said.

"Seems so."

"She also likes airports and dentist stickers. I don't want to over-interpret."

He almost laughed.

Then the laughter thinned because both of them knew the sentence was about more than Lila.

They carried their coffee to the table.

For a while they spoke only about the day in the administrative after-language of holidays. Edna's dressing. Darren's oldest trying to light a cookie with the candle stub. How many presents a seven-year-old actually needed before delight became a circulation problem. Then the room emptied enough for the other subject to come sit down with them.

"He got quieter toward the end," Renee said.

Noel looked up.

"Elton?"

"Yeah." She wrapped both hands around her mug. "Not better. Just quieter. Less energy for performance, I guess."

He waited.

"When Mama left him for good, the apartment turned into this museum of unfinished repair. Cabinet door off the hinge for six months. Lamp without a shade. Sink he kept meaning to fix." She smiled once without pleasure. "He was surrounded by things that wanted five minutes from him and somehow could not get it."

Noel looked toward his own open cabinet under the sink.

"That sounds familiar."

"That's why I'm telling you." She took a sip of coffee, made a face because it had gone lukewarm, kept drinking anyway. "One night about a year before he died, he said something strange. We were sitting in his kitchen because he hated restaurants by then. He had a screwdriver in one hand and the cabinet hinge in the other and hadn't managed to combine them. And he said, 'I never learned how to stay in a room once I'd disappointed it.'"

The sentence entered Noel cleanly, like a nail going straight into old wood without splitting it first.

"Did he know what he meant?" he asked.

"I think he knew exactly what he meant. I don't think he knew what to do with it."

They sat with that.

In the back bedroom Lila turned over once, the bedsprings making a small, tired music and then settling again.

"I used to think you had the worse version," Renee said finally. "Because he left."

Noel did not answer.

"Now I think maybe there isn't a better version," she said. "Just different mechanics."

"Mine was simpler."

"Simpler isn't always kinder."

He looked into the coffee. The surface had formed that thin cooling skin hot drinks get when neglected at exactly the wrong speed.

"No," he said. "It isn't."

He told her then about Halloran. About the blood pressure, the notebook, the under-sink leak. Not all of it. Enough. He did not summarize his life into revelations because people rarely tell the truth most usefully that way. He told it in fixtures and intervals, in small nightly acts and the odd fact that he now answered a Memphis number on the first ring.

Renee listened without trying to improve the shape of what he said.

When they stood up at last, she touched the table once with her fingertips and said, "For what it's worth, he never built a room like this."

Noel looked around the kitchen. Open cabinet. Cooling mugs. Wrapping paper bag. The lamp from the back bedroom throwing warm light down the hall. Not impressive. Not Instagrammable. Merely inhabited.

For what it was worth, it was worth more than he had words for.

That night he wrote:

Tonight Renee told me Elton once said he never learned how to stay in a room after disappointing it. I understood the sentence faster than I wanted to. Christmas mostly ended in dishes and cold coffee, which felt about right for a day built around incarnation.

He capped the pen and stood in the kitchen listening to the house sleep around other bodies.

It was not peace.

It was company.