Second Book

The Habit

Chapter 51: Second Book

The first notebook stayed in the kitchen drawer for nine days.

Not hidden. Not displayed. Put away with the careful uncertainty one reserves for an object that has finished being a tool and not yet settled into what it becomes next.

Noel opened the drawer twice a day anyway.

Morning, usually while reaching for a dish towel. Evening, usually while looking for the can opener or some other implement he knew perfectly well was in the second drawer and not the top one. Each time the marbled cover sat there among takeout menus, rubber bands, and a church bulletin from Homecoming Sunday Lila had somehow left behind despite carrying it all the way to Morrow and back.

The notebook did not accuse him, which was part of the problem.

If it had accused, he would have known the procedure. Defensiveness is just a form of muscle memory after enough years. But the full notebook in the drawer asked for nothing except acknowledgment. It had done what it had come to do. The lines had said their piece. The hidden sentence had surfaced. He had sat on the porch step with the book in his lap and the screen door behind him and the old, final arrangement of the first wound altered by language that turned out to have been his own all along.

Now the days kept happening anyway.

Bus stops. Work orders. Cold mornings. A text from Renee about whether a permission slip needed both initials or one. Lila's drawing of Bishop in church shoes taped beside the back door where the first cape drawing had faded slightly at the corners. The body of a life continuing without waiting for symbolic closure to finish packing its bags.

On the tenth day he stopped at Dollar General on the way home from work.

The school-supply aisle held the same black-and-white composition books in a crooked stack. He picked one up and then another because the first had a bent corner and the damage offended him with unnecessary intimacy.

At the register the cashier, a teenager with one silver stud in her eyebrow and an expression suggesting adulthood had already disappointed her in several avoidable ways, rang it up without comment.

"You a teacher?" she asked finally.

"No."

"You write poems."

Noel looked at the notebook.

"Absolutely not."

She nodded as if this, too, fit the file.

At home he set the new book on the table and stood over it in the fading kitchen light.

The old one belonged to the drawer now. Not buried. Archived. Its fullness had earned stillness. The new one looked insultingly blank by comparison, the pages uncreased, the cover stiff, the spine too certain of itself.

When Renee called at six-thirty to ask whether he had any spare weather tape because the back door at Morrow had begun making a new draft in the lower corner, he said yes and walked it over after supper.

Lila met him with one sock on and one in her hand.

"Do you know what happens after the last page?" she asked before greeting.

He looked at her.

"Of what."

"Of a notebook." She held the sock like evidence. "I filled one at school and Miss Landers said get another, but that seems disrespectful to the finished one."

Renee, from the kitchen, said, "I told you he would understand this question."

Noel leaned against the door frame.

"I think the first one gets to stay finished," he said. "And the next one gets to be next."

Lila considered.

"So it isn't replacing it."

"No."

"That's good," she said. "Replacement feels rude."

He fixed the draft with the weather tape and a slight adjustment to the threshold plate. The door shut more cleanly after that, the air no longer needling in around the corner. Lila watched from the floor, chin on knees, while Renee sorted mail at the table.

"Did you buy another one?" she asked without looking up.

Noel knew she did not mean the weather tape.

"Yeah."

Renee glanced at him then, not making a ceremony of it, only marking the fact.

"Good."

Back on Linden he opened the new composition book and sat a long while before writing.

The hand knew the angle. The page knew the pressure. Only the motive had changed enough to make the first sentence feel newly difficult. The first notebook had been purchased under instruction and reluctant triage. This one had been bought because the life on the other side of revelation still contained Tuesdays.

At last he wrote:

Kept the full notebook in the kitchen drawer for nine days before admitting that the days had not agreed to stop arriving just because the last page had done its job. Bought another composition book at Dollar General this afternoon and found out the blank pages offend me less than I expected. Lila says starting a second one is not replacement if the first is allowed to stay finished.