It was a long time. It was longer than the two storefronts, whatever I told you before. Then I felt it, small and cold, a bare hand, a seventy-two-year-old hand with a wedding ring on it, put into mine, deliberately, the way you set down something you have decided to carry.
I closed my fingers. Not hard.
Then Gretchen Fiske turned around on her bale, and she saw, and she began to clap.
I have been applauded perhaps three times in my life, once at a church talent show where I played the spoons. I never felt it in my chest before. The Holmgren twins took it up, then the whole back of the rack, and the sound went down the curbs ahead of us like wind through standing corn. The girl in the college sweatshirt lifted her hand halfway, and I saw her look sideways at her father.
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Then the man in the ball cap turned and went into the Co-op, and the door shut on its spring.
“He didn’t wave,” Marvene said, very low.
“No.”
“I thought he might.”
“He’s thinking,” I said. “That’s what it looks like, from the outside. Give him time.”
Her fingers tightened in mine. We rode the last block to the school like that, not looking at each other, with the whole class cheering and the band playing something I could not name. I will tell you honestly that I have never been so afraid and so well in all my life, in the same minute.
The Wednesdays
Supper was in the gym, ham and scalloped potatoes and a card table with a record player, and about eight o’clock somebody dropped the needle on “Make It with You.” I stood in front of her folding chair and said I was a poor dancer in 1971. She said I hadn’t improved. I stepped on her foot once.
She came up to my chin. It had been four years since I’d held a woman for a slow dance, and it took my body a verse to remember how, and it did.
I drove home Sunday after church. I sat beside her in the Lutheran pew, a Methodist among the Lutherans, and sang every verse without opening the hymnal. Afterward two of her friends looked at me with such frank hope that I understood I had been the subject of a great deal of conversation.
On the twenty-first and the twenty-eighth, both Wednesdays, I drove the eighty miles to Elmcrest for lunch at the Corner Cafe, where the waitress brings two coffees without asking. We talked about Rollin’s heart and Joleen’s garden and the price of a good set of tires. We talked about Darin, whom I have still never met, and about the Sundays.
That is where it is hard. She sets a table every Sunday and the chairs are empty. On the twenty-eighth she told me, with her fork in the air, that she had made a pot roast two Sundays running and eaten both of them standing up. “I’m not asking for him to like it,” she said. “I’m asking for him to come to dinner.”