A sample from
Ask Me to Help
Twenty-one years ago the man she was going to marry had asked her for one thing, in one sentence, and she had spent every year since finding a reason it was not the year.
Tonight she was going to give it to him. The room was booked in her name, ninety minutes south, and at seven o'clock a man named Lars Vanderkamp was going to walk into the bar downstairs and Doug would be sitting at the table when he did.
She drove, because she had booked it.
That was not a rule anybody had said. It was just how it had gone, the way most things had gone: Alonda made the call, Alonda put the card in, and then Alonda got behind the wheel like a woman finishing what she had started. Doug had offered at the end of the driveway. He had held his hand out flat for the keys with his eyebrows up, and she had said, "I've got it," and he had put the hand back in his coat pocket and gone around to the passenger side without a word, which was the whole of him in one movement.
They left Oakvale at twenty to three. She had wanted two-thirty. There had been a call about the Kessler Road culvert and the detour it was going to put on routes nine and fourteen come Monday, and she had taken it standing in the kitchen with her coat already on, and Doug had stood in the doorway with the overnight bags at his feet and waited without any expression at all until she was done.
Now the county gave way to the interstate, and the interstate went south, and the fields on both sides were cut and brown and papery, corn stubble in rows that turned and turned as they passed like something spinning slowly in the opposite direction. The sky was the flat white it went in November, the kind of light that made her want to check whether the headlights were on. They weren't. She turned them on anyway.
"Ninety minutes," she said. "Ninety-five with the construction at the river."
"That's fine."
"We're checking in at four-fifteen or thereabouts. It's under my name. Card's mine, so if the kid at the desk hands you anything, hand it back."
"All right."
"He's coming at seven. Bar, not the room. The corner table under the window if we can get it, and if we can't we'll take whatever's there and I'll stop being particular about it." She checked the mirror, changed lanes around a hauler with a load of pallets, came back. "He knows what he's driving to. He knows you'll be there. I told him a month ago, I told him again Tuesday, and he asked me two questions I liked and none I didn't."
"What were the two questions?"
"Whether Ray Poteet came back all right." She let a beat sit on that, because it had knocked something loose in her when he asked it, five weeks after a corridor and a bad hour and a man she had never met before doing his job in front of her. "And whether you were doing this because you wanted to or because I did."
Doug looked out his window. The overpass came up and went over them, its shadow crossing his face and leaving.
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him he could ask you himself." She glanced across. "Which he will."
"Okay," Doug said.
She waited. Ninety-one routes, sixty-one drivers, eleven thousand children out of bed by six-forty in the morning, and she could build the whole ugly month of January in her head on a Tuesday and hold it there — but she could not build her husband. There was never anything to build with. He gave her the same material every time, planed smooth, no grain to catch a nail in.
"Okay," she said back, and heard how it came out.
He turned his head. He had that long pale face that took the cold badly, dark hair going grey in patches instead of at the temples, and the beard going grey faster than the hair like it was supposed to, and the sunburn on the back of his neck that never entirely went, October, January, it didn't matter. Twenty-three years she had been looking at that neck. Twenty-one of them she had known exactly what was going on behind it.
"Say it," he said.
"It's not a complaint."
"I didn't say it was."
She put her hand at the top of the wheel and drove for a mile.
"I want to hear it from you," she said. "Once, in your own words, the way you'd say it if it wasn't already decided. Not the practical part. I've got the practical part, I made the practical part, the practical part is a spreadsheet in my phone. I want you to tell me what you want out of tonight."
"You know what I want out of tonight."
"I know what you asked me for in 2004 in that kitchen on Alvarado. You were twenty-five and you got one sentence out and then you couldn't look at me for a week." She heard her own voice go level and careful, the way it did on a call with a school board. "You've never revised it. Not once. Most people revise."
Doug was quiet. Ahead, the road came up off the flat and onto the long slow ridge before the river, and she felt the car take the grade.
"Same as it was," he said.
"Tell me anyway."
"I sit in the chair," he said. "By the window. I don't help. Nobody talks to me, nobody touches me, nobody checks in with me. I'm not — " he moved one big hand slightly, the way he did when he was looking for the tolerance on something " — I'm not consulted. That's the part. Not consulted. You don't ask me if it's all right, you don't ask me if I want anything, you don't ask me for a hand with anything. Not even a small thing. Especially not a small thing."
"And you sit there for four hours."
"However long it is."
"Doug, I'm asking about a small thing. Say a strap goes. Say I want a glass of water."
"You get it yourself," he said, "or he gets it for you."
She let out a breath through her nose. "Fine."
"You asked."
"I did ask." And then, because she wanted the whole of it out in the car where both of them could see it, she said it back to him in the voice she used for the roster — flat, in order, nothing in it. "So. He sits. By the window. He isn't spoken to. He isn't touched. He isn't consulted. He isn't asked to help. Not even a small thing."
"That's it," he said.
The girders of the river bridge came up out of the trees, four spans of grey steel going over brown water, and the deck joints came through the seat the way they always did, tuk, tuk, tuk, four of them, and then they were across and it was flat again and the corn started up on both sides.
"Now here's the one you don't answer. Why."
"Alonda."
"Twenty years. You've never asked me for one other thing." She said it without heat, which took some doing. "Not the truck you wanted. Not Thanksgiving at your sister's. Nothing. One request and it's this, and I've never once got a why out of you that had any inside to it."
He didn't answer straight away, and she thought — the way she had been thinking in short flares all week, in the shower, in the parking lot at the bus barn — this time.
"It's just the thing I want," Doug said.
There it was. Word for word, the same as at twenty-five, the same as three Christmases ago in the kitchen at eleven at night when she had brought it up herself for the first time in a decade and watched his ears go red. It's just the thing I want. Six words, sanded flat, and no way in.
"You know what that is," she said. "That's what my drivers say when they don't want the route changed. It's just how I do it. And then I find out there's a gate that sticks, or a dog, or a woman on Fenwick who comes out and yells."
"There's no dog."
"There's always a dog."
He almost laughed. She heard it happen and not finish. That was the other thing about him — funny in the house, in the dark, with her, and struck dumb in front of anybody else, so that she had had the only copy of him.
"I'm not hiding anything from you," he said, and he sounded like he meant it, which was worse. "There isn't a story. I don't have a — I wasn't done wrong by anybody. I know how people expect it to go. It just doesn't go that way. I've had it as long as I've had anything. When I was nineteen I couldn't have told you what it was called."
"And it hasn't moved."
"No."
"Nothing about it has moved."
"No," he said. "Why would it."
She drove. She thought about how a route was written: you started with the children who had to be at school first and the ones who could not be left standing longest, and everything else fell out from those. Give her constraints and she could route anything. Give her the whole thing sanded flat and she had nowhere to put a stop on it.
"Okay," she said. "Then hear mine, and don't answer it now, because I know you. Answer it whenever."
"All right."
"I'm not doing this to be nice to you." That came out steadier than she felt. "I want him. I have wanted him for about four weeks, and I have said so on the phone with you sitting eight feet away, and I'm going to have him in a room I paid for, and I don't need it to be a present." She checked the mirror again for something to do with her eyes. "I need to know that's all right with you. That it isn't — that I'm not getting away with something because you're standing there holding the door."
"It's all right with me."
"Say it like it's yours."
He shifted in the seat. "I want you to have it," he said. "I've wanted you to have it since before you did."
Something turned over low in her, unhelpfully, at seventy-two miles an hour on a road with nothing on it. She kept her face still, which was her whole professional skill.
"Fine," she said. "That's the first useful thing you've said since the driveway."
"Don't put me in the report."
"I put everything in the report."
Her phone went off in the cupholder, buzzing itself around in a half circle, and the screen said VERLENE and then went to the dash display, and Alonda thumbed the wheel.
"Where are you," Verlene said. No greeting. Nine years of no greeting.
"South of the river."
"South of the — " A pause. Alonda could hear the office behind her, the radio on the shelf, somebody's chair. "It's Friday afternoon."
"It is."
"You know I have to look at Monday's board before I go home, and I have got Poteet still out and I have got Dellinger's leave in and I have got the Kessler culvert closing Monday at seven a.m., which means nine and fourteen are running through the square with everybody's parents in it."
"Send nine down Fenwick and take fourteen over to Third," Alonda said. "Third's signed thirty-five, they'll hate it, they'll live. Add nine minutes to fourteen, tell the drivers tonight, not Monday morning, and text the two schools yourself so it doesn't come from a sub."
There was a scratching sound: Verlene writing it down.
"And the freeze," Verlene said.
"Sunday night into Monday, I saw it."
"First hard one of the year. Half those men haven't dropped a chain since March."
"Which is why you're telling them tonight," Alonda said. "I'll be at my desk at six-thirty Monday."
"Uh-huh." A beat, and the tone changed by about a degree, which from Verlene was a wholesale change of subject. "Rendale. That's where you are."
"Around there."
"On your anniversary weekend."
"Tomorrow's the anniversary."
"I know what tomorrow is, I signed the card." Another pause, longer, and in it Alonda could feel the woman deciding. "All right. Have a nice time at your hotel in Rendale, Illinois."
"Thank you, Verlene."
"Mm," Verlene said, and was gone.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.