Chapter 12 What Glenna Kept

The check came back in August, and it came back the ordinary way, which is the way that hurts most. Glenna had written it in her kitchen on a Saturday, the same as she had written a hundred and thirty-two of them, and she had put it in her bag and given it to Junie on Sunday with the memo line filled in — *coffee and pastry, Aug.* — and had not thought about it again. She had known the number in her checking account to within a few dollars, or believed she had, and the belief was the thing she had been living on for fourteen months, the way a person lives on a bridge they have decided not to inspect. On Tuesday her debit card was declined at the pharmacy, and she paid with cash and said nothing, and went home and opened the folder where she kept the statements, and added up the numbers twice, and found that she had been wrong by a much larger amount than a few dollars. There was a bill from the town for the second half of her property tax. There was the quarterly payment on the furnace she had replaced three years ago. There was a dental bill from June. And there was the fact, which she had known and not looked at, that the insurance money had stopped being a river some time ago and had become a bucket, and that she had been dipping from the bucket every month since, and that the bucket was now down to the bottom, where the sound changes. She sat at the kitchen table with the statements spread out in front of her, and did not cry, and did not call anyone, and did the thing she had always done, which was to make the arithmetic honest and then to decide. --- Junie found out on Friday, because the check had gone through the bank and come back, and the bank had called the bakery, and Junie had looked at the returned slip for a long moment and then driven to Glenna's house in the middle of the afternoon with the slip in her apron pocket. She did not knock loudly. She knocked the way you knock at a house where someone might be sleeping. Glenna opened the door. "You should have told me," Junie said. "Come in," Glenna said, "and don't shout on the porch." They sat in the front room, in the two chairs that had been Ralph's and hers, and Junie put the slip on the little table between them. "Fourteen months of rubber checks," Junie said. "Except they weren't rubber. They were good, every one, until this one. Which means for fourteen months you've been paying me rent out of savings while telling me it was coffee money, and now the savings is the coffee money, and the coffee money just bounced." "Fourteen months," Glenna said. "Yes." "Why didn't you say something." "Because it was mine to solve," Glenna said. "And because the day I say it out loud is the day the room becomes something people are paying for, and the room was never supposed to be that." "The room has always been something somebody was paying for! Me! I've paid the mortgage on this building for eight years, and you've paid me one fifty a month to use a room that isn't costing you anything, and I have taken that money every single month and I have never once said the true sentence, which is that the room is free and always has been, and that you have been giving me a hundred and fifty dollars a month for eleven years to use a room I would have given you for nothing, and that the reason I never said it is that I could see it was keeping you company." Junie stopped. Her hands were shaking. "And now it's keeping you broke." Glenna looked at the slip on the table. "I'm going to sell the house," she said. Junie sat back. "Not because of this," Glenna said. "Because of this, partly. Because it's a four-bedroom house with one woman in it and a furnace that eats money and a porch that needs the boards replaced, and because Ralph would have wanted me to be sensible, and because I have spent forty years being sensible and it has left me with a house I can't afford and a circle I won't tell the truth to." "Where would you go?" "To my sister Verna, in Delwin," Glenna said. "She's had the second bedroom empty since her husband died. She's asked me four times. I've said no four times. I'm going to say yes on Sunday." "Sunday's the meeting." "I know," Glenna said. "That's why I'm going to say it on Sunday." --- She said it on Sunday. It was not a speech. It was worse and better than a speech, because she said it in the middle of the book talk and not at the end, the way a person says a thing when they have decided that there will never be a good moment and so any moment will do. "There's something I've been keeping," Glenna said, "and I'm going to give it to you now, because the house goes on the market in September and I'd rather you heard it from me than from the sign." Then she told them about the checks and the memo line, and about the fourteen months, and about the house, and about Delwin. Nobody said anything for a long moment. The teapot sat in the middle of the table on the two doors. Outside, in Court Street, a truck went by. It was Romy who spoke first, and she spoke quietly, and she said the thing that no one else could have said. "A hundred and fifty a month for eleven years," she said. "That's close to twenty thousand dollars." "Yes." "For a room," Romy said. "For eight chairs and a Sunday." "For eight chairs and a Sunday," Glenna agreed. Romy looked at her, and Glenna looked back, and something passed between them that the others could see but not read, because they were the only two people in the room who had ever paid rent on a place to be warm. "I would have done it too," Romy said. "I want you all to know that. If I'd had twenty thousand dollars and no house to put it in, I would have done exactly what she did, and I would have told you all the same lie, and I would have thought I was being dignified." "That's not dignified," Annette said, and then stopped, and looked at Glenna, and then said, "I mean that as a fact about dignity, not about you." "I know how you meant it," Glenna said. Vernon said, "Glenna, the room has never cost you anything and that's not the point. The point is you've been holding up a corner of this table for eleven years with your own money so that the rest of us could keep sitting at it, and none of us knew, and now we can't give it back to you, and that's a debt that doesn't clear." "It clears the way all of them clear," Glenna said. "Somebody else holds up the corner later. That's the whole mechanism. It isn't a debt. It's a relay." Nobody argued with her, which was how the circle did its agreeing. Then Junie said, "The building." "The building," Glenna said. "I'm going to sell it," Junie said. "Halberd wants a decision by October and I've carried the paper around long enough. I'll take the offer, I'll move the bakery three doors down on Court, into the little place with the bad foot traffic, and the back room goes with the building. That's the shape of it. I'm sorry." Katia said, "Where do we go?" and it was the first question anyone had asked all year that no one in the room could answer with a sentence about a book, and for a moment the back room was just a back room: a table made of two doors, eight mismatched chairs, a chipped teapot, and seven people who had walked into it from the cold. Glenna reached into her bag and took out the spiral notebook, and set it on the table in the middle of them, where the teapot had been. "First," she said, "we finish the year. This is my last year as your chair, and it was going to be my last year anyway, and now you know why, and the reason isn't the house. The reason is that a person should leave a thing while she can still set the chairs. So we finish the year, all of it, and we read September's book, and then we decide where the road goes." "And after September?" Sadie said. "After September," Glenna said, "somebody else makes the list." --- That night Glenna sat up late with the notebook in the front room, and read back through eleven years of her own upright handwriting, and found the parentheticals, forty-two of them, one for nearly every person who had ever sat in the back room and needed a particular March. She came to the last written page and drew a line under the September entry and wrote, in the space below it, three words, and then closed the notebook and put it in her bag, where it would wait for the second Sunday. The three words were a name. Not hers, and not anyone's in the room. She had found it in a place none of them would have thought to look, and she had decided, some time in the last year, that a relay needs a runner, and that she would not be alive forever to point at the moon. ---