Chapter 13 The Thaw

The thaw came for Cassie Tharp in August, on a Wednesday, in a dentist's waiting room, of all places, with a magazine in her lap. She had driven into the county seat with the baby and a list — flour, diapers, a new car seat cover, a filling she had put off since the spring — and the baby had fallen asleep in the stroller, and the office had a fish tank and a rack of magazines, and she had picked one up without looking and read a whole article about a man who built bridges out of scrap, and then another about a town in Norway that lit its streets with mirrors, and she had reached the end of the second article and realized she had read both of them, start to finish, and could remember what they said. It was the first thing she had read to the end since March. She sat in the plastic chair with the magazine in her lap and did the arithmetic of the last five months and found that the fog had a shape, and that the shape had an edge, and that she was standing, by some small accident of a bridge-building article, on the wrong side of it. She did not feel cured. She wanted that on the record too. What she felt was more like the moment a fever stops being a climate and becomes a temperature. She could still feel it. She had stopped being made of it. When Perry came home that night — three to eleven, the warehouse across the river — she was at the kitchen table with the August book open, and she had made a pot of soup, and she said, "I read two articles today all the way through." Perry hung his jacket on the chair. He was a slow, kind man who had spent five months being careful with her, which had been correct and had also been lonely, and he looked at the soup and the open book and did not say anything clever, because he was not clever, which was one of the reasons she had married him. "That's good, Cass," he said. "I want to go back in October. Part-time. Two classes, one morning, one afternoon, if the sub's still there and they'll have me half." He sat down. "Okay." "That's not the whole thing," Cassie said. "The whole thing is, I need you to take the nights." "I already take the nights." "You take the nights and you sleep in the day and I do everything in the day and I have not had a day that was mine since Bea was born." She put her hand flat on the table. "I'm not asking for a favor. I'm doing the arithmetic out loud." Perry looked at the table for a while, and then at her, and said, "I'll talk to the warehouse about the evening shift. It's less money." "I know." "Then it's less money," he said, and that was the marriage, in one sentence, and she took it. The rest of August went by in a way she had not had since the winter, which was to say it went by in order. She began to read again, in the small units a person with a baby is allowed: an article, a chapter, the back of a cereal box if it was interesting, and once, on a Wednesday, forty pages of a novel in the twenty minutes of a nap, which felt like a door opening on a room she had forgotten was in her house. She took Bea to the river in the stroller and sat on the bench by the boat launch and watched the water come down under the bridge the way it had come down for a hundred years, and she did not have a thought about it, which was the point; she had spent five months having thoughts about everything, and it was a relief to sit in front of a river and have nothing in her head but the river. She also began, without announcing it, to keep a list. Not a reading list and not a grocery list. A list of hours: the hours in which she was herself and the hours in which she was only the fog's tenant, and she found, by the end of August, that the second list was getting shorter, and that she could feel it getting shorter the way you feel a fever break, which is not a single moment and not a dramatic one, but a morning when the sheet is dry. --- The August book was called *The Loud Kitchen*, and it was funny, and it was the perfect book for a month in which she was learning to laugh again. It was about a family that ran a restaurant and shouted at each other over the fryer, and there was nothing in it about loss or fog or the second Sunday of the month, and the circle fought about it for an hour, and Cassie realized halfway through the hour that she had an opinion and was defending it, out loud, at length, and that she had not done that since before the baby. Afterward, when the others were gathering their things, Romy came over to her with the ice to take home, and the two of them stood in the doorway with the bag between them. "You're back," Romy said. It was not a question and it was not a compliment. It was an observation, the way a person notes a train arriving. "I'm back some," Cassie said. "You're back too." "I'm back with a floor and a job and two hundred a month," Romy said. "That's not back. That's just not the car." Cassie looked at her for a second. "There were five months when I didn't know what I had lost," Cassie said. "I knew I had lost something. I didn't know what. It was my mind's footing. I kept standing in my own kitchen and not being able to find the floor." Romy nodded slowly. "In October," she said, "I lost the floor. The actual floor. The one in the house on Elm, with the tile I picked out myself when I was thirty-four. I kept standing in other people's kitchens, cleaning them, and they all had floors, and I was fine, and then I would go out to the car." Neither of them said anything for a moment. The ice bag was starting to sweat in Cassie's hand. "It's not the same," Cassie said. "No," Romy said. "It's not the same at all. That's why we can stand here." She took her keys out. "Everyone keeps trying to tell me it's fine, and everyone keeps trying to tell you it's fine, and it isn't fine, it's just survivable, and I've decided I'd rather have the second word than the first." "You're putting words in my mouth." "I'm a cleaner," Romy said. "I put things where they go." And Cassie laughed, genuinely, for the second time that month, a laugh that used her whole chest, and Romy looked pleased in the way a person looks when a joke lands and then went out into Court Street with her keys and her ice, and Cassie stood in the doorway a minute with the bag melting against her wrist and felt, for the first time since March, entirely in her own body, in her own town, in the last September of the back room, with somewhere to be on the second Sunday. ---