第19章 The Circle, Again

Fourteen chairs were set out on the last Sunday of September in the long hall of the Grange, and eight of them were in a circle and six of them were against the wall. Vernon stood at the door, because he had appointed himself the welcomer, and because a man who has walked a route for thirty-four years does not get to forget what a door is for. He had on the jacket he wore to funerals and the tie he wore to weddings and nothing else in his life had ever required either, and he stood there with his hands at his sides and greeted every person who came through the door as if he had been expecting them for years, which he had. There was a woman named Dell who had been in the circle in 2017 and had moved to the county seat and had a daughter now, and she stood in the doorway a moment as if unsure she was allowed, and Vernon said, "You're in the 2017 rows," and she laughed, and went in. There was a man named Gerald, who had moved to Florida and had come back, and who had been in the circle for two months in 2019, and who said, at the door, "I only came twice," and Vernon said, "Twice is twice," and showed him to the six chairs by the wall. There was a young man with a guitar case who turned out to be the son of the woman who had kept the circle's minutes in its first year, and who had come because his mother had died in the spring and had left a note that said, *find the reading circle,* which he had found on a corkboard, the same way Sadie had. And there was a woman who came alone and late and stood at the back of the hall with her coat on, and only Annette recognized her, and went to her, and brought her to the circle. Vernon counted them at the door the way he had once counted houses on a route, and the count came to sixteen, which was two more than the chairs, and Romy brought two more in from the stack, and nobody had to stand. He had thought, driving out, that he might feel like a spare part. He had felt like a spare part for a year, and the feeling had not gone away when Romy said Ora's rule to him in July, it had only gone quiet. But standing at the door of the Grange with his jacket and his tie and his mended tote, greeting people he had not seen since 2018 and people he had never seen at all, he found that a door is a job, and that a job is the thing that had been missing. He had a route again. It was four blocks long and it happened once a month, and it was enough, and he understood, standing there in the cold with his hand out, that a man does not need the whole town. A man needs four hundred houses or fourteen chairs. The number is not the point. The coming back around is the point. When the last person had come in and Romy had shut the door against the October-cold that had arrived three weeks early, Vernon went and sat in the chair nearest the stove, and took his book out of the tote — the mended one, the hole stitched shut with Ora's thread — and set it on the table with the others, and looked at the spiral notebook that Glenna had laid in the middle, which had been on that table in one building or another for eleven years, and which nobody had yet picked up. He considered picking it up himself and knew at once, with a clarity he trusted, that he was the wrong person, and that he was not picking it up was exactly the right thing to do, and he folded his hands on his book and waited to be told when to stand up. Glenna was at the table. She had the teapot — the brown one, chipped spout — and she had brought a second pot, a new one, plain white, which sat beside the first, because the room would outlast the teapot and the teapot knew it. She poured the coffee and the tea and let the room fill. Then she stood up in front of fourteen chairs, and did not thank anyone, because she hated a thank-you speech, and said the plain thing instead. "One of you is going to take the notebook after today," she said. "I'm not going to say who, because I'm not going to be the woman who hands a thing to a person and makes them keep it forever in front of everybody. It's on the table. Whoever wants it, takes it home. That's how the room stays. The room is not the chairs and the room is not this building. The room is that somebody makes the list." She sat down. Then there was the awkward part, which everyone had feared and which turned out to be fine, because Romy, who had brought the table all the way from Denby's on her own two arms, stood up and said, "There's coffee cake and there's a cake with a spelling error, and there's a stove that works, and I'm going to start it, and if you're cold it's your own fault for sitting by the door." The long hall filled with the sound of fourteen chairs moving at once, which is a good sound and not a common one. Glenna was the last to leave. She stood at the west windows in the dark with her bag on her arm and looked out at the road, and at her car, which was packed, because she was leaving for her sister Verna's in Delwin in the morning, and at the long hall behind her, where fourteen people were still standing around a table made of two doors, none of them wanting to go home. Romy came to stand beside her. "You didn't take the notebook," Romy said. "I didn't take it and I didn't give it," Glenna said. "That was the deal." "It's still on the table." "Then somebody will take it," Glenna said. "Somebody always does." She turned and looked at Romy for a moment, and then reached into her bag and took out an envelope, and handed it over. "That's for whoever takes the notebook," she said. "Which is nobody if nobody takes it. Which is not my problem after tomorrow." "It's a hundred percent your problem after tomorrow." "It is not," Glenna said, with great dignity, "because I will be in Delwin. You should clean out your car, by the way. It's still got your own smell in it and you walk down the street like it's still yours." And Romy laughed, which was the entire point of the whole sentence, and they stood there a minute in the dark at the west windows, two women with their hands full, and then Glenna went out and drove away down the long road, and the taillights went small and red and were gone. ---