The Night Before the Holiday

On the first Sunday of the month, after the dishes were put away, Eric stood up at the head of the table and told his family that he would be at the office on the night the long weekend began.

Luna read it on his lips, slowly, from the other end of the room, where she was drying a serving dish with a cloth. He did not raise his voice, and he did not turn his face away from her, as other men did when they spoke of work. He had learned long ago to turn toward her when he talked, and to keep his mouth clear of his hand, and to say each word with a small steady separation, and she had always taken that for a courtesy, and had been grateful for it. She saw the shapes come one after another. Friday night. The building will be empty. There is a stocktake to do before everyone goes away, and I would rather do it when it is quiet.

Inventory, she thought. She nodded.

"I'll be home late," said Eric, and his lips made the last word with their usual neatness, and he folded his napkin once, twice, and laid it on the plate. "Don't wait up."

Tomas, at the end of the table, raised his hand in a half-salute to show that he had understood. Adam did not look up. He was drawing a line with his thumbnail along the grain of the table, a long straight line, over and over, in the same place, and the sound of it, if she could have heard it, would have been a small dry whisper under the clink of the plates. Eric watched the thumbnail for a moment. He opened his mouth. Then he seemed to think better of it, and closed it again, and left the room.

…

On Tuesday night, at the office, she had pushed her cart down the second-floor corridor as she did four nights a week, with the bucket rattling on one side and the gray bag on the other.

The building was empty by seven. She liked it that way. The carpet muffled the wheels, and the fluorescent tubes buzzed in their sockets, which she could not hear but could see, a faint shiver in the light, and she worked down the row of offices one by one, emptying the baskets and wiping the desks, until she reached the end of the hall, where the last door stood shut. It was a gray steel door with a small brass plate, and on the cleaning company's schedule, which was taped inside the lid of her cart, it was marked in blue pen with the words DIRECTOR ONLY — DO NOT ENTER.

She had passed it every Tuesday for years. She passed it again now, and as she did, she saw that the door was not quite flush with the frame. A hand's width of dark showed along the hinge. Somebody had been in and had not pulled it fully closed.

She stopped. She stood there with her hand on the cart.

She was not a curious woman. It was one of the first things Eric had liked about her, he had said once, long ago: that she asked no questions. She reached out, and drew the door closed with two fingers, and tried the handle to be sure, and felt it hold. Then she wiped the brass plate with her cloth, though it was already clean, and moved on.

At the elevator, she found that her palms were damp, and could not have said why.

…

On Thursday she ironed his white shirt.

She did it at the board in the laundry room off the kitchen, a narrow room with a high window that let in a strip of winter light, and the iron was an old heavy one with a cord frayed at the plug that Eric had mended himself with black tape. She had ironed his shirts in that room every week for fourteen years. She knew the order by heart: the collar first, on the underside, then the cuffs, then the yoke, then the sleeves, one at a time, and the body last, working from the front panel across the back, until the whole cloth lay flat and warm and smelling of clean heat. It took her eleven minutes. She had never timed it, but she knew.

Today she did it more slowly.

She pressed the collar three times. She turned the cuffs and pressed those, and pressed them again, and she found that she was breathing carefully, as one does around a sleeping child, though there was no one in the room. She could not have said why. There was nothing wrong. He was a man who liked a shirt to be right, and the weekend was important, and an inventory was serious work. She laid the finished shirt on the table and smoothed the front with both palms, and it lay there as flat and white and perfect as paper.

She folded it. She folded it in thirds, the sleeves back, the collar up, and laid it in the drawer.

Then she took it out again, and unfolded it, and folded it a second time, because the crease at the left shoulder had not sat quite square.

There was a faint stir in the floor, a tremor so slight she might have imagined it, and she knew without turning that someone had come to the doorway. She looked up. It was Adam. He was standing in the frame in his socks, with his school bag still hanging from one shoulder, and he was not looking at the shirt. He was looking at his mother's hands.

She smiled. She lifted her fingers. Hungry?

He shook his head. After a moment he put the bag down and came and stood beside the ironing board, and watched her fold the shirt, a third time, and he said something, and she bent to see it, and it was only three words, spoken clearly, without any expression: "You're doing it again."

Doing what? She signed it slowly, with a puzzled face.

He did not answer. He put his hand out and, very lightly, touched the corner of the folded shirt with one finger, and then drew it back, as one touches a stove to see if it is hot.

…

That evening he sat on the fourth stair.

She could feel him there. The vibration was unmistakable, a soft weight through the floorboards of the hall, the small settling of a boy who has sat in the same place so many times that the wood itself knew him. She was in the kitchen with her back to the stairs, chopping onions, and she did not turn. Dinner was at seven. It was a quarter to.

The front door opened.

She felt it before she saw it, in the soles of her feet, in the click of the lock and the draft of cold air and the weight of a man's step on the hall tile. Then Eric came into the kitchen in his gray coat, with the briefcase in his right hand and his left hand already at his scarf. He nodded to her. His glasses were fogged from the cold, and he took them off, and wiped them with the paper tissue folded in four, and put them on again.

He went to the hall. She watched him through the doorway.

He stopped at the foot of the stairs. Adam was on the fourth step with his elbows on his knees, perfectly still, looking at his father with the flat steady look that Luna knew so well and had never been able to read. It was not a hostile look. It was not even a questioning one. It was the look of a boy at a window watching weather come in over a field.

Eric looked back at him.

The silence lasted a long time. She stood with the knife in her hand and her eyes on her husband's face, and she saw that the muscles around his mouth were relaxed, and his brow was smooth, and that he was smiling very slightly, the gentle polite smile that he wore to the office, and she thought that she had never seen a smile that seemed so much like a door being closed.

Eric moved his lips.

"Tomorrow I'll be late," he said. She read it clear and slow. "Don't wait up."

Adam did not answer. He did not nod. He sat on the fourth stair and looked at his father, and the clock in the hall counted off a few seconds that she could not hear, and then Eric turned, and hung his coat on the hook, and went to wash his hands.

Luna realized that she had stopped breathing, and began again.

…

Tomas came to her in the dark, after nine, in the kitchen.

She was sitting at the table with a cup of tea gone cold. The house had gone quiet, the study door had closed upstairs, and the light under the cabinets lay in a thin yellow bar across the table between her hands. He came in from the garage in his slippers, stooped and slow, with a folded paper in his fist, and sat down opposite her, and put the paper on the table, and smoothed it.

It was a plane ticket. It had a destination on it, a city across an ocean, and a date, and a seat number, and the line for the price had been printed in small gray type that she did not look at.

Mia, he signed, in his slow, heavy, careful hands. I am going to see her. Saturday morning, very early. Six days only.

I am so glad, she signed. And she was. She felt her eyes fill, and took his hands and held them, big and rough and warm from the stove. You haven't seen her in two years.

Two and a half. His mouth worked. Eric lent me the money. For the ticket. And the rest, for the term.

He did?

Last month. He said yes at once. Tomas's eyes dropped. I did not know how to ask. And he only said, of course, family is family. I will write it down in a book. Pay when you can.

That is good of him.

Yes. He was silent for a moment. He reminded me, today, at the gate. He said, remember to pay it back on time, Tomas. He smiled. He was very kind about it.

She nodded. She did not know why there was a faint stir in her chest at that, like a hand turning in the dark. It was a small thing. It was what a man would say to his brother-in-law, in a house where the money was counted, and she pushed the feeling away and squeezed Tomas's fingers, and he squeezed back.

You are lucky, he signed at last. To have a husband who takes care of you.

Yes, she answered. I know.

He took up the ticket, and folded it along its creases, and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt, and patted it flat. He rose, and kissed her forehead, and shuffled to the door. She watched him go.

Then she sat alone at the table for a very long time with the tea going cold between her hands, and a light was burning upstairs behind a closed door, and the whole house seemed to her to be listening.

At some point she rose. She went to the laundry room, where the shirt lay in the drawer, and took it out, and unfolded it, and laid it on the table. She folded it a third time. She smoothed the creases with her palms. She was aware, dimly, that her hands were doing it again, over and over, like something she had once learned and could not forget, and she told herself that it was only a shirt.

She folded it a fourth.

When she looked down, her fingers were trembling so hard that the crease would not hold…