Chapter 17: The Grandchildren
They came Friday afternoon in a rental car so full of groceries that the trunk would not latch, and Noah drove the last six miles with a bungee cord doing the work of engineering and optimism. Sadie rode with a grocery sack on her lap and another between her feet, holding a bag of oranges the way other people hold a baby, and when the car turned in at the gate she leaned out the window and hollered at the house like it was a person who had been worrying them. Evie stood on the porch with a dish towel over her shoulder and hollered back, which startled Hank Breslin out of his chair next door.
Noah unloaded the car twice, because the first time he carried everything to the porch and stood there looking at the house instead of going in. He was twenty-four and built like his grandfather, broad through the shoulders, with Walter's way of going quiet when something mattered. The new roof shone in the late light, courses straight as ruled lines, and the restored sign over the carport — W. MARSH, REPAIRS, the paint still smelling faintly new — caught the sun each time the breeze moved the mesquite.
"The foreman left his checklist in the mailbox," Evie told him. "Said a smart grandson might like to learn what a roof costs. You can walk it in the morning, before it gets hot. Not alone. Hank will hold the ladder and tell you it's crooked out of habit."
In the morning Noah climbed, careful as a cat on the new shingles, checking the flashing at the chimney and the line of the ridge the way the checklist said, calling down readings to Hank, who wrote them on the back of a feed-store receipt and argued with half of them. When he came down his shirt was dark with sweat and his face was doing something private. "He would have done this himself," he said. "Wouldn't he. Even at seventy."
"At seventy he did do it himself," Evie said. "I held the ladder and lied about not being scared. That's marriage, Noah. Ladder work and lying about being scared."
Sadie spent the day at the stove. That was her campaign and she announced it like one: she was going to learn the enchilada sauce before she went back to Tucson, because her mother made it from a jar and had confessed this shame on the drive up, and three generations of women were not going to end in a jar. Evie set her up with the dried chiles, the garlic, the pan that had not been new in any living person's memory. "Your great-grandmother measured with her hand," Evie said, "and your grandmother measures with spite, so you've got range." Sadie burned the first batch of chiles learning what too close meant, and Evie ate a spoonful of the second without flinching, which the girl understood correctly as the highest honor the kitchen conferred.
While the sauce simmered, the stories came, the way they always came in that house, sideways and attached to objects. The dented ladle led to the winter the pipes froze. The chipped blue bowl led to the church supper where Walter, courting, had eaten three helpings of a terrible Jell-O mold rather than hurt a cook's feelings, and Evie had decided a man who would do that would do for a lifetime. Sadie kept a notebook on the counter and wrote things down when she thought no one was watching, and everyone pretended not to watch.
Dinner took two hours and nobody looked at a clock. Noah asked about the riders and the storm, and heard the whole thing again from the beginning, the knock in the rain, the six wet strangers in the doorway, and his mother went quiet in the middle of it the way she had on the step, and reached under the table and found Evie's hand and held it like a rope. Afterward there were dishes enough for an army, and Sadie washed, and Noah dried, and Evie put away, and the kitchen steamed and clattered.
She kept drifting to the doorway. That was the thing she would remember later, more than the roof or the sauce or any single word. She would be mid-errand, towel in hand, and stop in the doorway of her own kitchen just to stand there and watch it be loud — her daughter laughing with her whole face for the first time in two years, her grandson telling the ladder story back to Hank with improvements, her granddaughter standing at her stove with her sleeves pushed up, tasting the sauce off the back of a spoon. Eighty-one years old, Evie Marsh stood in the doorway holding a dish towel, and did not go in, and did not go out, and let the noise of her family wash over the threshold and take her with it for a while.