When I Forget, He Keeps

Scheduled

The church office had a desk, a radiator, and a framed photograph of the congregation in 1974 that had been taken in front of a building Maren had never seen.

Elias was in the chair behind the desk with his coat off and his sleeves rolled and a pot of coffee going cold on the blotter, which meant he had been there all night too, which meant he had known what she was doing in the churchyard.

She did not sit down.

"In March," she said, "you went up the hill."

He turned the coffee cup a quarter turn and left it alone.

"Yes."

"With her coat."

"Yes."

"You asked him to kill her."

"I asked him to end it," Elias said. "There's a difference, and I am not going to pretend to you that the difference is large."

Maren put both hands on the edge of the desk.

"Start at the beginning."

He did. That was the thing about her uncle. When he finally gave you something he gave you all of it, laid out, in order, like a man emptying a drawer onto a table.

Her mother had been the ninth for eleven years. Between year six and year seven she had stopped going to the village, and between year eight and year nine she had stopped driving.

In year nine she wrote Elias a letter and put it under the door of the office rather than hand it to him, and in the letter she used the family word for the hill, which is replaced, because the family has never once written the other word down.

She asked to be replaced.

"Six times," Elias said. "She asked me six times over four years. Two letters a year, spring and fall, and I did not answer one of them, and she never mentioned it when I came out to the house."

"Then in March."

"In March she stopped writing and started arranging." He opened the desk drawer and took out a manila folder and set it between them without opening it. "She picked the successor. She picked the date. She picked the person who would drive her up and the person who would read the service, and she got both of them to agree before she ever told me."

"Who drove her."

"I did."

"So she was alive when she went up that hill."

"She was alive." Elias looked at the folder. "She walked up it."

Maren heard herself make a small sound and did not care.

"Why."

"Because the ninth year is when you stop being able to read," Elias said, "and she had already started, and she did the arithmetic the way you do arithmetic, which is why I want you to hear it in her words and not mine."

He opened the folder.

One page. Her mother's hand, the same hand as the ledger, the same hand as the school forms, dated the fourteenth of March.

Maren read it twice.

I have three years left and two of them are a chair. I am not going to spend them being fed. The tenth is mine and I have raised her for it and she does not know and she must not know until the first one is done, because if she knows before, she will go up the hill and ask him herself, and he will say no to her the way he said no to me, and then she will go up anyway and stand there. Do not let her stand there. Make her finish the words first. After that she can hate me.

The last line was not addressed to Elias.

Maren. The house is yours. So is everything in it, and there is one thing in it you are going to want to burn, and I am asking you not to.

Maren put the page down on the desk and stood with her hand flat on it for a while, because taking her hand off it seemed like a thing she would not be able to undo.

Eight months ago, her mother had sat in this office and written that, and then gone home and made dinner, and then over the summer taught Maren nothing, explained nothing, and let her keep thinking the book was a chore.

"You knew since March," Maren said.

"Since March."

"You sat in my kitchen."

"I sat in your kitchen," Elias said. "I also drove her up the hill. I also read the service. I also filled in the stone with a date on it. I am going to be at your wedding and at your funeral and I am not going to explain any of it to anybody, because there is nobody alive I could explain it to."

The radiator knocked twice. Outside, somebody in the lot started a truck and left it running.

"One more thing," he said. "She wanted the tenth told about the terms on the day, not before, and I have kept that, and I am going to keep it for about four more minutes."

He turned the ledger around. It had been on the corner of the desk the whole time. She had walked past it twice.

The last page. MAREN VOSS in her mother's hand, in capitals, written in March.

And out in the margin, in the column where the family had been writing one winter and four years and a spring for two hundred years, there was a date.

The fourth of November.

Next year.

"Your mother wrote that in March," Elias said. "Twelve months from the day she was buried. She never told me why that number and I never asked her."