Jodie put the list down. She sat looking at it. In the living room the television flickered blue over Petey's sleeping face,.
"Why didn't he tell me Friday?" she said. "He told me we were going in two weeks. After the milk check. He said two weeks. He said it would give me time to tell you." She looked up at me. "He said you'd be okay with it once we were married. He said you'd come around."
I didn't say anything. She looked back down at the paper. Fri the 15th. Don't tell A.
"Now tell me about Dad," she said.
So I took her down the hall and took the calendar off the wall.
It isn't much to look at, a hole in the plaster. It had been patched badly, by me, with a can of spackle from the Coast to Coast hardware, and then painted over with a color that didn't quite match, and then covered with seven years of calendars. Under the hall light you could see it plain: a shallow, rough-edged dent about the size of a dinner plate, with a crack running off it toward the ceiling like a river on a map. Jodie had walked past it ten thousand times. She'd hung her coat on the hook right beside it since she was ten.
I told her. I won't put all of it down here, either. I told her about the Elks and the Christmas bonus and the one word I said. I told her the part before, too, the part I'd never even told Irja, about how sweet Keith had been for the first two years, how he'd fixed my mother's porch steps and brought me flowers from the Safeway, how the first time he grabbed my arm hard enough to leave marks he cried afterward and said it was because he loved me so much it scared him. I told her I'd started wearing sweaters in September. I told her I'd lied to her about it for seven years because I didn't want to take her father away from her, and because I was ashamed, and because it was easier, and that all three of those reasons were true and none of them were good enough.
She stood in the hall with her hand flat on the dent in the wall, fitting her palm into it. She didn't cry. That frightened me more than if she had.