Chapter 11: The Incline

On the first Saturday in December, Gene ordered me to take a day off.

He did it at breakfast, with the tablet against the sugar bowl, in the voice he used for things that were not up for discussion.

"Jenna. Today you do nothing. Go somewhere. Do not call."

"I can't. It's the ten o'clock pills, and the stairs, and the laundry."

"The woman with the pie is on her way. She has a casserole and a Bible."

"Gene."

"It is an order," said the voice. "I am your employer."

The signed divorce papers had come in the mail on Wednesday, in a plain envelope.

Craig's looping signature was on the form, and a yellow sticky note was stuck to the front.

Sorry, Jen, said the note, in the same handwriting that signed every birthday card I had ever gotten from him.

The form said ninety days to the decree.

I had read it standing at the mailbox, waiting to feel something large.

What I felt was cold fingers and a kind of quiet.

I called Neil from the porch at nine.

"You said coffee."

"I did," he said. "I meant it. I can do coffee in forty minutes."

"I was thinking something bigger than coffee."

He was silent for exactly one breath.

"I'll bring a coat," he said.

The Johnstown Inclined Plane is a little red-and-wood train car that goes straight up a hillside at a slope that looks like a joke.

It has been climbing the same hill since 1891, after the flood, and the man in the ticket booth told us so without being asked.

We sat on a bench inside the car with our knees almost touching.

I looked at my phone, and then I looked at the time.