CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Three sheets, folded in half, one paperclip.
No note on the front. No name at the top. It started on the first line of the first page with the words Fire Investigation Bureau, records and a phone number and a four-digit extension.
I read it standing at the desk in my coat.
It was a list.
Who at the bureau releases a final report and on what day of the week she is actually in the office, which is Tuesdays and Thursdays.
That the carrier does not need the full report and will never ask for it, and that what they need is a certified letter with the case number and the cause determination on it, which is a separate thing you request from a different window, and that if you ask for the report they will tell you six weeks and if you ask for the letter they will tell you nine days.
The adjuster’s actual desk number instead of the queue.
The exact phrase to use about contents documentation, written out in quotation marks so I could read it off the page, which was that I was submitting a reconstructed inventory supported by bank records and photographic evidence in the absence of receipts destroyed in the loss.
And on the third sheet, a list of what counts as photographic evidence, with examples, and the note that background objects in family photographs are accepted and that people do not know this.
I had been stuck for a hundred and seven days.
I had made, by my own count, thirty-one phone calls about that claim since the twentieth of November, and I had spent somewhere around fourteen hours on hold, and I had been told two different things by four different people, and on the seventh of March a man left three pieces of paper at a desk in a converted motel and did not wait around.
It took twelve days after that.
The letter came on the nineteenth. The reconstructed inventory went in on the twenty-first with forty-one photographs attached, in nine of which you can see my refrigerator, and in one of which, taken at Danny’s fifth birthday, you can see the entire kitchen including the stand mixer, which was the single largest item I had been unable to document.
They approved eleven thousand four hundred dollars on the twenty-seventh of March.
Actual cash value. Not replacement. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars for everything three people owned, which is not enough and which is also, on the twenty-seventh of March, the largest number I had seen in one place since the twelfth of November.
The handwriting on those three sheets was small and cramped and leaning hard to the right.
I knew it immediately. I had a photocopy of it in a folder in a drawer four feet from where I was standing, on ruled paper, two entries, eleven minutes apart.
Same hand.
I want to say that I felt something complicated about that, and I did, for about a day, and then I used the list, because I have two children and eleven thousand four hundred dollars is eleven thousand four hundred dollars.
He came on the thirteenth.
I should say first that by then I was sleeping in a bed.
On the nineteenth of January, after thirty-two nights on the floor of that doorway, I finally did the obvious thing, which is that I pushed the bed frame across until the corner of it stood in the gap and the door came to rest against it.
Sixteen inches. Held by a bed instead of a hip.
And I slept in that bed, between the door and my son, which was the whole requirement and always had been.
It took me thirty-two nights to think of it. That is what being that tired does to a person. I have run a general ledger for eleven years and it took me a month to work out that a bed is heavier than a woman.
So when Denise called down the hall on the thirteenth of March and said there was a man in the lot, I went out with a coat on and my back in one piece for the first time in months.
He was standing by his truck with a paper bag.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
He held the bag out. I took it.
Four rubber door wedges. The heavy commercial kind, gray, with the ridges. There was a receipt in the bottom of the bag and I looked at it because I always look at it. Three dollars and twenty-nine cents apiece.
“These won’t work on that door,” Wes said.
I looked at him.
“I know they won’t. I checked it. That’s a rated door with a heavy closer on it and it’s got about eighty pounds behind it, and a wedge under that is going to walk out in an hour, and anyway you’re not allowed to.”
“Then why did you bring them.”
He put his hands in his coat pockets.
“For when you get out,” he said.
I stood in a parking lot with the old motel striping on it and held a paper bag with four door wedges in it.
“I don’t have an apartment.”
“I know.”
“I don’t have a lease, I don’t have a deposit, I don’t have a date.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s not what they’re for. They’re for later. You put them somewhere and then when you get one they’re already bought.”
Nobody has ever done anything like that for me before or since.
Not one person in my life has handed me thirteen dollars and sixteen cents worth of rubber on the assumption that I was going to need it in a place I did not have yet.
“Wes.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you keep doing this?”
He looked out at the fence and the back of the muffler shop.
“So I can sleep,” he said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“I know it is.”
“I want you to know that I know it,” I said.
“You’re not getting anything from me for this.
Not a thank you card, not absolution, not a conversation where I tell you it’s all right.
You wrote a false entry in a book and you didn’t make a ten second phone call and my son is going to be checking batteries when he’s forty. ”
“Yes.”
“And you’re allowed to try to sleep at night. Everybody is. But it isn’t going to work, and I’m not going to help it work.”
“I know that too,” Wes Nowak said.
Then he took his hands out of his pockets and put them back in.
“That’s not the only reason,” he said.
“What?”
“You asked me why I keep doing it and I gave you the true one and it’s not the whole one, and I’ve been standing here for four minutes trying to work out whether to say the rest of it, and I’m going to say it badly.”
“Then don’t.”
“No,” he said. “I’m going to say it badly on purpose, because if I say it well you’ll think I practiced.”
I did not say anything.
“I like being useful to you,” he said. “That’s the whole rest of it.
It’s not, I’m not standing here—” He stopped and started again.
“I don’t want anything. I’m forty and I’m divorced and I’ve got a letter in my file and thirty days of pay gone and I am not standing in a parking lot with a bag of doorstops thinking that’s the opening of something.
I want to be extremely clear about that. ”
“Okay.”
“But you asked and the answer isn’t only guilt, and I wasn’t going to stand here and let you believe a thing about me that’s convenient for both of us.”
He got in the truck.
Then he put the window down, which is what men in this city do.
“The wedges are the good ones,” he said. “Don’t buy the beige ones, they’re garbage.”
And he drove off.
I stood in the lot with a paper bag for a while and then I went inside and put it in the bottom of my closet in 118, under the box with the fire report in it, where it sat for four and a half months.
On the seventeenth of March the school called me at ten past nine in the morning.