11. Tess
Tess
Idon’t answer the reporter. I stand in my studio with the phone against my ear and I say I have no comment on anything, twice, and she says she understands and thanks me and I can hear her typing while she does it.
The thing is yes, I do know who sold it. I’ve known all along, I’ve just refused to ask her about it. I haven’t been able to face it until just now.
I need to talk about it, though. We need to put this to rest, especially with Shane’s people suspicious of my motives and looking for any reason to paint me as a horrible mother.
Kendra opens the door in the T-shirt she’s had since 2011 and her face has that swollen look, and behind her the television’s on with the sound off.
“You saw it.”
“She’s running it tonight. Everybody’s going to see it.”
“Okay.” She steps back. “Okay. Come in.”
Her apartment smells like the fig candle she’s burned for thirteen years. There’s a plate on the coffee table with half a sandwich going stale on it and a stack of unopened mail, and it’s all so familiar that I have to stand still for a second.
“I’m not sitting down.”
“Fine.”
“One question and don’t manage me.”
“Ask it.”
“Where’s all the money?”
She goes into the kitchen and comes back with a folder, which means she’s had it ready, which means she’s been waiting two weeks for me to come stand in her living room.
I open it. A receipt from the hospital. Payment applied to account.
Thirty-one thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars and eight cents.
Dated nine days after the article ran. Another one, smaller, from the pediatric group on Red River. Anonymous, both.
“I kept about four.”
“Kendra.”
“I’m not going to stand here and tell you I gave it all away, because I owed my sister and I paid her.” She’s got her arms crossed. “If I tell you I’m a saint you’ll never believe another word out of me.”
“So this was for me.”
“Yes.”
“Say it again and listen to yourself this time.”
She opens her mouth.
“You took photographs I gave you access to because you were my best friend. You gave them to strangers. You put my kid’s face on the internet with a question mark next to it. And then you paid my bill with it, so that when I found out I’d have to be”
“That is not why I?—”
“Let me finish.” My voice is going and I can’t get under it.
“You decided you knew better than me about my own life and then you went around me. And you say you did it out of love, but I have to question your motivations if there’s money missing.
Is that what it boils down to? Money? Are you like Mitch? ”
“Don’t put me next to him.”
“Every person in this thing went around me for my own good and I’m the only one who”
“That is not the same thing and you know it isn’t.”
“I’m the only one who’s had a brick thrown at her.”
That stops her. She sits down on the arm of her own couch, hard, like her legs quit.
“I know,” she says.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what.”
“Agree with me so it ends faster.”
“I’m not.” She wipes her face with the back of her wrist. “I’ve had two weeks in here with the phone off, Tess.
I know what I did. I’ve known since about four hours after I sent them, and I sat in this room and I told myself the hospital thing made it a different kind of thing, and it doesn’t.
It’s a receipt. It’s a receipt I bought so I could hand it to you. ”
Neither of us says anything for a while. Somebody’s car alarm goes off down the block and stops.
“You didn’t tell me you tried,” she says.
“No.”
“You let me sit there for a year thinking you were too proud to ask him.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not saying it excuses”
“You’re saying it a little.”
“Yeah.” She laughs, wetly, awful. “Yeah, I’m saying it a little.”
I look at the fig candle and the half sandwich and the door I have walked through maybe two thousand times.
“Are we okay?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not going to tell you I hate you, because I don’t. And I’m not going to say never, because I don’t know what never means tonight.” I pick up my keys. “I’m going to go a long time without calling you. That’s what I’ve got.”
She nods. At the door she says my name and I stop without turning around.
“Is she still doing the thing at night? The reflux thing?”
And that’s the worst part of the entire evening. That she knows about the thing at night.
“She’s better,” I say, and leave.
I sit in the car outside her building for a long time before I start it.
Thirteen years. She held my hair back in a bathroom in Corpus Christi when we were twenty-four.
She was at the hospital in October before my own mother could get a flight, and she sat in that plastic chair for nineteen hours, and when they finally let me hold Sadie it was Kendra who took the picture.
That picture is on my fridge. It’s been on my fridge the whole time.
There’s a man sitting on the curb outside my house.
No car in the drive. Nobody in a windbreaker at the corner pretending to look at his phone.
Just him, in the dark, between my mailbox and my neighbor’s recycling bin, elbows on his knees.
He gets up when my headlights hit him and then stays where he is, well back from the car, hands out where I can see them.
“I’ll go. Say it and I’m gone and I won’t do this again,” Shane tells me, hope in his voice.
I don’t say it. I don’t tell him to go.
“Ten minutes.” He’s got no jacket and it’s cold and he’s been out here a while. “Ten minutes with her, in your house, with you standing right there. And if it’s no, then it’s no, and you’ll never have to have this conversation with me again.”