Chapter 2
GWEN
The photo came through while Marta was still talking, loading top down the way pictures do on a bad signal. First the top of a whiteboard, the wipe marks, a magnet clip holding a takeout menu at the corner. Then the grid. Then the writing.
Charmaine's marker. I'd know it on the side of a barn. She makes a capital G like a fishhook.
Every weekday square from June to August had my name in it.
"Mom? Did it come through?"
"It came through."
"Are you okay? You sound — "
"I'll call you back tonight."
Then I sat in the front room with the phone in my hand and did what I do, which is arithmetic, because arithmetic is the only room in my head with a lock on the door.
Thirteen weeks, sixty-five weekdays. Lita's house is twenty-two minutes each way in June traffic, longer when the county's paving.
The shifts on that board weren't labeled, which meant they were the shifts I'd already been running since the last week of April, nine to four, because that's when the PT comes and the pharmacy calls back and a woman with a pinned hip needs somebody in the house.
Seven hours, plus the drive. I did the multiplication twice, because I do everything twice.
Four hundred and fifty-five hours before the driving.
The back door went and Wade came in smelling like the yard, bark mulch and diesel and that sweetish rot the topsoil piles get in warm weather.
He dropped his keys in the bowl. Then he saw me sitting in the front room with the lamp off, which is not where I sit at six on a Sunday, and his face did the thing I've seen maybe four times in twenty-nine years.
Before I said one word, he knew.
"Marta called."
He didn't answer.
"She asked if I wanted to take some shifts." I turned the phone around so the whiteboard faced him. "Off the summer schedule. That Aunt Charmaine sent around. To her. And to you. And to everybody."
He put his hands on the back of the dining chair, those big hands, split at the knuckles all season. My husband has never fidgeted in his life.
"There was a meeting," he said.
"When."
"Tuesday. At Charmaine's."
I ran Tuesday back like a tape. Tuesday I was at the dance studio on Bell Street with a shoebox of receipts, doing a woman's quarterlies on a folding table because her office is a closet with a mirror in it.
Home at six-forty. I made the chicken thing with the peppers.
He came in at seven-fifteen, ate two plates of it, and asked me whether the studio lady had finally gotten herself a card reader.
"You had dinner with me that night."
"Gwen."
"You sat at that table and ate chicken and asked me about a card reader, and you'd spent my summer four hours earlier."
"It wasn't like that."
"Then tell me what it was like." I got up out of the chair. I didn't raise my voice. "Was there a vote?"
He looked at the floor.
"Was there a vote, Wade?"
"Charmaine put it on the board. Russ was on video. Mom needs somebody in the house weekdays through the summer, she's got PT twice a week, she can't do the stairs, she can't do the tub." He gave it to me in order, the way he'd give me a delivery schedule. "So we went through it."
"And when my name went up in every single box, what did you say?"
I have watched this man take a hydraulic tailgate down on his own forearm without changing expression. He looked at me across our dining table and said it plain, because he isn't a liar, and because some part of him had been carrying it since Tuesday and wanted it out of his pockets.
"I already told them yes, Gwen."
Six words.
Sometimes you find an entry in a client's books that isn't a mistake. Not a rounding error, not a fat thumb — somebody sat down and typed it on purpose, and you go quiet when you find one.
I went quiet. The rage came later, in the car, at a light.
"You told them yes."
"I didn't think it was — Gwen, she's my mother. Somebody's got to be in that house. It's not like I could take it, you know what May is out there. We're in the season. Hoyt and me are running nine trucks."
"So you gave them mine."
"I gave them us." He heard it land. His jaw moved. "I said we'd handle it. That's — that's what I meant."
"We," I said. "Show me one square on that board with we in it."
He didn't look at the phone.
"There's no aide. There's no service, there's no rotation. There's sixty-five boxes and one name."
"You're good with her." He said it softly, the way he says the kind things. "She's easier with you than with any of us. She doesn't want strangers in her house. And honestly, Gwen — you're so good at this."
That compliment came down on the whole business like a lid on a pot. I turned the phone face down on the table so I wouldn't have to look at the fishhook G.
"Do you want to know what you spent?"
"Don't do the — "
"Sixty-five weekdays. Nine to four." My voice stayed level.
"Four hundred and fifty-five hours, Wade, before I count one minute in the car.
Forty-four minutes round trip on a good day, and June is paving on Route 9, so put the driving in and it's past five hundred. I did the math while you were talking."
He stood there.
"Four hundred and fifty-five hours of my life got moved, seconded and carried at a meeting I wasn't at, in a room I've never been invited into. Then you came home and ate chicken."
"Gwen — "
"How many hours of yours are on that board?"
"You know I can't — "
"That's not what I asked. How many."
The furnace clicked. Fifty-eight degrees outside in the middle of May, and this house is old, and the furnace clicks.
"None," he said.
"Okay."
That was all. I said okay, picked up my phone and went upstairs, and I didn't slam a thing. I set the alarm for five. I lay in the dark next to my husband, both of us on our backs, both of us breathing like people pretending, and for a long time neither of us said anything at all.
At twelve-forty he tried. "It's four days a week, really. Benita — I mean, Charmaine said Fridays might be shorter."
I let that sit in the dark until it died of exposure.
The alarm went at five and I got up and I went.
The swim was bad. I got in at 5:45 with the whole night still in my shoulders.
My catch was late, my hips dropped, and I sighted every fourth stroke like a beginner.
Still ran wide on the second loop — wide right, steering with my lungs like I'd never learned a thing.
On the third loop the cold got in underneath the effort.
On the fourth I stopped at the platform and hung off the ladder with my chest going like a bird's, which I have not done in three years.
Dot pulled up beside me and floated there. She didn't ask.
"Bad night," I said.
"Mm."
"I'll be fine Wednesday."
"Mm," she said, and swam off.
Afterward I sat in the car in the gravel lot with my wet hair soaking into the headrest and the heater roaring, my hands shaking on the wheel from the cold and not only the cold.
I didn't cry. Crying wasn't available. Arithmetic was.
Fourteen weeks to August twenty-first, thirteen of them already spent by a man in his sister's kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon.
Pearl went past my window with her towel around her shoulders and her hair in a plastic clip, and waved. She was radiant about eight breaths.
I waved back and drove home to a house where my husband was making coffee for two, and my mother-in-law would call at ten-forty, and the summer sat on the calendar like a repossession notice.