Chapter 3
GWEN
Idid not refuse.
There was never a morning where I stood in that kitchen and said no, figure it out yourselves.
I rehearsed it in the car twice. Both times I turned onto her road, parked, went in.
Because Lita is eighty-one, with a pin in her femur and a leg she's frightened of.
On the first Monday of June she was sitting in a chair in her own living room at nine in the morning, waiting for somebody to come, and the somebody on that board was me.
So I went. What I stopped doing was everything else.
For twenty-nine years I've been the switchboard of that family.
Nobody appointed me; it happened the way silt happens.
Charmaine texts me instead of her mother because you know how she gets.
Russ calls from Arizona at nine his time to ask whether the property tax bill came, because I'd be the one who'd know.
When Lita's cardiologist moved offices I'm the one who redistributed the address.
When Wendell was dying I ran the whole ten months out of a spiral notebook on my kitchen table, and at the funeral three people told me they didn't know how I did it, which was true, because they never once looked.
In June I stopped.
The thread lit up Monday morning — Charmaine wanting to know if PT was Tuesday or Wednesday now. I read it and put the phone down. Twenty minutes later my thumb went for it on its own, and I watched my own hand reaching to answer a question I already knew the answer to, and I made it stop.
Nobody answered Charmaine. By two she'd called the therapy office herself, and reported to the thread that it took forever, they put me on hold twice. Fourteen minutes. I've done it enough times to know.
I stopped translating, too. Lita speaks in summonses and complaints. For two decades I've taken those raw and converted them into appointments, refills, deliveries, then handed the finished product to a family that thought it arrived that way. In June I let her sentences stay sentences.
"The pharmacy sent the flat container again."
"That's frustrating."
Silence on the line, three full seconds, a woman waiting for a machine to start that didn't start.
"Well," she said. "Somebody ought to call them."
"Somebody ought to."
And my own books went unbalanced. I close on the nail — last business day of the month, everything reconciled, every client's ledger squared, my invoices out by five.
Nineteen years. Through Marta's mononucleosis, through the ice storm, through my own mother's funeral, when I closed September at her kitchen table with the casseroles still arriving.
June hung open. I didn't decide it. I sat down at the desk at six-fifteen one evening after seven hours at Lita's, and the columns were just shapes.
So I put my invoices in a folder, and the folder went in the drawer.
Then it was the twelfth, and then it was the nineteenth, and my receivables sat there like a sink of dishes.
Wade noticed nothing, and in fairness there was nothing to see. The house ran.
Except the kit stopped moving. Cap, goggles, towel roll, thermos, right there by the back door.
Monday the alarm went at five and I turned it off.
Wednesday the same. Saturday I got as far as the mudroom and stood with my hand on the mesh bag, thinking about the drive, about being back by eight-fifteen, about what nine hours at Lita's does to a body that's already been in cold water at dawn — and I put the bag down.
Second week of June, one swim. Third week, none.
You could feel it in the house, the way you feel weather coming before you're awake.
Wade started talking more at dinner. He asked about clients he has never once asked about.
One Thursday he came in with a rotisserie chicken he'd bought himself and set it on the counter like a man putting a coin in a machine and hoping.
He didn't ask about the swimming. Twice he got to the edge of it — once he said, "You didn't go this morning," and I said, "No," and he said, "Weather's been cold," and that was that.
The dry cap sat on the dryer for twelve days. Nobody moved it.
And then Lita found six o'clock.
The first one was a Tuesday. My phone lit at 6:02 with her name on it and I was up with my feet on the floor before my eyes worked, keys in my hand at the bedroom door. She'd dropped the remote and couldn't reach it from the chair.
"I didn't want to wake Wade," she said. "He works."
So I drove over and picked up the remote. Home at ten to seven, the lake already started without me, and Wade came down at seven-fifteen and asked why I was dressed already.
They came every few days after that. 6:04. 5:58. 6:09. The reason was never the reason — the remote, a smell in the refrigerator she wanted identified, the mail carrier's new schedule — and every one of them ended the same way, delivered like a courtesy, like a gift she was handing me.
I didn't want to wake Wade. He works.
She wasn't being cruel. She was eighty-one, alone in a house at six in the morning, with a leg that had already gone out from under her once without warning.
Calling somebody was the lever she had, so she pulled it.
But every one of those calls landed on the exact hour I'd have been in the water, and not one of them ever rang the phone of the son who lives a mile closer.
Marta came down the second weekend of June with her laundry, which at twenty-six is still how she tells me she misses us. She sat up on the counter while I made the coffee.
"So I looked at the schedule again. I could do a Thursday if I take a PTO day. Or, like — every other Saturday? And do some grandma shifts?"
I put the scoop down. She was swinging one foot, twenty-six years old, waiting for me to say thank you.
"Marta. Look at me a second."
"What?"
"Say the sentence you just said again."
"I said I could take some grandma shifts."
"Shifts. That's the word. You used the word for work."
She went pink. "I just meant — "
"I know what you meant. You meant it kindly, which is exactly why we're doing this now.
" I leaned back against the counter. "You will visit your grandmother.
You'll bring her the gossip. You'll do her nails if she'll let you, which she won't, then she will.
You'll sit there two hours and eat her terrible cookies and let her tell you that dress is a choice. "
Marta laughed, wet-eyed for no reason she could have named.
"You will not staff her," I said. "There's a difference between visiting somebody and staffing them, and it's the whole difference, and it's the difference nobody in this family has ever once explained to me. So I'm explaining it to you. Watch it this summer. You'll see it."
"Is something going on with you and Dad?"
"Yes."
She waited for the rest — the way children do, even at twenty-six, waiting for the sentence that puts the lid back on.
"Nothing you need to hold," I said. "But don't take shifts. Come see her. That's an order from your mother."
That night I couldn't sleep, so I went down and sat in the dark front room with the paper calendar off the file cabinet in my lap.
June was a wall of Lita, half of it gone and half of it coming.
Two swims in three weeks. Whatever I'd built by April — the three seconds, the thing my body could do at fifty-four that it couldn't do at fifty — was draining out of me at a rate I could have charted on a page.
What I saw, sitting there, wasn't my mother or the whiteboard or Wade's face when he said four hundred and fifty-five. It was the water at 5:45 with a lane of it going unused. Buoys out, Dot's watch running, the space where a person swims and no person in it.
I said it out loud to an empty room, in a whisper, like a lunatic.
"The race stands."
Then I said the other half.
"Whatever breaks for it, breaks."