Chapter 5
GWEN
Imade the sheet on a Wednesday, between a client's payroll run and dinner, and it took me forty minutes.
Forty minutes. It had been sitting there a decade, fully formed, waiting to be typed.
Two columns, ten point, one page — the way I'd hand it to a client whose numbers I was about to ruin. Left column, what the family gives. Right column, what I give.
Charmaine, the lawn service at Lita's: ninety a month, ten months a year, since Wendell died. Six years, fifty-four hundred dollars. I gave her every cent of credit for it, because it's real money and she pays it without being reminded.
Russ, the property taxes: thirty-one hundred a year for six years, plus the water heater in the second year. Twenty thousand and change. Two visits a year, four days each, and he takes his mother to breakfast both mornings, and she talks about those breakfasts for months afterward.
Wade: the ramp, and the original ramp, and the roof patch, and the storm door, and the two hundred dollar toilet with the higher seat, and the nine hundred dollars of lumber from the first weekend in June. Every hour of it. I didn't shave one.
Then the right column.
Wendell's decline, ten months, the fall of the year he was diagnosed through the August he died.
I still had it in the spiral notebook, because I'm me.
Nine hundred and forty hours, and that doesn't count the nights he was in the hospital in April and I slept in the chair.
I never wrote those down, and if it isn't documented I don't bill it.
The three recovery stretches since — the cataract surgeries, the shingles summer, the winter she had the bronchitis that turned: two hundred and sixty.
Then the ordinary running of the woman's life. Pharmacy, insurance appeals, cardiologist, the church-sale bookkeeping when her eyes went, the fifteen years of Thanksgivings where I got there at nine and left at ten at night. I only counted what I could name a date for. Four hundred and ten.
At the bottom, in its own line because it belonged in its own line: June through August, current year, per the schedule dated the second Tuesday of May. Four hundred and fifty-five hours, before the driving. Committed.
Grand total right column, hours. Grand total left column, dollars. And under that I typed one sentence: Note: no dollar figure appears in the right-hand column. No hour figure appears in the left.
Then I printed it, laid it face down on the kitchen table, and made the pork chops.
He came in at ten of seven and washed his hands at the sink a long time, the way he does in season, getting the yard out from under his nails. We ate. We talked about the county paving Route 9, which had started, which was adding nine minutes to my drive each way, which I did not mention.
When his plate was empty I turned the sheet over and slid it across.
"What's this?"
"Your family's books. Ten years. It's not complete, because I only entered what I could document, so it's conservative."
He picked it up and read it top to bottom without skipping, the way he reads a delivery ticket.
I wasn't leaving. I had never once said that word in this house, and if I'd said it then he'd have known inside of four seconds it was a bluff. So I stayed where I was and let him hold the page.
He got to the bottom, read the note line, and then read it again — I watched his eyes go back.
"Gwen."
"Not yet." I got up and started the water in the sink, because I needed my hands doing something. "I've got a question and I want you to actually work it. Take your time. It's not rhetorical, I'm not setting you up. I want the real answer."
"Okay."
"Twenty-nine years." I put the plates in. "Name one family crisis — one — that cost you a week of your season."
He didn't answer fast, which I appreciated.
"Not a weekend of lumber. Not a Saturday driving somebody to the airport. Not nine hundred dollars, which you have and can spend and would spend again tomorrow. A week. Your hours, your body, your sleep."
The refrigerator hummed. I let the water run over my wrists.
"Your dad's ten months. What was the biggest single stretch of that for you?"
"I did the funeral," he said. "All of it. The stones, the plot, the — "
"That's after. He was dead. I'm asking about the ten months, when he was alive, and there was a body in a bed, and it needed things."
He turned the sheet over like there might be something on the back.
"There was the week in April," he said slowly. "Hospital."
"You came at seven at night on your way home. Four nights, forty minutes each. It's on there, it's in your column, look. Two point seven hours."
"That can't be — " He stopped, and I could see him doing it, going year by year, back and back. The thing about my husband is that he's honest with numbers. It's the one place he's never let himself lie.
He set the sheet down. "There isn't one."
"No."
"There's a lot of driving."
"There's an enormous amount of driving. You will drive anybody anywhere. You'd drive your mother to Ohio tonight if she asked you."
"That's not nothing."
"It isn't nothing. It's a garage. It's the whole garage. Everything you've ever given this family has a garage or a lumberyard in it, and everything they've ever asked of me has had a body in it, and not one person has noticed that those are different things."
He put his hand flat on the paper.
"Everybody else pays money. Charmaine writes a check for the lawn, Russ writes a check for the taxes, you buy the toilet. That's fine — money's a real contribution, I gave every dollar of it full credit on that page. I'm the only person in this family who's expected to pay in life."
"You've never said any of this."
And there it was.
"No, I haven't. That's mine, and I'll be dealing with it for a while. But you've watched it for a decade. You didn't need me to say it. You've been standing in the room."
He didn't argue, which he never does once he's lost the numbers.
"I'll talk to Charmaine," he said.
"About what?"
"About — I don't know yet. Some of it. Maybe she can do a day."
"Okay."
"Gwen — "
"It's twenty to eight. Route 9 is down to one lane, so I'm leaving at eight-twenty tomorrow instead of eight-forty."
He looked up at me then, older than he'd looked at Christmas, and some part of me wanted to put a hand on the back of his neck. Twenty-nine years isn't nothing either. I know what his neck feels like. I dried my hands instead.
"The race is August twenty-first."
"I know when the race is."
"I don't think you do, so I'm going to say the shape of it once.
Between now and then, somebody is going to pay for your mother's summer in hours.
That's not optional and I'm not pretending it is.
Somebody's hands are going into that house every weekday, because she needs them, because she's eighty-one, because she's frightened. "
"I know."
"I've paid in advance for a decade." I nodded at the sheet, face up now under the kitchen light. "Check the page. I'm current."
I went up. He sat down there a long time — no television, no phone, the chair creaking twice.
At half past ten I heard the cabinet where we keep the folders open and close.
He'd put the sheet in with the tax documents.
That's my husband exactly: he couldn't answer it, so he filed it, and I lay in the dark upstairs somewhere between fury and something almost like tenderness, because filing a thing is at least admitting it's a document.