Chapter 6
WADE
Charmaine's kitchen has a doorway between the cooking side and the table side, and my sister and I are both big people, so somebody always ends up standing in it.
That's where the whole thing came apart, and I'll take it — I asked Gwen to come.
I thought if she was in the room, Charmaine would offer a day.
It was a Saturday in the middle of June. Charmaine had made the coffee cake she makes when there's going to be a conversation, and Gwen sat at the table with her hands around a mug she didn't drink from.
I did my part badly. I said something about the summer being heavier than we'd planned for, maybe we could look at the board again, and Charmaine got defensive before I finished, the way she's been since she was six.
"Wade, I've got Katie's whole travel schedule. And I'm three towns over."
"I know where you live."
"You're a mile from her." She got up to move a plate that didn't need moving. "And I'm not the one who — look. Don't put this on me. We offered, Gwen."
The kitchen changed temperature. I felt it on my arms.
Gwen set the mug down. "Offered what?"
Charmaine looked at me. She's looked at me that way exactly twice in our lives, and the other time was at the reading of Dad's will.
"You don't know," she said.
"Offered what, Charmaine."
"The aide." My sister stood in her own doorway with a plate in her hand. "Russ and I had the aide money on the table the first night. At the meeting. Before anybody wrote anything on that board."
"Charmaine," I said.
"No." She put the plate down. "No, I'm not carrying this one.
Russ priced it out that same afternoon, he sent the agency links and everything, four hours a day, five days a week, and it came to — what was it, twelve something a week — and we said split it three ways.
That was the plan. That was on the table the first night. "
Gwen didn't move. "Show me."
"Gwen — " I said.
"Show me the thread, Charmaine."
My sister got her phone and scrolled back a long way, longer than she wanted to. Then she set it on the table in front of my wife, and went and stood at the sink with her back to the room.
I knew every line of it. I'd typed one of them.
Russ, 4:51 p.m.: three agencies here, rates attached, the middle one's got the best reviews. 4 hrs/day M-F is $1,240/wk. Splits to $413 each. I'm in for mine.
Charmaine, 5:02 p.m.: I'm in. Mom will hate it for two weeks then forget she ever objected.
Russ, 5:04 p.m.: also they do the bathing. that's the part none of us can do and you know it.
And then, 9:38 that night, from me.
no need, Gwen's got it. she's so good at this. honestly she'd be hurt if we hired somebody out.
Gwen read it. Then she read it out loud, in the flattest voice I have ever heard come out of her.
"No need. Gwen's got it. She's so good at this. Honestly she'd be hurt if we hired somebody out."
Nobody said anything. The refrigerator did what refrigerators do.
She read it again. "Honestly she'd be hurt if we hired somebody out.
" Then she looked up at me. "I've been sitting in your mother's living room for three weeks with my books unbalanced, and there was twelve hundred dollars a week on the table, and you turned it down on my behalf. In my name. With my feelings."
"Gwen."
"You didn't just spend my summer, Wade. You took away the thing that could've bought it back, and then you told them I'd be hurt."
"Yeah."
"That's it? Yeah?"
"What else is there." My voice came out wrong. "That's what I did. I typed it. It's in my thumbs. I can't make it be something else."
Charmaine turned around from the sink. "I want to say — Gwen, I thought you'd said yes. I thought he'd asked you and you'd — that's why I wrote the board."
"You wrote my name in sixty-five boxes," Gwen said, "because a man told you a woman would be hurt by being helped."
Charmaine's face went, and she sat down.
I got my phone out. I did it right then, in that kitchen, and it wasn't all decency — I couldn't sit there one more second with my wife's face doing that.
I opened the same thread. The one with all four of us in it, Russ included, out in Arizona where it was nine in the morning. I typed it slow because I wanted it exact.
I was wrong in May. We're taking the aide money — thank you both, and Russ, thank you for pricing it.
I'll hire and I'll manage it. Also for the record: Gwen never said she'd be hurt.
I said that. She was never asked anything at all.
There was no yes from her. I want that written down where I wrote the other thing.
I hit send with my sister watching me and my wife watching me, and I set the phone on the table face up so they could both see it go.
Russ came back in about ninety seconds. ok. glad. Then, twenty seconds later, gwen i'm sorry.
Gwen looked at it a long time and didn't answer it.
"That doesn't fix June," she said.
"No."
"June's gone. That's three weeks of training. That's — " She stopped, which she does when she catches herself explaining something to people who don't have the vocabulary for it. "Fine. Hire somebody. Do it fast."
Then she got her bag and said goodbye to Charmaine like a person leaving a work meeting, and went out to sit in the truck.
I hired Benita the following Wednesday, and I did all of it myself, which sounds like nothing.
I'd never done it. I called four agencies and didn't understand a single thing any of them said for the first two calls — hourly minimums, bath aide versus companion care, whether they'd do transfers, two-hour minimums, what happens if the assigned person's sick.
By the third call I'd started writing it down in the notebook I use for stone deliveries.
I asked for references and I actually called them.
The second one was a man about my age who went quiet on the phone and said his mother had died in March, and Benita had been there, and would I hold on a second.
I held on.
She came out Thursday. Fifties, small, arms like somebody who moves people for a living. She met me in Mom's driveway and looked at the ramp before she looked at me.
"One in twelve. Who did that?"
"Me."
"Good. Most families do one in eight and then wonder." She got her bag onto her shoulder. "Okay. Show me the bathroom."
She was in that house forty minutes and named eight things I hadn't thought of.
First one was that the tub was wrong no matter what bars I'd hung in it.
What my mother needed was a bench and a handheld sprayer, plus a shower schedule set to the same days every week, because people with a fresh hip don't like surprises about the shower.
Then I had to go tell my mother.
I'd told myself I'd bring Charmaine. I didn't bring Charmaine, because if I had, Mom would have found a way to make it something Charmaine had done to her, and by dinnertime it would've been in a phone call to somebody at the church.
So I sat down at her kitchen table Friday morning, in the season, at ten o'clock with nine trucks running without me, and told her a woman named Benita was coming Monday, weekdays, and it was decided.
She went white around the mouth. "Absolutely not."
"Monday, Ma."
"I will not have strangers in my house." Her hand went flat on the table — that hand, the one that ran the rummage sale for thirty-one years and could stop a room.
"I have been in this house since 1971. I did not have strangers in it when your father was sick.
I did not have them when I had the shingles — "
"You had Gwen."
"Gwen isn't a stranger."
"No. Gwen's my wife. And she was never asked."
"She never minded."
"She was never asked, Mom."
She looked out the window at the driveway a while. Her chin was going, just slightly, and I made myself stay in the chair instead of getting up to fill the kettle, which is what I have done in that kitchen my entire life.
"They talk about me in the hallway at that therapy place," she said. "Did you know that? Like I'm a case. A hired woman means I'm a case."
"A hired woman means you get your shower on Tuesday and Friday, and nobody has to be brave about it."
"Your father," she said, and her voice found its edge again, "would never have allowed a stranger to come into this house and put hands on his wife."
She's a marksman, my mother. I sat in that chair and I could feel the bathroom two rooms away, the doorway, the chipped tile in the corner by the vanity.
"Dad never allowed himself within ten feet of any of it, Mom."
She turned her head.
"Not once. Not with Grandma Ruth, not with Uncle Ted, not with anybody. He'd build you a ramp overnight. He'd drive four hundred miles. He never touched a single body in this family in his life, and neither have I." My hands were on my knees. "I'd know. I'm his."
The clock over the stove ticked. It's the loudest clock in the county.
"Benita comes Monday at eight," I said. "I'll be here at eight to let her in."
Mom straightened the placemat in front of her, which is what she does instead of surrendering.
"Then she can start with the porch," she said. "It's filthy out there. Sawdust everywhere. Some fool was building."