Chapter 7
GWEN
Benita started on a Monday, eight to noon, four hours a day, five days a week.
On the second day she got Lita into the tub on the new bench with the handheld sprayer, and got her out again.
Lita told me afterward that the woman was rough.
Then she told me the water pressure was better than she'd expected, which in that house is a hymn.
Four hours a day does not cover six in the morning. It doesn't cover noon to whenever the PT van comes, or the pharmacy, or the days PT runs at two, or the Wednesday the aide's car wouldn't start. And the mornings were never the aide's. The mornings were the phone.
Wade brought me his solution on a Tuesday night at the end of June, and he brought it the way he brings everything, which is with a notebook.
Actual handwriting, actual list. He set it on the table between us and sat down across from me still smelling like the yard, and I watched him be nervous, which he almost never is, and something in me went soft against my will.
"Okay," he said. "The mornings."
"The mornings."
"So here's what I've got. One, call schedule. I told Mom, no calls before eight unless it's an actual emergency, and I mean a fall or a chest thing. If it's not that, it waits till eight."
"You told her that."
"I told her that."
"How'd she take it?"
"She said she'd try to remember." He almost smiled.
"Two. Bud Kessler's next door, and he's up at five-thirty every day of his life — that man has not slept past five-thirty since Korea.
I talked to him. He'll walk over and look in if she needs eyes on something before eight.
He's had the code for years. He said he'd be glad to.
Actually he said 'about time,' which I didn't love. "
I laughed, and it surprised both of us.
"Three." He turned the page. "Tuesdays and Fridays she's got PT at ten-thirty. I looked at the van schedule, and if she takes their transport instead of me driving — "
"She hates the van."
"She hates the van. But she'd take it if I asked her right."
"Okay."
"And four." He looked up. "The swimming. I've been thinking about the swimming. I know it's been bad."
I sat still.
"The way I figure it, if the calls stop and Bud's covering the early stuff, you'd get most of them. Not all. Most. And I could probably do a couple of the Saturdays myself, take the whole morning at Mom's so you've got the long one."
"Some of the Saturdays."
"Most of the swims and some of the Saturdays. And then, worst case — " and here it came, gentle, with real love in it, which is the only reason it took me two full seconds to feel the knife go in, "worst case, if this summer's just too chewed up, there's always next year's race."
The refrigerator hummed. The bulb over the table has been going since April and I keep meaning to change it.
For about a minute I didn't say anything, because I was looking at my husband.
Sixty hours into a work week. A burn on his forearm from a hitch he'd grabbed wrong.
He'd hired an aide by himself, out of a notebook, from four agencies.
He'd sat in his mother's kitchen and taken the strangers-in-my-house speech to the face without handing one syllable of it home to me.
He'd gone to the neighbor. He'd made a list at night when he could barely keep his eyes open, and he'd done it because of me.
Two middle-aged people at a kitchen table with somebody's family sitting on top of it.
There was a version of that minute where I said okay, honey, thank you, and took the discount, and got most of my swims, and kept the peace.
In that version I stand on a beach next August with a body that spent the summer at seventy percent, telling everybody I'm fine with it, lying for a year.
I've taken the discount my whole life. Nobody's ever caught me at it, because I take it before anyone has to offer.
"Wade. The qualification expires."
"I know it — "
"No. Listen to the sentence. It expires, it doesn't roll.
There's no next year's race. There's a next year's qualifier, in April, in forty-nine degree water, and I'd have to swim a time I have not yet proven I can swim twice.
" I kept my hands flat on the table. "I've said this to you four times since May. I counted. Four."
"I hear you."
"You don't, though, and I finally know why." I wasn't even angry, which surprised me. "Next year is where you keep everything."
He went still.
"That's not a dig, it's an observation, and I've had a long month to make it.
Next year is where the vacation is. Next year's where the trip to see Russ is, and where you'll finally take a week off.
Next year is where your mother's still fine, and your father was still fine, right up until the day he wasn't." My voice did something once, and I let it.
"It's the safest place you know, and you keep offering it to me like a gift, because you honestly cannot understand why anybody wouldn't want to put a thing in there. "
He looked down at his own notebook.
"I'm racing this one."
I got up and took the kitchen calendar off its nail — the paper one, the tire place one, the one that's run this family's life since Marta was in middle school — opened it to August and laid it flat on the table. Then I got a pen out of the drawer. Not the pencil in the cup. The pen.
Across the twenty-first, in the box, in letters big enough to read from the doorway: RACE. 7:00 A.M. KETTLE POINT.
I didn't circle it. I didn't explain it, and I didn't say the thing I could feel forming, because a speech would have made it negotiable. I hung the calendar back on its nail and went upstairs.
I brushed my teeth. I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark a while with the door open, and the light was still on down there, and I couldn't hear one thing — no chair, no television, no water running.
He was standing at the calendar. I knew it the way you know things after twenty-nine years.
A man in a kitchen at ten at night, reading four words in ink.