Chapter 8
WADE
The last Saturday in June, Gwen put the whole ten years on the kitchen table, and then I put down one more page, and that page was mine.
She'd already given me the two-column sheet in the middle of the month.
This was that sheet with teeth. She'd gone through it again, and where the first one lumped things, this one had dates.
The lawn service with its start month. The taxes by year.
Dad's ten months broken out into the actual weeks.
The shingles summer, the bronchitis winter.
My toilet, my roof patch, my ramp, my nine hundred dollars of lumber, each with its hours beside it.
A little over two thousand documented hours in her column across the decade, and that's the conservative version, because she only counts what she can document.
"Okay," I said. "I've seen it. I know."
"That's the file. That's everything I can document."
She started squaring the pages up to put them back in the folder, and I sat there watching her do it. I don't think I decided anything. It came up out of me the way a burp comes up.
"There's another page."
"For what?"
"For your file. It's mine." I got up, and the chair made a noise on the floor. "It's in the desk. Give me a second."
It lives in the second drawer of the desk in the front room, where the tax stuff lives.
It comes in the mail every year at the end of the fiscal year.
I've opened exactly one of them in fifteen years, and then I put it back in the drawer, and I've known what it says ever since without needing to look.
I came back and set it down in front of her, not square, crooked, with my thumb print on the corner, because my hands weren't doing well.
"Third line from the bottom."
She didn't pick it up. She turned her head and read it sideways, which is a thing she does.
ACCRUED PAID LEAVE — BALANCE: 240.0 HRS.
"I've got two hundred and forty hours," I said. "I've had them for years."
She sat back in her chair. "That's six weeks."
"Six weeks. They carry over. They've been carrying the whole time.
" My voice was doing something strange, so I kept going, because stopping seemed worse.
"I'm going to say the rest before you ask me, because if you ask me I'll answer smaller.
I had them through Dad's ten months. I had them through Mom's cataracts.
Through the shingles, through the bronchitis winter. "
"Wade — "
"I had them through your mother."
The clock in our kitchen doesn't tick. I remember wishing it did.
Gwen looked at the paper a long time without touching it. "I've done our taxes for twenty-nine years," she said.
"I know."
"That statement comes to this house every February.
I open it. I put the wage figure where the wage figure goes.
" Her voice had gone strange too, in a different direction.
"That line is four inches from the number I've been copying out by hand for twenty-nine years, and I have never once read it as a thing that could be spent. I read it as paperwork."
"It was paperwork. I made sure of it."
She put two fingers on the edge of the page and turned it a quarter inch, straightening it, and I don't think she knew she was doing it.
"Why?"
I could have lied there. Not a big lie — I had four small ones ready and every one of them was true enough to survive an audit. The season. The cash flow. Hoyt. The bank note on the loader.
"They're not for a someday," I said.
"What?"
"The hours." My throat was doing something. "Everybody thinks they're for a trip. You think they're for a trip, Hoyt thinks I'm a maniac who won't take a vacation. They're not for a trip. They never were."
She waited. She's good at waiting — nineteen years across the table from men who don't want to tell her about the cash drawer.
"They're a wall."
"A wall against what?"
"Against having to." My hands were flat on my knees, under the table where she couldn't see them. "Long as I've got hours I've never spent, I can always say the reason I'm not there is the season. If I spend them, then the reason I'm not there is me."
She sat back.
"That's the whole thing," I said. "That's not most of it. That's it."
"You have never once been able to be in a room with a sick body." She said it slowly. "In twenty-nine years."
"No."
"And instead of finding that out about yourself, you built a schedule where you'd never have to."
"Out of your hours. Yeah."
She looked at me a long moment, then got up and stood at the sink with her back to me, which was worse than being looked at.
"Is there more?"
There was six years of more, sitting in a doorway with a chipped tile in the corner.
"Not tonight," I said, and my voice came out of me like a stranger's, and she heard it, and she let it go. She shouldn't have. She did.
Monday I filed for the leave. In thirty-one years at that yard I've taken time in single days, in half days, in I'll be back by two. I have never once put in a form.
I did the math first, because I'm my father's son. Two days a week, July and August, call it eighteen days, a hundred and forty-four hours. Leaves me ninety-six in the bank, and I noticed I was glad about that, which told me something about myself I didn't enjoy.
Hoyt read the form standing up in the scale house with the loader going outside.
"Tuesdays and Thursdays," he said. "In July."
"And August."
"You know what August is."
"I know what August is."
He set the form on the counter and looked out the window at the mulch bays a while. "Your mother?"
"My mother."
"Huh." Thirty-one years, and that's what I got. Then: "Manny can run the desk Tuesdays. Thursdays are the problem — Thursdays are the landscaper trucks. We'd have to bring Dev up to the scale and pay him for it."
"Then we pay him for it."
"That's real money, Wade."
"I know exactly how much money it is." I'd run it Sunday night. "About nine thousand across the two months, between Dev's hours and what we lose from me not selling in the yard. I'll take it out of my draw."
"That's not — " He stopped, picked the form back up, signed it, handed it over without looking at me. "You could've done this before, you know."
"Yeah."
"I'd have said yes before. Any time. Six years ago I'd have said yes."
"I know that too."
I lost something that day, in the eyes of men whose opinion I've organized my life around.
Nothing dramatic. It's a thing you feel in a yard — the guys knowing the boss is gone two days a week in the season, that little flatness when I come in Wednesday morning and ask how Tuesday went.
A man in this business is his availability. That's the whole reputation.
Flexible is the other word for it. That's the one my family uses, and they've been using it about my wife since before Marta was born.
First Tuesday of July I picked my mother up for PT at ten-fifteen. Got there at ten, and Benita had her ready, which I hadn't known was a thing that had to happen — shoes on, a bag with the water bottle in it, the therapy shorts, the sheet from the last session they want you to bring.
"You'll need the belt," Benita said.
"The what?"
She took a folded canvas thing off the back of the chair.
Gait belt. She showed me how it buckles around the ribs, low, snug, two fingers of room, and how you get your hand under it palm up, and how you never pull a person up by the arm, because you'll take the shoulder out of an eighty-one-year-old the way you'd pop a wing off a chicken.
I put it on my mother wrong the first time, too high, up under the arms, so it rode when I lifted, and she said "Wade," in the voice, and Benita said, mild as milk, "Lower. Ribs. Like a seatbelt."
Second time I got it. She came up out of the chair against my forearm and stood there holding the walker.
For a second she was leaning her weight on me — her actual weight, my mother's actual body, warm through her blouse — and my heart went like I'd run up a hill.
I didn't let go and I didn't leave the room and I didn't look at any doorway.
"Well," she said, getting her balance. "You're not gentle."
"I'll learn."
"Your father was never gentle either." She started for the door. "He was quick, though. You're slow."
PT runs an hour and ten minutes in a room that smells like rubber, and they don't let you sit in with them.
You sit in a molded chair by the window with a dozen other people who are all somebody's kid or somebody's husband.
I watched a man about eighty do the same six inches of leg lift forty times.
I watched my mother get talked to loudly by a girl of about twenty-five, and I watched my mother be pleasant about it, which she has never once been at home, and something about pride went through me that I'm not going to be able to put down properly.
On the way out the girl handed me the sheet. "Are you the son? Great. Okay, so we're worried about the bathroom transfers still — "
And I stood there in a hallway getting told about my mother's bathroom transfers, and I didn't go anywhere.
The pill organizer moved into my truck that week.
It'd been living on our kitchen table since April, this ugly blue plastic thing with fourteen doors, morning and night, and every Sunday Gwen had filled it.
I took it out to the truck on the second Tuesday, because the pharmacy runs were mine now and the pharmacy had started calling my phone.
I strapped it into the passenger seat with the belt so it wouldn't slide off and pop open on a turn, which it did once before I got smart.
My mother's week, buckled in shotgun, riding around all season with the delivery tickets.
The third Tuesday is the one I think about.
Benita does baths Tuesday and Friday, and Mom had been letting her for two and a half weeks with the grace of a woman being audited.
But she would not let her do the hair. Would not.
She'd sit there with her jaw set and say the shower spray was wrong for it, she'd always done it at the sink, she'd been doing it at that sink since 1971, thank you.
So her hair hadn't been washed properly in going on three weeks, and she knew it, and it was killing her, and she'd have died before she said so.
Benita left at noon. I was there because I'd brought the PT sheet back, and a bag of the peaches Mom likes from the stand on Route 9. She was in the kitchen chair with her hand up at the back of her head, patting at it.
"When did Gwen used to do this," I said.
"Thursdays. For twelve years."
I stood there in my work clothes in my mother's kitchen with a bag of peaches in my hand.
"Where's the pitcher."
She looked at me.
"The pitcher, Ma. The plastic one. Is it still under the sink?"
"You'll flood the floor."
"Probably."
"You don't know how."
"No," I said. "You'll have to tell me."
There was a long moment there where she could have said no, and I'd have let her, and I'd have driven home and that would have been the end of it, and I'd never have tried again.
"It's in the cupboard by the flour," she said. "Not the sink. The sink one's for the plants."
I rolled my sleeves. Put a towel down on the counter edge for her neck, folded in thirds, because that's the only way towels get folded in that house.
Moved a chair over, got the belt on her right first try, got her across and seated with her back to the basin.
Then I had to lean her head back, which meant my hand went under my mother's skull.
Her head is smaller than I thought it would be.
She weighs nothing. This woman ran a rummage sale like a shipping company for thirty-one years and her whole head fits in one of my hands.
"Water," she said.
I ran it.
"Too hot."
I ran it cooler.
"Too cold. Are you a boy of eight? Put your wrist in it."
I put my wrist in it and found the temperature, which is warmer than you'd think, warmer than I'd have picked, right at the edge of what my forearm calls comfortable.
Then I filled the pitcher and poured it over my mother's hair with my other hand cupped at her hairline so it wouldn't run in her eyes, because she told me to, in three words, sharply.
Then she closed her eyes and didn't say anything else for a while, and neither did I.
The shampoo was the same one that's been in that house my whole life.
The window over that sink faces west, so at one in the afternoon in July the whole kitchen goes gold, and the water was making its sound going down the drain, and my mother's hair was in my hands, thin, her scalp right there under it.
Neither of us died of it.
I rinsed her three times because she says twice is never enough. I got the towel around her head in the turban shape she indicated with one finger. I got her back to the chair with the belt, and she sat there like a queen in a bad hotel and said, "You got water on the floor."
"I said I would."
"It's by the trash. You'll have to mop that or it'll be sticky."
So I mopped it, and put the pitcher back in the cupboard by the flour, and let myself out, and sat in my truck in her driveway with my hands on the wheel about four minutes. Then I went back to the yard and sold sixty yards of stone.
I didn't tell Gwen. I got in the truck twice that week with it ready in my mouth — guess what I did Tuesday — and both times I put the radio on instead. She'd been handed enough things built out of lumber and set at her feet with a note on them.
That Friday she needed the truck. Her car was at the shop for the brake line and she had a client run out to the septic place on the county road, so she came by the yard at eight in the morning to swap keys. I was up in the scale house doing tickets, and I watched her out the window.
She got in, went to put her bag on the passenger seat, and stopped. Sat there with the door open and one foot still on the running board, looking at that blue plastic organizer buckled into the seat of my work truck with a stack of stone tickets under it and a peach bag on the floor.
She put her hand on it. Flat on the lid, the way you'd put your hand on a dog.
She sat like that in my truck in the parking lot of my own yard for a long minute with her eyes somewhere past the windshield, and I stood up in the scale house with a clipboard in my hand and I did not go down there.
Whatever was happening in that truck was hers.
Walking down to be seen watching it would have taken it off her.
She shut the door, started the engine, drove out past the mulch bays.
Hoyt came in behind me with a delivery slip. "That your wife?"
"Yeah."
"She okay? She was sitting out there a while."
"She's fine," I said.