“Yvette’s due in March,” he said, and he put the folder on the table like he had been carrying it around all week.
I waited for the part where he took it back.
He didn’t.
He sat down across from me and stretched his legs out under the table.
He looked RELIEVED.
“So nine years of appointments finally answered the question, didn’t they.”
NINE YEARS.
Nine years of a needle in the same spot on my hip.
Nine years of driving home from that building with the radio off.
His mother said it first, two summers ago, at a fish fry, with a paper plate in her hand.
“Some women just aren’t built for it,” Georgette said.
Dwight put his arm around me in the parking lot afterward and told me she was old and I should let it go.
I let it go for two summers.
Yvette worked in his office. She sat at our table last Christmas and asked me for the recipe for the corn thing.
By Tuesday morning the checking account had ELEVEN DOLLARS in it.
The insurance card quit at the pharmacy counter with four people in line behind me.
The truck was in the company’s name, so a man came and took it out of the driveway at lunch and waved at me while he did it.
I borrowed my sister’s hatchback and drove back to the house at four.
My key went in and turned halfway and stopped.
Dwight opened the door and stood in the gap.
“My attorney will call you,” he said.
“My clothes are in there.”
“We’ll work something out.”
“Where am I supposed to sleep?”
He shrugged. “You’ve always landed on your feet.”
Then he shut it.
I stood on my own walkway with a suitcase and a grocery bag of shoes until I heard boots coming across the road behind me.
Elmer Stankovich has lived in the block house opposite ours since before we bought ours.
He walks an old beagle at six every morning and sands chairs in his garage every afternoon with the door up.
Dwight used to say the man had probably never been past the county line.
Elmer never answered that.
He looked at the suitcase. Then at my door.
“You got anywhere tonight?”
“I’ll find a motel.”
“Guest room’s made up.”
“I’m not taking charity.”
“Good,” he said. “I wasn’t offering any.”
His garage smelled like varnish and coffee.
There was a jar of buttons on the workbench, sorted by color, and I have thought about that jar more than anything else in that room.
He set down a house key.
Then a card for a lawyer up the highway.
Then a brown envelope with a clinic’s name in the corner, a clinic four hours away that I had never once called.
“What is this.”
“A second look.”
“I didn’t ask for one.”
“No,” he said. “Take the card, Roberta.”
Then he pulled the shallow drawer open and laid a carbon copy of an order form on top of the envelope.
Dwight’s name was typed across the top of it.
The date was SEVEN YEARS AGO.
I read the line at the bottom twice.
MALE FACTOR.
The floor did something under me.
“He showed me his results,” I said. “They were FINE. He read them out to me in the car in the parking garage.”
“You were shown a page,” Elmer said. “That is not the same as being shown a result.”
Nine years of me apologizing at the kitchen sink.
Nine years of his mother’s paper plate.
And he KNEW.
My hands started going.
“Where did you get this?”
He didn’t answer that one.
He asked me something else instead, and the room got bigger.
“Did he ever tell you why the billing office at your clinic shut down in the middle of your treatment?”
“They moved.”
“No.”
He slid a second page across the bench.
“They were audited.”
“By who?”
“By my office, to start.”
I looked at him. Old man. Flannel. Sawdust up both forearms and a hearing aid.
“You clerked at the courthouse,” I said. “That’s what everybody on this road says.”
“That was the last job with my name on the door.”
He went to the shelf over the vise and took down a frame that has been sitting face-down up there since the day we moved in.
He put it on the workbench. Face-down. Left his hand flat on the back of it.
“Dwight thinks a man stops being anything the day he retires,” he said. “I’d like him to keep thinking that four more months.”
“Why four months?”
Elmer picked a button out of the jar and turned it over with his thumb.
“Because that’s when he finds out WHO SIGNED THE ORDER.”
Lowell Brandt, M.D.
“Who signed it?”
Elmer put the button back in the jar. Then he turned the carbon around on the bench so it faced me and put one finger under the box in the bottom corner.
ORDERING PHYSICIAN.
Typed inside the box: LOWELL BRANDT, M.D.
Over the type, in blue ink that had come through the carbon gray, a signature.
Dr. Brandt. My doctor.
Nine years of sitting on the paper in his exam room in Lima with my shoes on the floor. He had ordered this test on my husband two years in. And every month after that he looked me in the face and talked to me about my follicles.
I picked the page up and held it under the bulb over the vise, like more light was going to change what it said.
The date was written in by hand. 7/17. Both sevens had a little bar through the middle.
“He sat there every month,” I said. “He used to ask about my mother’s hip.”
“Look at the signature.”
I looked. A big looped L. A B with the bottom half left open like a mouth.
“Brandt signs his name like he’s swatting a fly,” Elmer said. “A line and a hook. I’ve seen about four hundred of them. He didn’t write that.”
“Then who did?”
He took the page out of my hand and laid it back on the brown envelope, square, where it had been.
“The state spent two years asking that,” he said. “Nobody in that building ever answered.”
The tin box
Georgette gave me the card the first Christmas after the wedding.
It was a plain index card with blue lines, and the corn thing was on it in her schoolteacher hand. 1 box Jiffy. 1 can creamed corn, 1 can whole kernel, drained. 1 stick Butter. Sour cream. Bake at 375 for 45 min, till the edges pull away.
Down in the corner she had written for my girl, and a big looped G.
“You’re the daughter I ordered,” she said, “and the hospital lost the paperwork.”
Everybody at the table laughed. I did too. I was twenty-eight, and I thought it was the nicest thing anybody had ever said to me in a kitchen.
The card lived in a tin box on top of my refrigerator for eleven years, with my mother’s cards and the ones I’d clipped out of the paper.
Georgette did medical billing for thirty years. The last twenty-two of them were for a company that ran its office out of the back of the third floor of the building where Dr. Brandt practiced. When Dwight and I had gone two years without anything happening, she made one phone call and we were in Brandt’s waiting room the next week.
“Lowell’s the best there is,” she said. “I see everybody’s numbers. Trust me.”
Two years after that, Brandt wanted Dwight tested too. Dwight would rather have had a tooth pulled. He said so at our kitchen table, more than once.
“Leave it to me,” Georgette said. “I’ll get him in and out.”
She did. Two weeks later, in the parking garage under Brandt’s building, level three, she came down the ramp in her work cardigan with her lanyard swinging and an envelope in her hand, and she knocked on the driver’s window with her rings.
“Your results, baby. I pulled them myself.”
Dwight turned on the dome light and read it out loud. Count, normal. Motility, normal. He read every line, even the ones that were only numbers.
Then he hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, twice, and laughed.
Georgette reached in across him and patted my knee.
“Now you go on up, honey,” she said. “They’re waiting on you.”
I went up. That was the month they doubled the shots in my hip.
The billing office closed five years ago, right in the middle of all of it. Georgette told us they’d moved the whole operation to Columbus and she’d taken her retirement rather than drive. There was a sheet cake at the Moose lodge with her name on it in yellow roses.
Last Christmas, when Yvette asked me for the corn thing, I got the tin box down, propped Georgette’s card against the sugar canister, took a picture of it and sent it to her.
Now I was lying on top of the bedspread in Elmer’s guest room with my shoes still on.
The tin box was on my refrigerator, in a house my key didn’t open.
Carol Doyle
Carol Doyle’s office was over a tax preparer on Elida Road, up a flight of stairs that smelled like carpet glue.
She was about sixty, with her reading glasses on a chain, and she already had a letter from Dwight’s attorney printed out when I got there Thursday morning. Elmer had called her Wednesday. I hadn’t asked him to.
“He’s going for dissipation,” she said.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It means he says you spent marital money on yourself and he wants it back.” She turned the page around. “Sixty-four thousand dollars. Nine years of it. He’s got it itemized.”
Every line was a date and a charge from Brandt’s office. At the top, his lawyer had typed a heading.
Wife’s elective fertility treatment.
“Elective,” I said.
“That’s his lawyer’s word.”
“I had a needle in my hip every night for months at a time.”
“I know, hon. That’s why it’s itemized. The account didn’t get emptied by accident. He took what he’s calling his half before you could say a word.”
Eleven dollars. I did the math on the stairs coming up and I did it again in her chair, and it still came out to eleven dollars.
I put the carbon on her desk.
She read it the way people read a bill they’ve already decided not to pay. Then she got to the line at the bottom and took her glasses off.
“Where did this come from?”
“The man across the road.”
He had told me the night before, when I asked him again at the kitchen door. He’d made the copy the week the state boxed up that office. The patient’s name on it was on a mailbox he walked past every morning at six.
“Is he allowed to have it?” Carol said.
“No.”
She put her glasses back on and slid the carbon across the desk to me with one finger.
“Then for now it doesn’t exist,” she said. “The state has the original in a box. In March it comes out of that box at a hearing, and then it’s a record, and I can put it in front of any judge in this county. If I use a copy now, Dwight’s lawyer asks where it came from, a retired investigator gets in trouble, and they spend the whole hearing arguing about the paper instead of reading it.”
“So what do I do until March?”
“You get your clothes. You sign nothing. You don’t show that to anybody.”
She tapped the letter.
“Until March, on paper, you’re a woman who spent sixty-four thousand dollars on herself.”
Forty-one pages
The brown envelope had an appointment letter in it for the following Monday at ten, with a Dr. Nguyen, and a records release already filled out except for my signature.
A note was clipped to the front in square capitals. GAS MONEY IN THE GLOVEBOX OF YOUR SISTER’S CAR.
There was. Eighty dollars, folded once, under the registration.
I signed the release Thursday night and Elmer faxed it from a machine in the corner of his garage that I didn’t know anybody still owned.
I left at five-thirty Monday morning. Four hours. I drove the whole way with the radio off. I always had. Nine years of it, and I couldn’t have told you why.
Dr. Nguyen was younger than me and wore running shoes with her white coat. Brandt’s office had faxed my chart over on Friday. Forty-one pages.
She went through it with me page by page. Year one, every test they ran on me. Normal. Normal. One number a little low, and then normal again the next month. At the top of page two, still in year one, somebody had written unexplained, and after that nobody wrote anything else.
“And nine years of that,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“What about my husband’s?”
She turned pages. She turned them back.
“There’s no partner workup in here.”
“He had one. Year two. July.”
“Not in this chart.”
I didn’t take the carbon out of my purse. Carol had said nobody. I told her what it said instead. MALE FACTOR, at the bottom, typed.
Dr. Nguyen sat back in her chair.
“If that had been in this chart in year two,” she said, “I’d have stopped everything we were doing to you. It’s a different plan. Most of the work happens on his side of the lab. Not in your hip.”
“His girlfriend’s pregnant.”
“Male factor means the numbers are low. Low isn’t none.”
“So it’s his.”
“It could easily be his.”
I looked down at the chart. Year two was page nine. I was thirty-two on page nine.
“Would it have worked,” I said. “For me. Back then.”
She didn’t pretend she couldn’t answer.
“At thirty-two, with his result in front of me? I’d have liked your chances a lot.”
She gave me a copy of all forty-one pages in a manila folder with a rubber band around it.
I pulled into a rest area outside Findlay on the way home and read every page again under the dome light.
Dwight’s name wasn’t on any of them. Not once.
Saturday, two hours
Georgette called Friday while I was in the shower and left a voicemail.
“Honey, I don’t care what that boy is doing, you are still my girl. I want to put first and last down on an apartment for you. Something in Lima, close to Denise. You shouldn’t be sleeping on your sister’s couch at your age.”
I played it four times on the edge of Elmer’s guest bed.
The walk-through was Saturday from ten to twelve, with Dwight’s attorney at my kitchen table the whole time. He was about my age, in loafers with no socks, and he had a legal pad he never wrote on.
Carol couldn’t come. She told me to bring contractor bags and not to talk.
Dwight stayed in the living room with the game on.
There was a camel coat on the hook by the back door that wasn’t mine.
I did the closet first. Then the dresser. Then the bathroom, where somebody had already moved everything of mine into one drawer. I had four bags down the steps and into the hatchback with twenty minutes left.
The tin box wasn’t on the refrigerator.
There was a clean rectangle in the dust up there where it had sat for eleven years.
“Where’s my recipe box?”
Dwight didn’t get up. “Mom packed up the kitchen stuff Thursday.”
“That’s mine. Those are my mother’s cards.”
“She’s keeping it safe.”
The attorney wrote on his legal pad for the first time.
“We can add it to the list,” he said.
“What list?”
“Items in dispute.”
“It’s recipes.”
He wrote that down too.
I called Georgette from the hatchback in my own driveway, with the engine running and the bags piled up past the headrest.
She picked up on the first ring. She was sweet. She was so sorry. She’d only taken the box because she didn’t want it going out with the trash, and of course she’d bring it right over, and was I at Denise’s?
“No,” I said. “Across the road. Elmer’s got a guest room.”
Nothing on the line.
Then: “Elmer Stankovich?”
“You know him?”
“Roberta.” Her voice had changed. It was the one she used on the phone with the gas company. “You pack your things and get out of that man’s house tonight. I’ll pay for a motel. I’ll pay for a week.”
“He’s been nothing but—”
“Honey, that man is not who you think he is.”
Three seventy-five
Elmer was in the garage with the door up and a chair upside down on the bench, sanding the rungs.
I told him what she said. All of it, word for word, standing in the doorway with the cold coming in behind me.
He kept sanding.
“She would say that,” he said.
“How does my mother-in-law know you?”
“Ask her.”
“I’m asking you.”
“And in March I’m going to be sitting in a hearing room,” he said, “answering questions about everything I ever said to anybody about that office. So I’m not saying it to you.”
He blew the dust off the rung.
I sat down on the stool by the vise. The carbon was still on the workbench, in a plastic sleeve now.
She took the box on Thursday. The second she heard his name, the gas company voice. Everything else in that kitchen she would have let Dwight put out on the curb in a bag.
I got my phone out and scrolled back to December. Past Denise and me fighting about who was bringing rolls on Christmas Eve. Past a picture of the beagle asleep on Elmer’s porch that I’d taken from my front step.
December twenty-second. Me to Yvette.
here you go, it’s georgette’s, don’t tell her I gave it out lol
Under it, the picture. Georgette’s card propped against my sugar canister.
I spread two fingers on the screen and made it bigger.
Bake at 375.
The seven had a little bar through the middle.
I made it bigger again, until the ink went soft. 1 stick Butter. The B with the bottom half left open like a mouth.
I put the phone face up on the workbench next to the carbon and moved it until the card and the order were side by side under the bulb.
7/17. 375.
LOWELL BRANDT. Butter.
for my girl. G.
Elmer stopped sanding.
He came over and bent down with both hands on his knees and looked at the phone for a long time.
“Send that to me,” he said. “Nobody else.”
“You knew.”
“I thought,” he said. “That is not the same as knowing.”
He straightened up slowly, one hand on the bench.
“Five women worked in that office. We sat every one of them down and had them write out a page for us. Your mother-in-law printed hers. Block capitals, top to bottom. I never once saw her write a word in her own hand.”
I sent it. The phone made its little noise.
“She brought it down to the car,” I said. “The envelope. He read it with the dome light on.”
“That would be how it went.”
“He hit the steering wheel. He was so happy he hit the steering wheel.”
Elmer didn’t say anything to that.
Across the road, my kitchen light was on. Yvette’s car was in my half of the driveway.
The man in my kitchen had never seen his own result.
The Buick
Georgette came at six the next morning, while Elmer was out with the beagle.
I was in the garage in my coat with a cup of his coffee when her Buick pulled into his driveway. She got out holding my tin box against her chest with both arms, like a casserole.
She didn’t go to the house. She came straight to the open garage door.
“I brought your things,” she said. “I didn’t sleep. I want you to know I didn’t sleep.”
She set the box on the workbench.
I opened it. My mother’s cards were there, in my mother’s order, with the rubber band. The ones from the paper. The pie crust from Dwight’s aunt that nobody ever made. I went through them one at a time, with Georgette standing there and her engine still running in the drive.
The corn card wasn’t in it.
“Where’s the corn thing?”
“Oh, honey.” She waved her hand. “That one’s mine anyway. I wrote it.”
I turned my phone around on the bench so it faced her.
She looked at it. She didn’t bend down the way Elmer had. She didn’t need to.
Then she talked, and I let her.
“He sent that to Columbus. Didn’t he.” She didn’t wait. “You don’t know what you’ve done. You don’t know what those people are like. We didn’t move, Roberta. They came in with boxes. Twenty-two years I sat in that office, and that old man carried my desk out in banker’s boxes, and Lowell stood in the hall and let him. And you want to hand them my handwriting off a recipe card.”
She put one hand flat on the tin box.
“Here’s what happens. Dwight drops the money. Every penny of that list, I’ll see to it tonight. He does what I tell him, he always has. You keep the house. I’ll sign whatever Carol puts in front of me. You delete that, and you go stay at Denise’s, and you let that man have his hearing without you in it.”
“I sent it last night.”
Her mouth stayed open a second.
“Then you call him,” she said. “You tell him it’s a card I gave my son’s wife and it doesn’t mean a thing. And the house is yours today. I’ll drive you up to Lima to sign it myself.”
“No.”
She took her hand off the box.
“Do you know what his father would have called him?” she said. “Do you have any idea what that man was like? A man who couldn’t was nothing in that house. Nothing. I wasn’t going to hand my son that. Not over a piece of paper.”
“It was nine years.”
“You were young. They were shots. Women take shots.”
She was shaking now, just in her hands.
“And what would you have done if I’d told you? You’d have gone. A girl like you. You’d have been out that door and found somebody who could, and he’d have been forty years old with nobody.” She pointed at me with her keys. “I kept you. I kept you for him.”
“You stood at that fish fry and told everybody I wasn’t built for it.”
“People ask, Roberta. They ask and they ask. I had to say something.”
The beagle’s tags came up the driveway before Elmer did.
He stopped at the edge of the garage door with the leash in his hand and looked at the Buick, and then at her.
“Mrs. Kuhn,” he said.
She straightened her coat. “Mr. Stankovich.”
“You’ll want to go on home, Georgette. I have to write down that you came.”
Across the road, my front door opened. Dwight came down the walk in his slippers and his company fleece and crossed without looking either way.
“Mom? It’s six in the morning.”
He looked at his mother. At me. At the tin box with the lid off.
“What’s going on?”
My phone was on the bench between us with the screen still lit. Georgette looked at it. Then at me.
I picked it up and put it in my coat pocket.
“Your mother brought my box back,” I said.
“At six in the morning?”
“Get my door, Dwight,” Georgette said.
Dwight walked his mother to the Buick and held the door for her, the way she taught him.
Room 114
March eleventh. Columbus. The state office building, second floor, a hallway lined with wooden benches that looked like church pews somebody had sawed in half.
That morning, before we left, Elmer turned the frame over on the shelf above the vise. I saw it for the first time. His name, a gold seal, the State of Ohio across the top, a date from before I was born. He left it face up and pulled the garage door down.
He wore a brown suit and the hearing aid and had his reading glasses in his shirt pocket. They called him in at nine.
Georgette went in at ten-thirty with a lawyer from Dayton, her cardigan buttoned to the neck. She walked past me close enough to touch.
Yvette had the baby on the fourth. A girl. Denise showed me a picture on her phone that I hadn’t asked to see.
I live upstairs in a half-double on Auglaize Street now, two blocks from the laundromat. I drive a Corolla with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it that I paid for with my first three checks from the hardware store. The tin box is on top of my refrigerator. The corn card isn’t in it. I made the corn thing for Denise’s birthday off the picture on my phone, and I set the oven to 375.
The week before the hearing, Dwight’s lawyer stopped using the word elective in his letters. Carol said that was how you could tell.
Dwight came up the stairs at a quarter after eleven. They’d subpoenaed him as the patient on the order. He went in without looking at me.
He was in there twenty minutes.
When he came out he sat down on the bench across the hall from mine, with a folder on his knees that he held like he had been carrying it around all week. His feet were pulled in under the bench, crossed at the ankles.
He looked at me.
“They showed me who signed it,” he said.
He waited for me to say something.
I sat down on the other end of his bench and stretched my legs out.
If this one got under your skin, send it to somebody who has spent years being told the problem was them.
For more stories about family drama and unexpected twists, check out what happened when My Mother-in-Law Calls It the Hartig Place. The Mortgage Comes Out of My Account., or the chaos that ensued when My Fiancé Wired $9,400 for His Sister’s Surgery to an Account at My House. You might also be intrigued by the close call in My Sister’s Future In-Laws Were Two Chairs From My Father’s Phone.
