The lender rang my desk at nine-fifteen to say the loan in my name was three payments from finished.
I made her say it twice, because NINE YEARS were folded up inside that loan and I had never read as far as the last page.
“Seventy-two months,” she said. “It closes after Christmas.”
“Just three?” I said.
“Just three.”
I’d signed it in the lot outside a medical supply store, bent over the warm hood of my own car, while Keith held the glass door open with his boot.
We were four years married. An index card of baby names sat in the junk drawer by the phone.
“She’s got us, Denise. We’re all she’s got,” Keith said that year.
“I know,” I said, and I did know.
His mother, Norma, slipped on the church steps in Monmouth after an ice storm, and the woman they brought home was somebody else.
A broken hip. A nerve in her left leg that quit answering. A surgeon saying permanent before she was off the stretcher.
We turned the back porch into a bedroom and moved her bed out there.
I dropped to three days a week at the water department so I could drive her to therapy.
Every weekend I loaded her pills into a plastic tray at the kitchen table and set it beside her coffee.
I walked her across that linoleum by the elbow for nine years.
A person’s weight on your arm turns into something you stop feeling, like a watch.
The index card of names ended up under the batteries and the rubber bands.
Keith’s aunts used the word saint at every visitation, loud enough for the next pew.
I didn’t feel like one. Mostly I felt like whoever was up first.
The power chair came in year three, because the walker wasn’t enough, and the lender wanted a signature with a steady paycheck under it.
Keith’s credit was a mess. Mine wasn’t.
It went in my name.
“It’s paperwork, hon,” he said.
Norma reached over and patted my hand. “The daughter I never got,” she said.
A hundred and fifty-three dollars came out of my check for it every month, on the fifth.
She had good weeks. She had a lot more bad ones.
I learned to hear her moan in the hallway from the far end of the house.
I got up with her twice a night and never once asked Keith to take a turn.
Keith mowed twice a month and called that his share.
Last week the joystick on the chair worked loose, so I rolled it up the ramp into my van and took it to a repair shop two towns east.
A radio behind the counter was playing a ballgame nobody was listening to.
The kid who fixed it took half an hour, printed a ticket, and tapped a number near the bottom.
“Motor hours,” he said. “Thirty-one.”
“That meter’s broken,” I said. “She’s in that chair all day.”
“Meter’s fine,” he said, and handed me the pen.
Sixty-two dollars, parts and labor. I stuck the ticket in my coat, went on to work, and forgot it.
Around eleven-fifty my hand went into that pocket after a pen and came out with the ticket.
I thought about the lender, and my signature on a loan Keith had never read. Then I thought about thirty-one hours.
I swung the van back around by the water tower.
I was only going to leave that ticket on the kitchen table for Keith and ask him to read it with me.
That was the whole plan.
Inside it was quiet, and quiet was wrong, because her TV in the back room runs from breakfast to supper.
Her lunch was still under the plastic wrap on the counter.
I stayed in the front hall, keys bunched in my fist.
Then the ceiling creaked.
It wasn’t the drag. It wasn’t one foot, a rest, and then the other.
Footsteps.
Fast ones. Coming down two at a time.
I slid into the porch doorway before I knew I’d moved.
And Norma came down those stairs.
She kept no hand on the rail. She didn’t stop at the landing. She didn’t make ONE SOUND.
She looked TWENTY-FIVE YEARS YOUNGER, easy, nothing like the woman I’d been hauling out of the tub since I was thirty-five.
Her hair was loose around her shoulders and she was HUMMING.
She was wearing shoes. Real ones, with a little heel.
And a step behind her, grinning at whatever she’d just told him, came a man I had NEVER LAID EYES ON.
He had a pie box balanced on three grocery bags hooked over one arm.
The Bottom Step
Norma saw me with three steps still to go.
She didn’t reach for the rail. She stopped and looked at me the way she looks at a pan somebody put away wet.
“Well,” she said. “You’re early.”
The man behind her nearly walked into her shoulder. He said sorry, Norm, and then he saw me too.
“Denise, this is Glen Hobart,” she said. “From the Methodist. He runs the griddle at the men’s breakfast.”
He was somewhere in his seventies, in a golf jacket with the zipper pull gone. He started to put out a hand and remembered what was in it.
The grocery bags on his arm were full of my freezer.
I could see it through the plastic. My handwriting on masking tape. Chili, the second of the month. Ham and bean. A two-pound pack of ground chuck with the store sticker still on.
The pie box on top held the cherry pie I’d bought for Keith’s aunt Vera’s birthday and put up in the chest freezer in the spare room until the party.
“Nice to meet you,” Glen said.
I didn’t say anything back.
“She does for me,” Norma told him, the way you’d explain a lamp.
Glen lowered the bags onto the hall runner very carefully, like something he had just found out he shouldn’t be carrying.
Then Norma walked past me into the porch.
Her heels crossed the linoleum I’d walked her over for nine years, every step as long as the one before it.
She turned around beside the power chair and let herself down into it one armrest at a time. The joystick I’d spent sixty-two dollars on sat right under her fingers.
“Don’t you tell Keith about the stairs,” she said. “He worries.”
“He does,” I said.
Glen found his car keys in his jacket. He left the bags where they were.
“I’ll see you next week, Norma,” he said, and let himself out the front.
Next week.
He said it like a man with a standing appointment.
Sherry’s Form
That morning, after the lender hung up, I had called her back.
Her name was Sherry. She had the patient voice of somebody who reads account numbers out loud all day long.
“If I pay off the last three now,” I said, “what does that come to?”
“Four fifty-nine even.”
“And the title’s in my name?”
“You’re the owner of record, yes.”
“I want to put it in my mother-in-law’s name. As a Christmas present.”
Sherry was quiet a second. Then she said it was the sweetest thing she’d heard all week, and she’d email me a payoff letter and a transfer request. I’d fill in the new owner, send it back with the payment, and she’d take it from there.
I printed both at the water department on the good printer by the supervisor’s desk. I read every line this time.
Seventy-two payments of a hundred and fifty-three dollars. The total at the bottom came to eleven thousand and sixteen.
I had never once added it up. I think I didn’t want to know.
I left the new owner’s line blank. I folded both pages into a Christmas card with a cardinal on the front and put the card in my purse. I was going to hand it to her Christmas morning, after the cinnamon rolls, so she’d never again have to think of that chair as something she was borrowing from me.
I was forty-four. I’d been careful with money since the year I turned thirty-five and dropped to three days. You get careful when half a paycheck goes away and nobody makes it up.
The grocery bill was the one I watched hardest.
It had run about a hundred and forty a week when Norma moved onto the porch. Over the last couple of years it had crept up closer to a hundred and ninety. I’d started clipping coupons again at the kitchen table after supper. I blamed the prices, same as everybody in line at the store.
I’d stopped buying the good coffee. I’d stopped buying pie, except for birthdays.
The repair shop was on my mind that morning too. When the kid handed me the pen, he’d said something I let go right past me.
His name was Wes. It was stitched on his shirt pocket.
“If she ever quits needing it, bring it back,” he said. “We buy the clean ones. Thirty-one hours, I’d give you twenty-four hundred for it today.”
“She’s always going to need it,” I said.
He shrugged and turned the ballgame up.
I drove to work with the ticket in my pocket and the card with the cardinal on the seat beside me.
I had planned the nicest thing I ever did for anybody between two water bills.
The Card Table Upstairs
Norma put her TV on. The game show with the wheel, loud.
I left Glen’s bags on the runner and went up the stairs myself.
I hadn’t been up there since the weekend. The spare room at the end of the hall was where everything went when the porch became hers. The chest freezer. Paper towels by the case. My mother’s sewing machine under a bedsheet.
The freezer lid was open about an inch, propped on a folded dish rag so it wouldn’t seal and click.
Half the wire baskets were empty.
The card table from the hall closet was set up by the window, with the two good chairs from the dining room pulled up to it.
Coffee mugs, a pair. A saucer with pie crumbs on it. Drugstore reading glasses folded on the sill. The deck of cards from the buffet drawer, squared up and waiting.
On the chair nearest the window was the flat cushion off the porch sofa, the one I’d been meaning to replace because she said it hurt her hip.
The window looks out past the clothesline to the driveway and the road. From that chair you can see a car turn in a full minute before it gets to the house.
I worked three days a week, eight to four-thirty. The rest of the week I was in this house from the minute she woke up until she was asleep.
The mugs had dried coffee rings in the bottom, one inside another, more of them than I wanted to count.
I stood where she must have stood to watch for my van.
Downstairs the wheel on the TV clicked around and a woman screamed about what she’d won.
I went back down and called Keith at the implement dealer.
“Come home,” I said.
“Is it Mom? Is she down?”
“Come home, Keith.”
He didn’t ask me anything else.
Keith’s Truck In The Drive
He was home in eleven minutes. The dealer is a fifteen-minute drive.
He came in the front and saw the bags on the runner and the pie box sitting on top. He didn’t look surprised. He looked tired. Then he looked up the stairs.
“Hon,” he said.
“How long,” I said.
He went to the porch first. I heard him say her name and her say his, and the TV went down a notch.
When he came back he stood by the coat hooks with his hands in his back pockets, the way he stands at the parts counter when the part isn’t in.
“She’s been better a while,” he said.
“How long a while.”
“Years, hon. Since about when the chair came.” He looked at the bags instead of me. “It comes and goes. She’s got bad days.”
“Glen,” I said.
“Glen’s been good to her. He drives her to lunch sometimes. It gets her out of the house.”
“Out of my freezer,” I said.
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“I saw her on the stairs once, from the yard,” he said. “The second summer. I figured she’d tell you when she was ready.”
“The aunts,” I said.
He took a long time.
“Everybody kind of knew. She plays pinochle in the church basement on your workdays with half of them.”
I thought about every visitation. Vera and Bonnie at the guest book, patting my arm, saying saint to whoever was nearest. How loud they always said it.
“We figured you liked it,” Keith said. “You’re so good at it. Mom always said you’d be lost without somebody to do for.”
“And the chair,” I said.
“It was already bought, Denise. Was I supposed to send it back?”
He looked at the ceiling like the answer was up there with the card table.
“It’s a small church,” he said.
The Cardinal Card
The porch smelled like her hand lotion and the space heater.
Norma had the remote in her lap and her heels crossed at the ankle on the footrest of my chair.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said, in the voice she uses across a fellowship hall. “It’s hamburger and a pie. Look at the two of you.”
Keith stood in the doorway and studied the thermostat.
“A girl from the agency gets fifteen dollars an hour to sit with somebody,” Norma said. “Fifteen. I asked. And she goes home at night to nobody. Denise got a roof and a family and a reason to get up in the morning.”
She turned the remote over in her hands.
“And who else was ever going to need her? She wasn’t rocking any babies.”
Keith kept his eyes on the thermostat.
The wheel on the TV clicked around and landed on something.
I went out to my van.
I sat behind the wheel with the engine off and my purse on my knees. I took out the card with the cardinal and slid the two pages out of it. The payoff letter. The transfer request, with its blank line for the new owner.
I’d practiced her name on a notepad at lunch so it would look nice when I wrote it in.
I called the lender. Sherry picked up.
“Denise Lindgren,” I said. “The payoff from this morning.”
“Oh, good, I’ve got you right here. Are you sending the transfer over?”
“Cancel it,” I said.
I heard her keys stop.
“The transfer?”
“The transfer. I’m paying the four fifty-nine today, on my card, right now. The title stays with me.”
“With you,” she said, and started typing again.
“With me.”
She read me a confirmation number, and I wrote it on the back of the cardinal.
Then I dug the repair ticket out of my coat and called the number printed across the top.
Wes answered with the ballgame going behind him.
“Is that twenty-four hundred still good?” I said.
“For the thirty-one-hour one? Sure is.”
“Can you pick it up today?”
“I could be out there around four.”
“Come at four,” I said.
I went back inside to tell Norma she had until four o’clock in that chair.
The Van At Ten To Four
Norma had three hours, and she used them.
“You cannot sell a woman’s chair out from under her,” she said. “I’ll call the pastor. Wait till Vera hears about this.”
“Call her,” I said.
“Keith. Are you going to just stand there? Your father would have had something to say to her.”
Keith said, “Mom.” Then he turned to me and said, “Denise, come on. Where’s she supposed to sit?”
“Wherever she likes,” I said.
Norma turned the TV off so we could hear her better.
“I let you do for me,” she said. “I let you, because you needed it. You’d have gone right out of your mind in this house with nobody to fuss over. I watched you with that pill tray every weekend. I thought, well, that’s her baby, then.”
She smoothed the quilt over her knees.
“I am seventy-four years old. I have good days. I’m not getting down on my knees to apologize for a good day to a woman who counts hamburger.”
“And Glen is none of your business. Glen is the only person in this whole town who asks me how I am and waits to hear it.”
“Keith, you tell her what she’d be without us. Go on. Tell her.”
Keith didn’t tell me anything. He went out to the garage and stayed there.
The van came up the drive at ten to four.
Wes and another boy in a gray sweatshirt let the ramp down and came to the porch with a dolly they didn’t need.
When they walked in, Norma stood up.
She got up out of that chair without touching either armrest, in her heels, and stepped back from it with her arms folded. I don’t think she knew she’d done it until she saw Wes look at her feet.
He looked at me after that. He didn’t say one word about it.
He sat down in the chair himself and drove it out the front and up the ramp with the joystick.
He wrote the check leaning on the hood of the van. Twenty-two hundred, not twenty-four, because I wanted it gone today and he’d had to come out. I signed the back of it on the same hood.
Glen’s car pulled in behind the van while the ramp was still folding up. Norma had called him from the porch phone the minute Keith went to the garage.
She came out the front with her purse and her good wool coat over her arm. Glen came up the walk to help her down the steps. She didn’t take his arm.
The grocery bags were still sitting on the runner.
“They’re already packed,” I said, and handed them to him.
He took them. He took the pie too, and Norma held out her hands for it through the car window.
The van went one way at the end of the road, and Glen’s car went the other.
The pie box rode off on her lap.
The Junk Drawer By The Phone
Keith drove her pill tray over to Glen’s after supper.
I’d filled it the weekend before, like always. It still had the rest of the week in it.
It cost me four hundred and fifty-nine dollars and the only Christmas present I’d planned in nine years. The cardinal card went into the trash under the coffee grounds.
The next morning I called my supervisor at the water department before she’d hung up her coat and asked if the full-time desk by the window was still open.
It was. I start on the first.
That evening the smoke alarm in the hall started chirping, the way they do, and I went to the junk drawer by the phone for a nine-volt.
The index card was under the rubber bands, soft at the corners. Keith’s handwriting down one side, mine down the other.
I read the names. I had never said any of them out loud to anybody.
I put the battery in the alarm. I put the card back in the drawer, on top this time.
Then I went upstairs. Keith came up behind me without being asked. He folded the card table, tucked the two dining chairs under his arms one at a time, and carried everything down.
I emptied the saucer. I washed the two mugs and put them in the cupboard with the rest.
I pulled the bedsheet off my mother’s sewing machine.
The window still looks out over the clothesline and the drive and the road. You can see a full minute of it before anybody gets to the house.
I turned the chair around and sat down at the machine with my back to it.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s been doing for someone else a lot longer than anybody’s noticed.
For more stories about the people who shape our lives, check out Thirty-Five Afternoons She Practiced For Him, And He Took Her Microphone and The Test Was Still Damp When My Husband Demanded A Name, or read about Arlene and her frosting school bus.
