“She’s staying for supper.”
My daughter said it with her coat still on, like the thing was already CLOSED.
Four pork chops in the pan, and behind her a girl in a man’s fleece jacket in eighty-degree heat, canvas sneakers split along one side.
Now we were five.
The girl kept her chin down and her hands up inside the sleeves.
She gave me the girl’s name, Roxanne, and nothing else.
I told her the plates were in the second cabinet.
I cut two chops into four and put more noodles under the gravy, and nobody at that table said ANYTHING about it.
Gordon asked her about the bus route, and Roxanne answered so quietly he leaned halfway across the table.
But she ate.
Slow. Careful. ALL of it.
She drank six glasses of water, and when the freezer clicked on her shoulders came up around her ears.
After she walked home I stood in Annika’s doorway.
“You can’t bring people here. We’re a month behind on the propane.”
“She hasn’t eaten since lunch yesterday,” Annika said.
“She went down on the gym floor at practice again. Her dad’s working NIGHTS and days since the hospital started sending bills. Their power was off in June.”
I sat down on the end of her bed.
I had spent an hour doing arithmetic on pork chops. She had been doing hers on DAYS.
“Bring her back Thursday,” I said.
She came Thursday, and the Thursday after that, and then it was just what happened at six — homework at the counter, noodles, the walk back to the corner on Fairmount before dark.
She never asked for a thing TWICE.
Then her duffel slid off the chair and landed open on the tile, and what came out of it was not schoolbooks.
I picked it up.
And when I understood what that girl had been carrying to school EVERY DAY, my hands stopped working right.
She had gone still in the doorway.
“Roxanne. WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?”
The Tile by the Stove
Four orange bottles came out of the bag and two of them went under the stove.
I got down on the tile. Caps on tight, the pharmacy sticker wrapped halfway around each one, and the name on all four was DENNIS KERSHAW. Oxycodone. Wexford Hospice Pharmacy, with a phone number and a date in July.
Under the bottles there was a spiral notebook, the kind that comes five to a pack in August, and a plastic pill organizer with the days of the week on it, and a toothbrush in a sandwich bag.
No books. No knee pads. No shoes.
I opened the notebook on the floor with the bottles standing in a row against my knee. Dates down the left side. Times next to them. Then a number, and then another number in a second column with a letter beside it.
Tues 2. Keep 4. 6 out.
Annika was at the table with her pencil still in her hand and her mouth open.
“Roxanne. WHERE DID YOU GET THIS?”
She had her shoulder against the doorframe and both hands up in the fleece sleeves, the way she stood in my kitchen the first night, and she did not move toward the bag.
“Can I have it back.”
“Honey.”
“Can I have the bag back, please.”
I stood up with the notebook. She looked at it and not at me, and then she said the thing that kept me awake.
“He said not to open it in anybody’s house.”
Fairmount Street
We moved into the rental in March because the house we had been in sold out from under us in five days.
It is narrow and brown inside and the kitchen is the whole ground floor, near enough. Gordon was forty-three that spring and he took a second route at the warehouse to cover the deposit, which meant he slept from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon with a towel over the window. I went back to the clinic on Saturdays. We were fine, if fine means nobody was calling the house yet.
Then the propane bill came for a month we had already spent, and the clinic cut Saturdays to every other, and the folder of bills on the counter got a rubber band around it because it stopped standing up on its own.
Annika made the volleyball team in August. That is the thing I want on the record before anything else about that summer, because it was the last good news we got for a while and I almost missed it. She came in with the paper and I was on the phone with the propane company and I gave her a thumbs up with the receiver against my ear.
Roxanne came off the late bus with her the first week of practice.
Here is what I knew about the Kershaws before that night. Four blocks over, the gray house with the porch rail missing two spindles. The dad had something bad, cancer or the treatment for cancer, and everybody on that end of Fairmount said the same sentence about him, that he was working himself into the ground for that girl. Nights at the plant and days hauling for a guy with a box truck. My own neighbor said it over the fence with her hand on her chest. That poor man.
The mother left when Roxanne was six. Annika told me that part on the stairs, quietly, like she was handing me something breakable.
The jacket was his. I had that from the second Thursday, because Roxanne said it when I asked if she wanted to hang it up. My dad’s, she said, and then she put her hands back in the sleeves, and I dropped it, because eighty degrees is not a reason to make a kid take off the only thing she is holding on to.
She walked home every time. I offered the car every time. She said the corner was fine.
So the third Thursday I followed her as far as the mailbox with the trash bag in my hand, which is a cowardly way to do it, and I will own that.
There was a maroon Buick under the streetlight at the corner of Fairmount and Dell, idling, not parked. It had been there when she left the house. I know because I had seen it through the window over the sink while I was washing her glass, and I had thought somebody’s husband was waiting on somebody.
The Buick pulled off the curb when she reached it.
Thursdays
By the fifth week she knew where the forks were and she got five down without being asked.
I want to say what she was like, because the bottles have a way of turning a kid into a case, and she was not a case, she was fourteen years old and laughed at my husband’s terrible joke about the box fan every single time he made it.
She counted things. That is the one thing about her I would have told you in week five if you had asked me for something odd. She counted the chops when I put the pan down. She counted the glasses in the dish rack and lined them up rim to rim with about a finger between them. When Gordon got the mail she said out loud how many envelopes he had in his hand, five, not as a question, just flat, and then she went back to her worksheet.
She ate everything on the plate and she never took seconds unless Annika took seconds first.
She asked me what day the trash went out, which I thought was the politest thing a kid had ever asked me, and I said Wednesday, and she said theirs was Tuesday, and the nurse came Tuesdays too, and that was the only time she ever told me a thing about that house without being asked. Darla, she said. Darla comes in the morning and stays forty minutes.
I told her the nurse sounded nice. She said Darla was fine.
She did her homework at the counter standing up. The duffel went on the chair by the back door, every time, the same chair, and I thought that was because she was raised to keep her stuff out of the way.
The ninth of September I came in from the porch and she was at the counter with her back to me and her hand in the pocket of that fleece.
She said she had to go. She hugged Annika, which she had started doing, and she went out to the corner.
I wiped the counter down and found the second plate. Not hers. The one Gordon hadn’t finished, the noodles scraped off it into nothing, and the fork laid across it clean.
And in the pocket of the jacket she had left over the chair back while she washed her hands, what was a sandwich bag of noodles doing folded twice in a pocket that wasn’t hers?
The Corner on Fairmount
I did not say anything about the noodles. I want that understood. I started cooking more and plating less, and the extra went into a plastic container that sat on the counter by the door, and she took it, and neither of us ever once said a word about it.
What I did do was walk her past the corner the next week.
I made it about the dark. The clocks had not changed yet but it was going gray by half past seven, and I said I would walk with her as far as Dell and get my steps in, and she said okay in a way that meant she was counting something again.
The Buick was there. Maroon, four door, a cracked trim strip along the bottom of the passenger door, and a man in it with his elbow out the window. Fifty, maybe. Glasses on a cord.
Roxanne stopped about eight feet short of it and turned around and told me she could go from there.
I stood at the corner of Dell and I did not leave, because some part of me had already decided that evening what I was going to make her do, and she knew it, and she went to the window anyway because she had to.
She took her hand out of the fleece pocket and put something through the window.
He put something back in her hand and she folded it before it cleared the glass. Folded bills fold a certain way in somebody’s fingers. You do not have to see the number.
The Buick went up Dell and Roxanne walked the other way toward the gray house without looking back at me, and I stood there with my arms crossed like an idiot and let her.
Then I went home and did the worst thing I did that whole month.
I called the Kershaws.
He answered on the fourth ring and his voice was a man’s voice who had been asleep for ninety minutes in the middle of a life. I said who I was. I said his daughter ate at our table Thursdays and she was welcome any night of the week, and I said I could bring a bag of groceries by on Saturday, and I got about that far.
“We’re all right,” he said.
“I know you’re working. I’m not saying anything about that.”
“She tell you we weren’t all right?”
“She didn’t tell me anything.”
There was a long stretch where I could hear a television in that house and a chair move.
“I’ll send money with her for the food,” he said. “How much.”
I said I didn’t want money and he said then there’s nothing to talk about, and I said, because I could not help myself, that there was a car at the corner of Dell waiting for her on Thursdays.
The chair moved again.
“Don’t call my house again.”
The First Three Pages
She missed the next Thursday.
Annika came off the late bus alone and would not eat, and at nine o’clock she stood in my kitchen and asked me what I had said to him, and I told her the truth, and she went upstairs and shut the door and the shutting of it went through the whole cheap house.
Roxanne came back the Thursday after that. She came in the same as always. She hugged Annika. She got the plates down, five, second cabinet.
And she kept the duffel on her shoulder through supper.
She ate with the strap across her chest and the bag in her lap, and when Gordon made the joke about the box fan she did the laugh, and I put my hands flat on the counter behind me and made myself wait.
It was nine when she finally set it on the chair by the back door, and she set it wrong, on the curved part where nothing stays, and she went to wash her hands and the bag went off the chair and landed open on the tile.
That is where the caption stops, so here is the rest of it.
After she asked for the bag back I took the notebook to the table and sat down with it under the light, and Annika came and stood against my arm, and Roxanne stayed in the doorway with her shoulder on the frame.
The columns went back to the end of June. Dates, times, and a number, and then the second column with the letter B.
Tues 2. Keep 4. 6 out.
Sat 2. Keep 3. 7 out.
Forty pages of a kid’s handwriting, round and careful, with the letters sitting up straight on the line the way they teach you in fourth grade and most people quit doing by seventh.
Except the first three pages.
Those were in a grown man’s hand. Bigger, slanted hard to the right, pressed in deep enough that I could feel the grooves on the back of the sheet with my thumb. Same three columns. Same letter in the same place. One line at the bottom of the third page, underlined twice: COUNT BEFORE AND AFTER.
On the fourth page the handwriting changed to hers in the middle of a row.
“Roxanne,” I said. “Who wrote this part?”
She came off the doorframe then. She came over and looked at the page from arm’s length, and she put one finger on the grooved writing and did not touch the rest.
“He does the first ones,” she said. “I do the rest.”
The Kershaws’ Kitchen
Gordon drove. Roxanne sat in the back with the duffel zipped on her lap and told me twice that her father had not had his nine o’clock.
The gray house smelled like a hot television and vinegar. There was a hospital bed in the front room where a couch goes and a man in it under a blanket in October with his arms outside it, and Dennis Kershaw weighed about as much as my daughter.
He looked at his kid first and the bag second and us third.
“Go put your bag up,” he said to her, and she went.
Then he talked. I have never in my life had a man talk at me like that. Gordon stood by the door with his hat in his hand and I stood at the end of that bed and Dennis Kershaw talked for eleven minutes without letting either of us get a whole sentence in, and he was not ashamed, and that is the part I was not ready for.
The plant let him go in February. The insurance went with it and the hospital kept sending the same statement with a bigger number on it. The power went off in June for nine days and he said the word nine days three separate times. He said the box truck job was real, it was just finished. He said he got a hundred and sixty a month from the county and the propane alone was ninety.
He said a script for thirty costs him nothing and a man at the corner pays sixty for ten.
“And I don’t drive,” he said. “I can’t get to the end of that porch.”
“So you send your daughter,” I said.
“I send her four blocks.”
“To a car.”
“To Burl, who I have known since ninth grade, who gives her sixty dollars and drives off.” He got himself up on one elbow. “You think I don’t know what she is. I know exactly what she is. She’s the only thing that works in this house.”
Gordon put his hat on the arm of the chair.
“We’ll take the power bill,” he said.
I did not know he was going to say it and I have not let him pay for a thing without being consulted since we were twenty-six years old.
Dennis Kershaw looked at him for a while.
“I’m not taking money off a man who rents.”
“Then don’t call it money. Call it I’ve got a girl who likes yours.”
And here is the second thing I was not ready for. He started to cry, and then he stopped it, and what he said next he said to the ceiling.
“She counts them out in the kitchen so I don’t see her do it.”
I took the notebook out of my coat. I told him I had it, the whole thing, including the three pages he wrote in his own hand with his own pen pressed hard enough to dent the page. I told him Darla came Tuesdays and stayed forty minutes, and that his daughter was the one who told me that, and that I had her number off the pharmacy sticker besides.
He said, very quietly, that they would take her.
“Then the corner is finished,” I said. “Tonight. The bottles live in my hall closet and I bring what’s due twice a day and I count it in front of you. Your kid eats at my table Thursdays and any other day she wants. And if that Buick is at Dell one more time I give Darla the notebook.”
“You’d hand a nurse my handwriting.”
“Yes.”
Roxanne was in the kitchen doorway. I don’t know how long.
He called her over and she came around the foot of the bed and he told her to get the organizer off the shelf and the bottles out of her bag.
He put them in my hands, one at a time.
The Last Week of October
The propane is two months behind now instead of one. We paid the Kershaws’ power and ours is a thing we do a little of each week, and the house sits at sixty-one degrees with the oven door open after supper and a space heater in Annika’s room on a timer so it doesn’t run all night.
Annika did not speak to me for eleven days. She had told that girl nobody in this house would ever tell, and I am the reason that turned out to be a lie, and she is fourteen, and she was right.
She started again on a Tuesday. She came down and asked what was for supper and that was the whole apology, in both directions.
I drive over at eight in the morning and eight at night and I count two into Darla’s organizer with Dennis watching me do it, and some mornings he is asleep and I sit in the chair by the window for a minute before I leave. The county sent a second woman out about a hoist for the bathroom. Nobody has taken anybody.
The duffel lives on the chair by our back door on Thursdays. There are knee pads in it now, and a water bottle, and a math book with the cover curling.
Last Thursday I had four chops in the pan and the freezer clicked on and nobody’s shoulders moved.
Annika came in with her coat still on and Roxanne behind her in the olive fleece, which she still wears, which she is going to wear into the snow.
“She’s staying,” Annika said.
“Second cabinet,” Roxanne said, and she took down five plates.
If this one got to you, pass it to somebody who has a kid on a team and no idea what that kid is carrying home on the bus.
For more tales that tug at the heartstrings, you might appreciate the story of My Grandmother’s Pin Has a Catch That Has Not Worked Since 1961, or perhaps the difficult choices in I Signed the Deed at Eleven and Let Him Drive Home to It, and don’t miss the poignant reflections in I Kept Her March Envelope In My Coat For Five Months And Never Opened It.
