A grown man in a red flannel shirt leaned over a crying nurse at the register and told her she had NO BUSINESS having a baby, and that was the last ordinary errand I ever ran.
I knew his voice before I saw his face.
All I’d gone into the grocery on Pickett Road for was nine-volt batteries. The smoke detector had chirped since Tuesday, and at seventy-one I get in and get out.
She was in front of me in lane four.
Twenty-six, maybe. Blue scrubs creased like she’d slept in a car. A knot of hair that had quit hours ago. Shaking hands setting down the only thing she was buying.
A thirty-one-dollar can of the gentle formula.
Somebody’s toddler two lanes over kept singing the same four notes.
“It didn’t take, hon,” said Bev at the register.
The nurse leaned in. “That can’t be right. I came off a double forty minutes ago. Could you try once more?”
Same flat beep.
Then he came past my cart, a case of beer on his hip. Dwight, my late wife’s sister’s boy, forty-six now.
“You can’t PAY for a baby, you got NO BUSINESS having one,” he said.
Nobody made a sound, but the lane changed, the way a kitchen does when somebody slams a cabinet.
“Some of us put in a day’s work too,” he said to the whole line. “Go find a food pantry.”
She drew her shoulders in.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll put it back.”
Her fingers closing on that can did it. Something I’d kept packed down for fifty years came loose under my ribs.
“Leave it where it is,” I said.
It came out harder than I planned.
I stuck my own card in the reader and tipped my head at Bev. “Ring it up.”
Dwight laughed through his nose. “Here we go. Uncle Walt’s gonna play hero.”
I came out from behind my cart.
Slowly.
My knees quit fast years ago, but they still lock when I plant them.
“Hero?” I said.
You could hear the freezer cases humming.
“I was twenty the first time I rode the back of a fire engine,” I said. “I carried kids younger than her out of houses that were falling in.”
Dwight shifted boots and kept quiet.
“Nobody on that truck asked who could pay,” I said, stepping toward him. “You went in for whoever was in front of you. THAT WAS THE WHOLE DEAL.”
I pointed at the beer.
“Your aunt Irene set a plate for you every Sunday for six years. And this is what you do with it? In PUBLIC?”
His face went the color of his shirt. He looked left, then right.
Every eye in the lane was on him now.
He set the beer on the gum rack and walked out without it.
That was all.
When I looked back at the register, the nurse was crying without a sound.
“Thank you,” she said. “I get paid Friday.”
“Keep your Friday,” I said, and put the receipt in her hand.
Her phone lay face up beside the can and lit with a call.
And the picture on that screen stopped me dead where I stood. ⬇️
The rooster clock
It was Joyce.
My sister-in-law. Irene’s big sister, seventy-three this past spring, standing in her own kitchen with a baby up on her shoulder. The baby had on a yellow sleeper and had most of its fist in its mouth. Over Joyce’s head was the rooster clock Irene bought her at a church rummage sale the year we got married. It has run four minutes fast since the Carter administration.
JOYCE, across the top of the screen. No last name. She didn’t need one.
The nurse had it to her ear before the second buzz.
“I’m here, I’m leaving right now,” she said. “Is he still going?”
He was. I could hear him from where I stood. That thin, winding-up cry that doesn’t stop for breath.
“I got it. Tell him I got it. Ten minutes.”
She hung up and picked the can up off the belt with both hands.
“How do you know Joyce Pruitt?” I said.
She looked at me like she was trying to place me. It didn’t take her long.
“She keeps Hunter when I’m on shift,” she said.
“Who’s Hunter?”
She held the can up a couple of inches. That was her answer.
“How long has Joyce been keeping him?”
“Since he was six weeks old.” She put the receipt and the phone in the side pocket of her scrubs. “You’re Walt. The fireman. She’s got your picture on her refrigerator.”
“From my retirement,” I said. “The one with the sheet cake.”
“That one.”
Bev was holding my batteries in one hand and not ringing them up. The whole lane was still pretending not to listen.
The nurse got as far as the automatic doors. They opened for her and she stood in them, and they started to close on her, and opened again.
“Ask Joyce,” she said. “Please don’t ask Dwight.”
The hall closet
I paid for the batteries and drove home with them on the seat beside me.
Out in the lot a kid was trying to fit a mattress into a hatchback, and his girlfriend had the other end and was laughing too hard to help.
Dwight’s truck was gone.
The house on Alder Street is the one Irene and I bought in 1981. It has one smoke detector, in the hallway ceiling, right outside the hall closet, and it had been chirping every forty seconds since Tuesday. I’d called Dwight Tuesday night. He’d said he would swing by.
He always said that. Most times he did.
That became his job after the funeral. Irene went in February, two winters back, and by April Dwight had a key on his ring and the run of the place. He mowed. He cleaned the gutters. He came twice a year when the clocks changed and climbed my stepladder and put fresh nine-volts in the detector, because a man with my knees has no business on a ladder, and I spent forty years telling people exactly that.
I got the stepladder out of the closet that night and stood it under the chirp.
I looked at it. I put it back.
The coffee can was on the closet shelf where it had always been. A red can, the big size, the lid gone soft from handling. Across the lid in black marker Irene had written DWIGHT.
She started that can when he was a boy. Grocery change. Birthday money from her mother. The loose dollars I’d lose to her at gin rummy on a Friday. She kept an index card folded inside and wrote a running total on it in pencil every time she put something in, the date and the number, and the last line on that card is in her handwriting from the fall she got sick.
6,400.
“That’s for when he gets his feet under him,” she used to say.
He never did, the way she meant it. He married at twenty-nine and it came apart at thirty-eight, and after it came apart he ate at our table every Sunday for six years. Pot roast. Irene’s biscuits. He’d come straight from the tire warehouse out on Route 9, still in his boots, and he’d put his elbows on her good tablecloth, and Irene would set the first plate down in front of him before she set one in front of me.
“Some of us put in a day’s work,” he’d say, and reach for the biscuits.
He said that a lot. Irene laughed every time.
He asked me about the can twice after the funeral. Once at the cemetery, which I held against him, and once in my own kitchen with a glass of my tea in his hand.
“Aunt Irene always said that was mine, Walt.”
“When it’s for something real,” I told him.
He didn’t argue. He mowed the next week like nothing had been said.
Joyce and I kept up Sundays at her place for a while after. Then I stopped going. I couldn’t sit at a table with an empty chair next to me and Joyce passing the rolls across it like it wasn’t there. I told her it was my knees. She let me say it.
So I hadn’t been in Joyce’s kitchen in going on a year and a half. I hadn’t seen that rooster clock. I hadn’t seen any baby.
I stood in the hallway under the chirp with my phone in my hand.
Then I called Joyce, and she picked up on the first ring, like she’d been sitting on it.
Saturday, the stepladder
“I figured it’d be you,” Joyce said.
“There’s a picture of you on a girl’s phone holding a baby,” I said.
“Kayla’s,” she said. “Her name is Kayla, Walt. She’s a nurse at County. She works like a mule.”
“I know what she does. I was behind her in line.”
“I heard.”
In this town that’s all it takes. Forty minutes, and a thing is across it.
“Whose is he, Joyce?”
“He’s a baby,” she said. “I feed him and I change him and I rock him when she’s on nights. It’s a job. She pays me in groceries. Did you eat supper?”
“Joyce.”
“Eat something,” she said, and hung up on me. In fifty years she had never hung up on me.
Dwight came Saturday morning with a box of donuts. He let himself in with his key, the way he always did, and said “Just me!” from the door so I wouldn’t come at him with a bat.
“Heard you got to shouting at the Pickett Road store,” he said, and set the donuts on the counter.
“You got loud first.”
“Yeah, well.” He opened the hall closet and got the stepladder out like it was his. “I know her, okay? That’s the part you don’t know. I took her out twice, last summer. Twice. And now she’s got a kid and she’s telling people it’s mine, and she’s got Mom wrapped up in it, and Mom’s soft, Walt. You know Mom’s soft.”
He climbed up and twisted the detector off the ceiling.
“She’s working the whole family,” he said from up there. “She worked you in about four minutes flat. Thirty-one bucks. Good for her.”
I handed the batteries up to him. He dropped the old one in his shirt pocket.
“Is it yours?” I said.
“No, it’s not mine.” He snapped the cover back on. The chirp was gone, and the house was too quiet without it. “There’s no test, there’s no nothing. There’s her saying so.”
He came down and folded the ladder and stood it back in the closet. His eyes went to the shelf and to the red can on it, for about a second, the way anybody’s eyes go to a thing that’s in front of them.
“You ought to put Aunt Irene’s can in the bank,” he said, and hung my key back on his ring. “Anybody could walk in here.”
Four hundred in a bank envelope
Monday I went to the bank and took out four hundred dollars of my own and had the girl at the window put it in one of their envelopes.
I drove it to Joyce’s.
She came to the door in her housecoat with the baby on her hip.
Hunter was bigger than he’d looked on the phone. Seven months, Joyce said. He had a wet chin and a sock on one foot and no sock on the other, and he stared at me like I owed him money.
“I’m not staying,” I said. “This is for her. For the formula.”
Joyce looked at the envelope a long time before she took it.
The kitchen smelled the way it always did, coffee and Pine-Sol. The rooster clock said ten-twenty. It was ten-sixteen. There was a high chair pulled up where Irene used to sit when she came over to help with the canning, and a blue diaper bag hanging off the chair next to it.
“I’ll give it to her Thursday when she picks him up,” Joyce said. “She gets off days at four.” Then she said, “Walt. Don’t stir this.”
“I’m not stirring anything. I’m buying formula.”
“You’re stirring.” She moved the baby to her other hip. “He’s my only one. You and Irene never had to pick between anybody. I’m asking you.”
“Pick between who?”
She didn’t answer that. She said, “Go home and eat something,” which is what Joyce says instead of everything else.
I went home.
Friday there was an envelope in my mailbox with no stamp on it. The bank’s envelope. My four hundred was in it, all four bills, and folded around them was a sheet torn off a County General notepad.
The handwriting was small and leaned hard to the right, like whoever wrote it was late for something.
Mr. Walt, thank you for Thursday. You didn’t have to do that and I won’t forget it. I can’t take this.
And under that, pressed so hard the pen went through the paper in one spot:
It isn’t yours to pay.
Six thousand four hundred
I did what Dwight told me. That’s the part I can’t get past.
Saturday I got the stepladder out again, not to climb it, just to stand on the first step and reach the back of the shelf without my knees, and I took Irene’s can down to carry it to the bank.
It was lighter than I remembered.
I sat at the kitchen table with it and took the lid off. The index card was on top where she always kept it, folded in half, her pencil going down it year by year. 1989. 1994. 2003. The last line was the fall she got sick.
6,400.
I counted it the way we were taught to count people out of a building. Once fast, once slow. Mostly twenties. Some fifties she’d gotten from I don’t know where. The two-dollar bill her father gave her when she was a girl, still in there, soft as a hankie.
Four thousand.
I counted it again and it was still four thousand.
I sat there with the money in piles on the table and went through who’d been in that closet. Me. The man from the gas company reads the meter from the side yard and never comes in. Joyce hadn’t set foot in this house since the lunch after the funeral.
And Dwight. Every spring and every fall, and whenever the detector chirped, and whenever he felt like dropping by with donuts. A key on his ring. The closet door right there at the foot of the ladder.
Anybody could walk in here.
I called him. It rang out and went to his voicemail, and I listened to the whole greeting and hung up without saying a word.
I sat there a while longer.
Then I put the money back in the can and the card back on top of it and the lid back on, and I put the can in a paper grocery sack, and I didn’t put it back on the shelf. I kept it in the front seat of my car, locked, for five days. I checked on it twice a night like it was a pilot light.
Thursday at four o’clock I was on Joyce’s porch with the can under my arm.
Thursday, four-fifteen
Joyce opened the door and looked at the grocery sack and knew what was in it. She’d seen that can on Irene’s shelf for forty years.
She let me in without a word and went back to her sink.
I set the can on her kitchen table next to the high chair. Hunter was in it, working on a cracker and getting most of it on the tray.
Kayla came in at four-fifteen by the rooster clock, which meant four-eleven. Same scrubs, or another set just like them. She had her keys in her hand and her mouth open to say something to Joyce, and then she saw me and closed it.
“I’m not here to give you anything,” I said.
She looked at the can. DWIGHT, in Irene’s marker, big enough to read across the room.
“I got your note,” I said. “You wrote it isn’t mine to pay.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then whose is it?”
Kayla looked at Joyce’s back. Joyce kept washing the same cup.
Kayla put her keys down. She unzipped the side pocket of the blue diaper bag and took out a paper folded in thirds, and she opened it flat on the table and turned it around so it was right side up for me.
A check. A copy of one, with the bank’s notice stapled to the corner.
Pay to the order of Kayla Doyle. Four hundred and no/100. Dated the first of September. In the memo line, one letter: H.
Stamped across it in red: RETURNED. INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. The notice underneath said thirty-five dollars, charged to her account on the Thursday I stood behind her in lane four.
The signature I knew. I’d seen it on the bottom of every Christmas card that came to Alder Street for thirty years.
Dwight Pruitt. The big loopy D he’d been doing since the fourth grade.
“The first of every month,” Kayla said. “Since March. Every one cleared till this one.”
“Since March,” I said.
“I put it in that Tuesday before my shift. Nobody told me it came back.” She pressed the fee notice flat with two fingers. “I found out at the register.”
That can’t be right, she’d said to Bev. Could you try once more.
I did the arithmetic on my fingers under the table, like I was nine years old. March. April. May. June. July. August. Six of them. Four hundred apiece.
The can on the table between us was twenty-four hundred light.
Joyce turned the water off.
“He said he’d take care of it himself if I kept his name out of it,” Kayla said. “So I kept his name out of it. I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t say a word in that store with him standing right there.” She looked at the baby. “All I wanted was the can of formula.”
Hunter threw his cracker on the floor.
“Does he still come for Sunday dinner?” I said.
Joyce dried her hands on the dish towel, one finger at a time.
“He comes Sunday,” Joyce said. “One o’clock.”
One o’clock Sunday
I got there at noon. I hadn’t sat at Joyce’s table on a Sunday since the spring after the funeral. She’d set four places and pulled the high chair up to the corner.
Kayla came at twelve-thirty with Hunter and a store-bought pie she apologized for twice.
The can sat in the middle of the table between the pot roast and the rolls, lid on, DWIGHT facing the kitchen door.
He let himself in at five after one. He had a key to Joyce’s too.
“Just me,” he said, and came around the corner, and stopped.
He looked at Kayla. He looked at the baby. He looked at the can.
“Well, this is nice,” he said. “This is real nice, Mom. You want to tell me what this is?”
Joyce passed me the rolls.
I put the check on the table next to the can and turned it right side up for him.
Dwight didn’t pick it up. He didn’t have to.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. So one bounced. One. I’m a day late, I’m a week late, and she runs to the whole family? That’s what she does, Walt. I told you. That’s exactly what I told you Saturday.” He pointed at Kayla the way he had in lane four, finger out, arm straight. “Six months I paid you. Six months, never missed, out of my own pocket, and I never once hear thank you. I hear you crying to my mother. Crying to my uncle. Crying to Bev at the checkout.”
“You told me it wasn’t yours,” I said.
“I said there’s no test.”
“You wrote H on six checks.”
He laughed through his nose, the way he had at the register. “So I’m a nice guy. Sue me.”
I took the lid off the can. I laid Irene’s index card on top of the check, with 6,400 looking up at him in her pencil.
He looked at it a long time.
“That was mine,” he said. “That was always mine. She wrote my name on it. Everybody at that table knew it was mine. I was taking what was mine, Walt, and I was spending it on the kid. On the kid. What do you want me to say? I should’ve let it sit in your closet till you died? You’d have put it in the collection plate.”
Nobody said anything. Hunter banged his spoon on the tray.
“I’ve got a job,” Dwight said. “I work. Some of us actually get up in the morning and—”
“What job, Dwight?” Joyce said.
She hadn’t raised her voice. She was cutting Hunter’s roast into pieces the size of a fingernail.
“Mom.”
“The warehouse let you go in May,” Joyce said. “You think I don’t talk to Pam Kowalski? Her Greg runs that loading dock. I’ve made your truck payment since June.” She put the knife down. “Sit down or go home. Those are the two things.”
Dwight stood there in his flannel with both hands open.
“You too?” he said to her. “You’re gonna do this in front of her?”
“She’s been in front of me every Thursday since he was six weeks old,” Joyce said.
I pushed the can across the tablecloth to Kayla.
She put both hands up. “I told you, I can’t take your money.”
“It’s got his name on it,” I said. “It’s his. He’s paying you.”
Kayla looked at the lid for a while. Then she put her hand flat on top of it and left it there.
“That’s my money,” Dwight said. “That’s MY money, Walt.”
“It is,” I said. “You’re spending it.”
I held out my hand, palm up, over the pot roast.
He knew what for. He’d been up my stepladder forty times. He worked the key off his ring with his thumbnail, the ring fighting him, biting into the pad of his thumb, and when it came loose he dropped it on the tablecloth next to Irene’s card.
“Good luck with your ladder,” he said.
He went out the way he came. The screen door banged twice behind him.
Lane four
The detector in my hallway chirped again the second week of October. It does that when the furnace kicks on.
I got the stepladder out myself. It took me the better part of twenty minutes. One step, stop, the next step, both hands on the top rail and my knees locking like they do. I had my phone in my shirt pocket with 911 punched in and not dialed, which is a thing I used to tell old men to do. I got the nine-volt in. I came down.
Then I sat on the bottom step a while.
The neighbor boy mows now. Twenty dollars a yard, and he misses the strip along the fence.
Kayla left the can at Joyce’s. On the first of the month Joyce counts four hundred out of it at the kitchen table and writes the new number on Irene’s card, in pen, under Irene’s last line. The column goes down. By summer there won’t be anything left in it but the two-dollar bill.
Nobody has said Dwight’s name at that table since. Joyce stopped making the truck payment, and the truck went back to the dealer the last week of September. He’s got an apartment over the laundromat on Fourth. I hear that from Joyce, and she hears it from Pam.
I go Sundays again. Joyce sets four plates. The fourth one is Kayla’s when she’s off. When she’s on shift it’s nobody’s, and Joyce puts it out anyway.
The Thursday before Halloween I was in the grocery on Pickett Road for nine-volts, because the one I’d put up on the ladder was the last in the pack.
Lane four. Bev.
I put the batteries on the belt and a can of the gentle formula behind them, for Joyce’s pantry shelf, because Thursdays run long.
Bev looked at the can and then at me and didn’t say a word about it. I put my card in the reader. It beeped once, the short one.
“It took, hon,” Bev said.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still keeps a can of change on a closet shelf with a name on the lid.
For more unsettling tales, check out I Heard Ticking Under a Sheet in a Dead Woman’s Cellar or read about a different kind of tension in My Husband Stuck Eleven Yellow Flags on the Refinance. I Signed Every One.. You might also find yourself on edge with On Friday He Decides Whether I Keep Operating in This Hospital.
