“Use the GOOD PLATES, and for once don’t make it a production,” Everett said.
He had been chasing this promotion for nineteen months, and Sunday was the night it got decided.
I roasted a chicken, ironed my mother’s tablecloth, and put on the navy dress he likes.
Fifty-four years old, twenty-nine years married, and still being briefed like HIRED HELP.
The jokes had started in our own kitchen the winter before.
“Watch out, everybody, she’s about to combust.”
He said it in front of my sister, and my sister laughed too.
Then he took them outdoors. His brother’s cookout. The church lot in Kewanee. The line at the bank.
I got good at LAUGHING at eight and crying at eleven.
That was the arrangement.
Roland came at six thirty with wine and a soft leather bag he set down against the sideboard.
Everett got louder with every course. He corrected my dates. He finished my sentences while I passed the beans, and twice he answered a question somebody had asked me.
I stood up once and brought the thermostat down TWO DEGREES.
“Sorry about her,” Everett said. “Her wiring’s going. It’s a whole THING with women that age.”
Roland set his fork down and left it there.
My husband kept going.
I cleared the plates before dessert and ran the tap loud enough to fill the kitchen.
When the taillights turned at the corner, Everett was GLOWING.
He told me it was the best night of his career and asked me twice whether I had noticed the handshake at the door.
I went to bed in the dress with my earrings still in.
At ten past seven the house phone rang, the one NOBODY calls anymore.
I picked it up.
“It’s Roland,” he said. “Don’t say my name where he can hear you, Marguerite.”
Something went cold along the backs of my hands.
“I left that bag under your sideboard on purpose,” he said. “It was running the whole meal.”
He waited while a truck went past on his end.
“I’m not going to tell you what’s on it,” he said. “I want you to hear it yourself, and then I want THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE I DO ANYTHING WITH IT.”
The house phone
“Look under the sideboard,” Roland said. “Not against it. Under.”
My mother had that phone put in with a long cord in 1988 so she could stir and talk at the same time. It reaches the dining room if you pull. I pulled it tight across the doorway and got down on my knees in the navy dress.
The bag was pushed back past the front legs, where the vacuum doesn’t go.
I dragged it out onto the rug.
Under a folded map of Henry County and a tin of mints was a silver recorder the size of a deck of cards. The screen still had a number on it. 2:51:07.
“It’s here,” I said.
“Good. At two o’clock this afternoon your husband is in my office to sign for the Galesburg store. I hand him the keys, I shake his hand, the whole floor claps.” He stopped. “What you hear on that decides whether I do.”
Upstairs the shower shut off. The pipes knocked twice in the wall behind the stove.
“He’s out,” I said.
“Then I’ll be quick. Don’t play it with him in the house. The speaker’s small but it’s loud.”
I held the recorder flat against my stomach.
“Thursday he came into my office and shut the door,” Roland said. “He wanted a favor.”
Over my head a drawer opened and closed. Everett was looking for his brown belt.
“What kind of favor?”
“He asked me to put my name under yours on something,” Roland said. “Listen first.”
The cedar box
The deed to this house lives in a cedar box on the top shelf of the hall closet, under my mother’s church gloves.
My parents bought the place in 1971 for nineteen thousand five hundred dollars. My father died in 1994. Everett and I moved in with my mother in 2009, when her kidneys started going, because somebody had to drive her to dialysis in Peoria three days a week and it wasn’t going to be Pam.
In April of 2011 she had a lawyer from Cambridge come out to the kitchen table. She was down to ninety-some pounds and she had the tablecloth out anyway, the white one with the blue edge.
The lawyer turned the papers around to face me.
“Your name,” my mother said. “BY ITSELF.”
Everett was in the yard with the mower. He came in for a glass of water in time to hear that last part, and he put his hand on his chest.
“Shirley thinks I’m after the silverware.”
The lawyer laughed. I laughed. My mother looked at him until he took his water back outside, and then she tapped the line where I was supposed to sign.
She died in June. The deed went into the cedar box under her gloves, and I didn’t think about it for a long time.
Everett was the funniest man at every cookout in the county. He had been the inside man at Doyle Implement for eleven years, and he could sell a grain cart to a man with no grain, and the man would thank him for the joke on his way out. In 2016 he and his brother put a new roof on this house over two weekends and a case of Busch Light, and he brought up that roof at every party for ten years.
“I put a roof on my mother-in-law’s house,” he’d say. “Now I can’t get out from under it.”
The jokes about me came later.
When Roland’s wife Joyce died last March, I made a lasagna for the visitation. In the parking lot of the funeral home Everett told two men from the parts counter that I got hot flashes in the walk-in cooler. Roland was coming out the side door with his coat over his arm.
He was the only one who didn’t laugh.
In May I went to Dr. Kowalski about the sweating and the sleep. Everett came into the exam room with me, which he had never once done for anything, and sat in the chair meant for my purse.
“Tell him about the stove,” he said.
“It was one burner, on low, for ten minutes.”
“And the anniversary.”
“I didn’t forget our anniversary. I had the date off by a day.”
Dr. Kowalski typed. In the parking lot Everett squeezed the back of my neck and said somebody had to look out for me, and then he drove me to the Hy-Vee and waited in the car.
I was at the kitchen table with the recorder in my pocket.
Everett came down the stairs knotting his tie.
The Galesburg store
He kissed the top of my head. He smelled like the cologne he wears to funerals and closings.
“You look like you slept in that,” he said.
“I did.”
He laughed like I had made a joke, and poured his coffee.
“Did you see the handshake? Two hands. The old man doesn’t do two hands.”
That made three times.
Then he told me about the store. A lot on the east side of Galesburg. Twelve people. His name on the door. Roland makes his managers own fifteen percent of whatever they run, because the old man says a man takes better care of what he paid for.
“A hundred and sixty thousand,” Everett said. “That’s my fifteen percent.”
“We don’t have a hundred and sixty thousand.”
“That’s what the bank’s for.” He pointed at the top of the refrigerator with his cup. “The folder up there. Collateral stuff. Don’t sign it here. TWO O’CLOCK, you come down to the dealership, Tammy notarizes it, Roland witnesses it for us. Pam’s coming too.”
Tammy does the titles at Doyle’s. She has done every title out there since the first Bush.
“Why is Pam coming?”
“To keep you company. You get nervous with papers.” He finished the coffee standing up and put the cup in the sink without rinsing it. “Wear the navy again. Roland liked it.”
He went into the dining room for his keys, and I heard him stop.
Roland’s bag was on the rug where I had left it.
“Old man forgot his bag.” He picked it up by the handles and bounced it once. “I’ll run it in to him. That’s a free point.”
He didn’t open it.
I stood in the kitchen doorway with my hand over my pocket until the front door shut behind him.
Then I went and stood at the thermostat.
Seventy-four, where I had put it at dinner. Sunday afternoon at four o’clock, when I came in from hanging the tablecloth out to air, it had said seventy-six. I had stood right there with the clothespins in my apron and decided I must have bumped it with the laundry basket.
I hadn’t carried the laundry basket past it all day.
The house phone rang before his car was off our street.
“How are you feeling?” Pam said.
“Fine.”
“Everett called me last night. Eleven o’clock. He said you had one of your spells at the table. Forgot the man’s wife’s name.”
“Joyce. I made her a lasagna.”
“He’s worried, honey. He says you sweat through your clothes and cry at the sink.” She let that sit on the line. “Maybe let him handle the bank stuff for a while. That’s all he wants. That’s all anybody wants for you.”
“I was running the water.”
“He said you’d say that.”
Yellow flags
The folder was on top of the refrigerator, next to the church calendar that has said March of 2019 for seven years because I like the picture of the barn.
It was thick. The yellow sign-here flags stuck out the side of it in a row.
I read the whole thing, which he had told me not to do.
The first thing in it was an application for a home equity line of credit from the bank on Tremont. One hundred sixty thousand dollars. Purpose of the loan: business investment. The property address was this house. Under owner of record somebody had typed my full name, and beside the borrower line there was a flag.
The second thing was four pages long.
ILLINOIS STATUTORY SHORT FORM POWER OF ATTORNEY FOR PROPERTY.
My name was typed in as the principal. Everett’s was typed in as the agent. Down the left side ran the list of what he could do with my name once I signed it. Real estate transactions. Borrowing. Banking. There were others I didn’t know the words for. Each one had a little box for my initials, and EVERY box had its own yellow flag.
The date at the top was already typed in. It was today.
At the bottom of the last page was one line for a witness.
In pencil, light, the way you write something you expect to go over in ink, it said Roland Doyle.
Under that was a line for the notary, with Tammy’s name typed in.
I sat down on the step stool by the refrigerator.
Stapled to the back of the power of attorney was a page I had never seen. A visit summary from Dr. Kowalski’s office, printed off the computer, dated May 14.
Spouse reports increased forgetfulness, misplaced items, repeated questions. Patient attributes symptoms to hot flashes and poor sleep.
I have never logged in to that portal. I don’t know the password. I didn’t know there was a portal.
Up in the corner of the page, where it prints whose account it is, it said Everett.
Minute forty-one
My mother’s tablecloth was still on the dining table, with a gravy spot by Roland’s place that I had meant to treat last night.
I sat down in front of the spot and pressed play.
The tape starts with a zipper and our front door. Everett’s voice, too big, “Roland, come in, come in.” Mine asking for his coat. Then the chairs scraping.
I held the button with the two arrows and let go and held it again.
The chicken. The year Pam got married, which Everett said was 1995, and which was 1994. His laugh. My laugh, half a second behind his, every single time. Roland saying almost nothing at all.
“Sorry about her. Her wiring’s going.”
I held the button again, and at forty-one minutes the kitchen tap came on.
Through that little speaker it sounded like a hose on a tin roof. I turned it all the way up and put my ear down against the tablecloth.
Everett was close to the bag. He must have leaned over it to reach the wine.
“Told you. Seventy-six at four o’clock. She’s been up twice.”
“You turned the heat up on her,” Roland said.
“Nobody argues with a woman that age about paperwork. Kowalski’s had it in her chart since May. All I need is one name on that form that isn’t family. Pam can’t. Pam’s blood.”
“It’s her mother’s house.”
“I’ve lived in it seventeen years. I put the roof on it. Two o’clock tomorrow it’s collateral, and by three it’s a store.”
“Does she know what she’s signing?”
“She signs where the flags are.” A fork went down on a plate. “And if it ever gets in front of a judge, Pam’ll say whatever I need her to. Pam laughs at whatever I laugh at.”
Roland didn’t answer him.
I picked up the pen from the folder and wrote 41 on the back of my left hand.
On the tape the water shut off. A cupboard closed. Then Everett again, at full dinner-table size, for everybody.
“Here she is,” he said. “The furnace.”
Roland’s desk
I dialed Doyle Implement, the number I have known by heart for eleven years, and asked for Roland.
“You heard it,” Roland said.
“Forty-one.”
“Thursday he shut my door and asked me to witness your power of attorney. Said you were slipping and needed some helping along.” He was quiet a second. “Then he winked at me. Said wait till Sunday, he’d have you sweating through the navy by dessert and I’d see for myself. I told him if I saw it at your table, I’d sign. He heard a yes. So I brought the bag.”
The truck went by on his end again, or another one.
“I sat with Joyce four years. I know what it looks like.” He let his breath out. “So you tell me. It’s my store. It’s your name.”
“Keep two o’clock,” I said.
“In front of your sister.”
“Keep it.”
It took twelve of his thirty minutes. I spent the other eighteen getting the cedar box down off the shelf.
I didn’t wear the navy. I put on my jeans and my mother’s gray cardigan, put the deed in a bank envelope and the recorder in the cardigan pocket, and drove out to Doyle Implement on Route 34. The new combines were lined up out front in the sun with their stickers still on the glass.
Roland’s office is glass on two sides, off the showroom. Anybody on the floor can see in.
Everett was in the chair across from the desk. Pam was on the little couch with her purse on her knees. Tammy stood at the corner of the desk with her stamp and her ink pad and her reading glasses on a chain. Roland’s leather bag was on the floor by his feet.
“There she is,” Everett said. “She found the place. Pam, didn’t I say she’d get lost coming out 34?”
Pam laughed, short.
“You didn’t wear the navy.” He shrugged at Roland. “Doesn’t matter. Sit down, honey. This takes five minutes. Tammy, she’s all yours.”
Tammy opened the folder and turned it toward me with the first flag showing.
I took the deed out of the envelope and laid it on Roland’s desk.
“Good,” Everett said. “She brought the deed. See? She’s with it today.” He laughed. “Tammy, you’ll want that for the bank.”
I set the recorder down on top of the deed and pushed play.
The kitchen tap came on in the glass office. Out on the floor, a man at the parts counter looked up.
“Told you. Seventy-six at four o’clock. She’s been up twice.”
Everett put his hand out toward it. Roland laid his own hand flat on the desk beside the recorder, and Everett took his back.
It played through to the furnace. I pushed stop.
“Okay,” Everett said. “Okay. That’s a joke. That’s how I talk, Roland, you’ve known me eleven years. You’ve heard me at the Christmas party. Everybody on that floor has heard me. She’s heard me for twenty-nine years and she laughs. She laughs harder than anybody.”
Nobody said anything.
“You taped me. In my own house. You understand that’s a felony in this state? I’ll have a lawyer on you by four o’clock.”
“Then call one,” Roland said.
Everett turned around to the couch. “Pam. Tell them about Christmas. Tell them about the potatoes.”
Pam was looking at the recorder.
“You said I laugh at whatever you laugh at,” she said.
“It’s an expression.”
“You called me at eleven o’clock at night,” Pam said, “to tell me my sister was losing her mind.” She stood up with her purse. “I’m not saying anything to any judge.”
Everett looked at me then, and there was no joke anywhere in his face.
“Where do you think you’re going to go? You haven’t brought home a check since 2009. That house is standing up under my roof. I put fourteen thousand two hundred dollars into that roof, and I’ll take every nickel of it back out if I have to pull the shingles off myself.”
Tammy picked her stamp up off the desk, put it in her drawer and closed the drawer.
“The Galesburg store isn’t yours,” Roland said. “Your desk on the floor isn’t either. Have it cleared by five.”
Out past the glass the men at the parts counter had stopped pretending to work. Eleven years of Everett’s numbers were up on the board behind them. Roland looked at the board a while and then down at his hands.
I picked up the deed. I left the recorder where it was, on Roland’s desk. It was his.
“Send me the bill for the roof,” I said, and I went out through the showroom.
Sixty-four
Three Sundays later I ironed my mother’s tablecloth, put it on the table and got down the good plates.
Everett is at his brother’s in Galva. His lawyer’s letter came on a Tuesday and mine answered it on a Friday, and the check for the roof cleared the Wednesday after that. Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars. It was most of what I had been putting by for a new furnace.
The deed is back in the cedar box under the gloves.
At the bank on Tremont the line got quiet when I stood in it. I stood in it anyway.
I roasted a chicken. I made beans.
Then I went out to the hall and turned the thermostat down to sixty-four.
Pam came at six thirty with a pie from the Hy-Vee and kept her coat on.
“It’s like a barn in here,” she said.
“Leave it.”
She didn’t touch it. She sat where she always sits, and I sat at the head of the table, in my mother’s chair.
Pam picked up the beans and passed them to me first.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who has been the joke at their own table for too long.
For more tales of marital dynamics and personal declarations, you might enjoy reading about how My Husband Walked His Mother’s Dog Until One. I Paid Her Landlord in May. or the story of how My Signature Was Real, and the House on It Was Mine. And if you’re curious about hidden narratives, check out I Kept Two Years of That Notebook and Never Put My Name on a Page.
