The sprinkler was still ticking over the sod I’d paid for when Rodney walked my bag down the front steps and set it on the concrete.
He wouldn’t let me back through the door for a pair of shoes that fit.
I was in my garden clogs, the green rubber ones with the heel worn through.
“Seven years I WASTED on you,” he said, filling the doorway of a house I’d put half the mortgage into. “Seven years. No baby. Nothing to show for any of it.”
His mother stood right behind him with lemonade in the good etched glasses.
Bev had put lipstick on for it.
And past her, in my kitchen, stood the other woman in my gray wool coat.
In August. Ninety-one degrees out.
My coat.
I looked down at what he’d put in the bag. A pair of flats. Two blouses. My grandmother’s locket on its chain, the little hinge bent flat.
Nothing else. Not my reading glasses. Not the checkbook.
“So that’s everything,” I said.
The corner of his mouth went up. “Be glad I’m not sending you an invoice.”
“For what.”
“My time.”
Bev laughed into her glass. “Leave with some grace, sweetheart. Nothing ages a woman like bitterness.”
The other woman didn’t come to the door for that part. She stayed in my kitchen with her hands in my coat pockets.
I didn’t cry.
That seemed to bother them worse than any word I had.
I’d done my crying back in February, in the car wash on Kellam Street, with the brushes going.
He came down a step and used the voice he used over pot roast at Bev’s, the one for getting something decided before anybody else caught on.
“Transfers are stopped as of this morning. Both joint accounts, frozen. My lawyer’s got your number. Be sensible and I’ll get you an apartment.”
“That’s money I EARNED,” I said.
“Ours,” he said.
Bev nodded along like she was agreeing to a price at a yard sale.
Then the other woman stepped out beside him and turned her left hand in the sun so the stone would catch it.
Crystal. She did the scheduling at his body shop.
I’d found that ring at the bottom of his tackle box in February. A blue oval stone in a navy velvet box. I set it back just how I’d found it, lid and all.
“No sense working yourself up,” she said. “I’ll make sure he gets what he’s owed.”
That one went in deeper than the rest.
Seven years of needles in my own stomach at ten past six every morning.
Seven years of waiting rooms, and a nurse named Luz who brought me the little cup of water before I ever asked.
$4,800 a round, and most of it came out of my paycheck.
Blood draws. Scans. The one where they put you under. I took every test there was.
Rodney never set foot in that clinic. NEVER ONCE.
Three Easters in a row his mother told him across the ham that a real man doesn’t let some doctor look him over like a steer at the fair.
I picked the bag up. It weighed about what a sack of flour weighs.
“This is going to cost you,” I said.
He laughed. “Nope. I just quit making the same mistake.”
The door closed. I heard the deadbolt, then the chain.
The porch light was still burning over it at one in the afternoon.
Bev never leaves a light on. She says the electric company doesn’t need her help.
So they’d sat up the whole night, the three of them, deciding who went first.
I stood on the walk and let the sprinkler come around and wet my ankles.
The water was cold. That was the one kind thing out there.
A mail truck idled two houses down with its blinker going. A woman pushing a stroller glanced at my bag, then kept her eyes on the sidewalk.
Across the road somebody’s blinds tipped shut.
The accounts I’d been ready for. The street I hadn’t.
“You’ll bake out there before that house hands you anything fair.”
The voice came over the hedge.
There’s a brick house at the end of our row in Harlan Springs that everybody tells stories about. State plates parked out front at hours nobody keeps. A lawn service every Tuesday. A man who comes down his porch stairs a step at a time, knee in a black brace, and never lifts a hand.
He was at his rail in a chambray shirt with the sleeves pushed up, watching Rodney’s windows. Not me.
The whole time he’d been standing there. I hadn’t seen him.
The Major, the street calls him. Major Haskett. Nobody’s ever checked.
Rodney called him the hermit. Bev called him worse.
“I’m not looking for anybody’s pity,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Never had a use for it.”
He reached back and pushed the screen door wide with his knuckles, and left it that way.
“Arrangements are what I do.”
He said it like a man giving his trade at a church supper.
I didn’t move. My clogs were full of water by then.
“That’s big talk from a man who doesn’t know me.”
“I know he had an appraiser walk that house in June,” he said. “He mention why.”
I didn’t know a thing about any appraiser.
The sprinkler came back across and drenched the bag. My grandmother’s locket was in there.
“Get in out of the sun, Stacy Burkhalter,” he said.
I had never given that man my name. Thirteen years on that street and I’d never given him a single thing.
My mouth finally moved.
“Where’d you get my name.”
“I had his before he ever signed for that house,” he said.
He held the door. Somewhere in the back a box fan was going and a radio played low.
“And THERE’S NO HASKETT.”
The Mailbox Said Haskett
His name was Wendell Burkhalter.
He told me before I’d sat down. He was standing at his counter with his back to me, running the tap until it came cold.
“Haskett was the widow who had this place before me,” he said. “I never took her off the mailbox.”
He put a glass of water in front of me.
“I’m Rodney’s father.”
I didn’t touch the water.
I sat there dripping on his linoleum in my ruined clogs and did the arithmetic. That’s what my head does when my hands have nothing to hold.
Rodney’s father drowned on Kerr Lake when Rodney was two. Bev told it every Easter. The johnboat, the squall, the body they never found.
“Bev tells a good drowning,” he said.
He lowered himself into the chair across from me with his bad knee stuck straight out under the table.
Thirty-one years with the state highway patrol. Retired a Major. The cars at his curb belonged to men he’d worked with, still driving what the state issued them.
Arrangements meant what it sounded like. Who stood where at a funeral. Which road got closed when the governor came through.
He was seventy-one, and he’d been writing our street down in pencil for thirteen years.
“Thirteen years,” I said. “You’ve been at the end of our row for thirteen years.”
“Bought it three months after you two moved in.”
“And never walked over once.”
“Bev had already moved him twice to keep him from me,” he said. “I wasn’t giving her a third reason.”
He looked out his side window toward the house.
“He turned your sprinkler up to high before he brought that bag out. I watched him do it from here.”
I looked down at the water in my clogs.
He got up and went to the drawer under the phone. He came back with a steno pad, the kind with the spiral across the top. He licked his thumb, turned pages until he found the one he wanted, and slid it across.
His handwriting was small and square, all capitals.
JUNE 11. 8:40. APPRAISER, WHITE CAR, CLIPBOARD. R. HOME ALL MORNING. S. PICKED UP 7:50, GRAY HONDA.
“Where were you on the eleventh of June?” he said.
A J Like A Fishhook
I didn’t need a calendar for that one.
June 11 was the one where they put me under.
Pam from payroll picked me up at ten to eight in her gray Honda. The night before, Rodney had told me he had a customer coming into the shop that morning he couldn’t put off.
Pam sat in the clinic lot for close to five hours with her crossword and the engine running for the air.
Rodney was home all morning. It was written right there in pencil.
I’ve been a payroll clerk for the county schools for nineteen years. I cut checks for bus drivers and lunch ladies and the man who mows the ball fields.
Most everybody thinks that’s a job about money. Mostly it’s a job about paper.
My grandmother taught me that before the county did.
Opal Lindsey kept the books for a feed store in Lexington for forty years. When I was in grade school she sat me at her dinette and made me write my name fifty times on the back of an old ledger sheet.
Stacy J., for Josephine, which was her mother’s name. The J had to drop below the line and hook back up, like something you’d bait.
“Sign it the same way every time,” she said. “Then nobody can tell you what you wrote.”
That locket in my bag was hers. Her picture was still in it, no bigger than a thumbnail.
I’ve signed Stacy J. Burkhalter with that fishhook J on every paper I’ve touched since the wedding. The mortgage. The clinic forms. The birthday cards to his mother.
In the bottom drawer of my desk at work, under the extra toner, there’s a green ledger with a cloth spine.
It has every round at the clinic. $4,800 a time, with the date, the doctor, and what they did.
So is every month’s half of the mortgage. $640, out of my check and into the joint account on the first, for thirteen years.
I kept Rodney’s books for a while too. Burkhalter Collision, on Sundays at our kitchen table. Then last fall he said Crystal would handle the paperwork now and I could quit worrying my head over it.
Crystal writes her S like a pig’s tail. A big round loop, then a curl that comes back under itself.
The last invoice I ever reconciled for him was a $1,180 bumper job. She’d added it up wrong by a hundred dollars. I folded it into the back of the green ledger, meaning to mention it.
I never did.
Rodney used to call that ledger my diary. He never once asked what was in it.
$3,000 And A Place On Delancey
I slept on Wendell’s daybed in the back room, under a window unit that rattled every time the compressor kicked on.
I was forty-one years old and sleeping in a stranger’s house on a street I’d lived on for thirteen years.
In the morning I walked to the drugstore on Kellam in a pair of Wendell’s slippers for a toothbrush and some readers.
The card reader said DECLINED.
The girl at the register looked at the slippers and didn’t say anything. I put the toothbrush back on the rack myself.
Payday was two days off. My check went straight into the joint account, the way it had since the day we opened it.
I called my own office from Wendell’s kitchen phone. I had my direct deposit pointed at the credit union account I’d kept since high school, the one with next to nothing in it.
The woman in benefits didn’t ask me why. Payroll people never do.
My cell rang at 10:15.
“Mrs. Burkhalter, Gary Vance. I represent Rodney.”
He had the voice of a man who reads things for a living and gets paid by the page.
“Rodney’s prepared to be generous,” he said. “Three thousand dollars, by check, and the first month on a one-bedroom on Delancey Street. The deposit’s covered. All he needs is your signature on a document saying the house is his going forward.”
“And the accounts.”
“Unfrozen the same afternoon.”
“And my things.”
“Mrs. Burkhalter senior will box up whatever you need.”
I looked at Wendell’s back door, and at the slippers on my feet.
“Where,” I said.
“Mrs. Burkhalter senior has offered her kitchen. Ten o’clock, day after tomorrow. Less formal than my office.”
It was Bev’s table. It had always been Bev’s table.
“Should I bring anything,” I said.
“Only a pen,” he said. “Rodney mentioned you’re particular about pens.”
10:20 On The Eleventh
I went to work the next day, because it was a workday and because the green ledger was there.
I called Tri-County Savings at 8:05. We’d had the mortgage there since the closing. My name was on it. My name was on the deed.
A woman named Denise pulled up the house.
She was quiet a second longer than a person is when there’s nothing to find.
“There’s a home equity line on the property,” she said. “Opened June 11. Nine thousand four hundred, drawn in full on July 2.”
“Can you send me the papers.”
“Your name’s on the account. I’ll email them now.”
I stood at the printer by the copier room while the pages came out warm, one at a time.
First the appraisal, dated June 11, 8:40 a.m. Then the closing statement from a title office on Main Street. Closing time, 10:20 a.m. Then the signature page.
Rodney’s name I’d know anywhere. He signs like he’s in a hurry to get to lunch.
Under it was mine.
Stacy Burkhalter.
No J. No hook. Just a big round S with a tail that curled back up under itself.
I took the green ledger out of the bottom drawer and opened it on my desk.
June 11. Clinic. $4,800. And beside it, in my own hand, the word under.
Then I turned to the back, unfolded the $1,180 bumper invoice, and laid it next to the signature page.
The same S. The same loop, the same curl, the same little stab at the end where the pen came off the paper.
The woman at the next desk asked if I wanted half her sandwich. I said no thank you, and she went back to her screen.
I sat there with the two pages side by side until the copier went to sleep.
$9,400 against the house I’d put $640 into every month for thirteen years. Drawn out in July, while I was still giving myself needles at ten past six in the morning.
10:20 on June 11, I was flat on a clinic table with an IV in my hand.
Luz Prints The Times
I drove to the clinic on my lunch.
Luz saw me come through the door and had the little cup of water in my hand before I got to the window.
“Nobody’s got you on the book today,” she said.
“I need my visit for June 11. The times.”
She didn’t ask why. She sat down and typed, and the printer behind her started up.
Check-in 8:52. Taken back 9:58. Recovery 10:40. Discharged 12:35 to Pam Oakes, coworker.
“That the day your husband couldn’t make it,” Luz said.
“They were all the day he couldn’t make it.”
She stapled the sheet and handed it over. Then she put her hand flat on top of mine for about a second and went back to her screen.
That evening I laid four pages on Wendell’s kitchen table.
The signature page. The closing statement with 10:20 on it. Crystal’s bumper invoice. Luz’s discharge sheet.
Beside them went his steno pad, open to June 11.
Wendell put on a pair of drugstore readers and leaned over the pages with both hands on the table edge. He took his time, the same time he’d have taken with a wreck on the interstate.
“I know a man in Raleigh who’d want to see this,” he said.
“No.”
He looked at me over the readers.
“I’ll call Denise myself,” I said. “I’ve got two o’clock with her, day after tomorrow.”
“After Bev’s.”
“After Bev’s.”
He sat back and rubbed his knee.
“Arrangements,” he said, and almost smiled.
A knock came on the frame of his screen door a little after eight. The sky was still light over the hedge.
Bev stood on his porch in her church cardigan. She didn’t look at me. She looked at him.
“Wendell,” she said.
He didn’t get up.
“Ten o’clock, Stacy,” she said, still looking at him. “Come by yourself.”
Then she went down his steps and back up the row without once turning around.
In thirteen years I’d never heard that woman say his name.
Bev’s Kitchen Table
Bev’s kitchen on Fairlawn smelled like percolator coffee and lemon furniture polish.
The folder was already open when I came in. Gary Vance had it squared in front of him at the head of the table, with yellow tabs sticking out the side.
Rodney sat across from my chair in his shop shirt with his name stitched over the pocket.
Crystal leaned on the counter by the sink, holding a coffee cup in both hands. My gray coat hung on the back of the kitchen door. I could see the sleeve.
Bev poured. She didn’t pour me one.
“Here’s how this goes,” Rodney said. “You sign by the yellow tabs. Gary hands you a check for three thousand. His girl’s got a key to Delancey in an envelope. You’re in by the weekend and nobody has to be ugly.”
I didn’t pick up the pen.
“I’m doing you a kindness here, Stace. Most men wouldn’t. Seven years I carried you. Paid every one of those clinic bills.”
I’d paid them. They were in the green ledger. I didn’t say so.
I took the four pages out of my purse and laid them on Bev’s oilcloth one at a time, facing him.
“Where was I at 10:20 on June 11,” I said.
He looked at the pages, then at me, and laughed short.
“Title office. Came in on your lunch. Doped up that whole summer, couldn’t find your own car keys.”
“That morning you told me you had a customer at the shop.”
“I did.”
“Home all morning,” I said.
“Says who.”
I didn’t answer that.
Crystal set her cup down on the counter.
“Rodney said she’d already agreed to it,” she said. “He said she just hated going down to the title place.”
“Hush,” Bev said.
Rodney put his whole hand flat on the signature page like he could hold it down.
“So Crystal helped with a form. So what. A line of credit on our house, that’s all it is. You’d have signed it. You’d have signed anything I put in front of you for seven years, and you know it.” He leaned in. “Five thousand. Five, and the apartment. Final.”
Gary Vance closed the folder slowly and set his pen on top of it.
“Rodney, I’d like a minute with you on the porch.”
“Sit down, Gary.”
“Sign it, Stacy,” Bev said. “Take the five. Don’t make him be ugly about it.”
“No,” I said.
“Walk out that door and you get NOTHING. Not the five. Not Delancey. Not one pair of shoes out of that closet. Hear me?”
“I have two o’clock with Denise at Tri-County,” I said.
I gathered the four pages up in the order I’d laid them down.
“Where’d you sleep, Stacy?” Bev said when I got to the door.
“End of the row,” I said.
Rodney made a face. “The hermit’s?”
Bev set the coffeepot down so hard the lid jumped.
He looked at her.
She didn’t look back.
The Hinge
Denise’s office at Tri-County was the size of a closet, with a plastic ficus in the corner.
I gave her copies and kept the originals. She read my statement twice and had me sign it at the bottom.
I signed it Stacy J. Burkhalter, with the hook.
She looked at that J for a long second, then at the copy of the other one. She said somebody from their office would be in touch by the end of the week.
That was all she said. I didn’t need more.
I didn’t get the three thousand. I didn’t get the five. The one-bedroom on Delancey went to somebody else by the end of the month. Every pair of shoes I owned stayed in a closet I couldn’t get to.
My next check landed in the credit union account. It paid for a secondhand pair of sneakers and my half of Wendell’s groceries.
He wouldn’t take rent. I put it in an envelope in his drawer by the phone anyway, under the steno pad.
That evening I sat on his porch steps with the locket in my lap and his needle-nose pliers.
The hinge had been bent flat, the way it bends when somebody pulls the two halves apart with their thumbnails looking for something that isn’t there.
My grandmother’s face was still inside, gone soft at the edges from the sprinkler.
I worked the hinge back a hair at a time. Wendell sat at the rail with his knee out and didn’t offer to help.
Across the hedge the sprinkler was off. The sod I’d paid for had gone brown in a stripe down the middle.
Rodney came out on his front step with a beer in his hand and looked down the row.
He wasn’t looking at me.
Wendell looked back at him. He didn’t wave. He didn’t look away either.
The two halves came together under my thumb, and the locket shut with a small click.
I put the chain over my head and fastened it behind my neck myself.
Rodney was still standing there when I went inside.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s been paying half and keeping the receipts.
For more tales of family drama and unexpected twists, you might enjoy reading about my sister marrying him in the ballroom I booked for my own wedding or the time my mother turned the thermostat down to 52 and took the formula home. And if you’re curious about another unforgettable family moment, check out when Travis had a car seat waiting next to the nursery window.
