My father moved my two kids into his cellar so my sister’s nineteen-year-old could have their bedrooms, after I’d paid him $850 a month for fourteen months. “Griffin’s going places,” he said. “Yours are used to less.” I didn’t argue. I loaded the car that night, and by morning he understood what had left with us.
We’d been living in Appleton since the divorce, in the house I grew up in.
Bryson was eleven. Charlie was eight.
They’d painted their own walls that first summer. His was green. Hers was a purple she picked off a paint chip called Grape Soda, and she was so proud of it she made Dad come up and look twice.
I worked doubles at the warehouse four days a week.
On the first of every month I handed Dad an envelope with $850 in it, cash, because he liked to count it at the table.
I paid the gas bill too. And the $3,400 when the water heater went in March.
Every Sunday night I filled his pill box. Fourteen little doors, morning and night, since the cardiologist added the third one.
Nobody asked me to. I just did it.
Then my sister called on a Tuesday.
Griffin had dropped out halfway through his second semester. Tricia’s new boyfriend didn’t want him at the apartment.
“He needs somewhere calm to figure himself out,” she said.
Dad said yes before she’d finished the sentence.
I got home from a shift on Thursday and the upstairs hall smelled like body spray.
Charlie’s door was open.
Her bed was gone.
There was a futon where it used to be, and a gaming chair, and a TV screwed into the purple wall with the cords hanging down.
Bryson’s room had a weight bench in it.
I found my kids in the cellar.
Two air mattresses on the concrete. Their clothes in laundry baskets. The dehumidifier going in the corner like a truck left running.
Charlie was sitting on her mattress with her backpack still on.
“Grandpa said it’s like camping,” she said.
Bryson didn’t say anything. He was holding his inhaler.
That cellar floods every April. Dad knows it does. He’s the one who taught me to keep the Christmas boxes up on cinder blocks.
I went back upstairs.
Dad was at the kitchen table with his word search, glasses down on the end of his nose. The clock over the stove was still an hour off from the spring.
“Where are their beds, Dad.”
“Garage. They’re fine. I’ll get the mattresses up off the floor this weekend.”
“Bryson has asthma.”
“So run the machine. That’s what it’s for.”
Griffin came in, drank orange juice out of the carton with the fridge door open, and left again without looking at either of us.
“He’s nineteen, Monika. He needs his own space to get his head right. That boy is going places.”
“And mine?”
Dad closed the word search on his pen.
“Yours are USED TO LESS. They’ll adjust. Kids bounce.”
Used to less.
Fourteen months. $11,900 in envelopes he counted in front of me.
A water heater. Every heart appointment since last fall, me in the waiting room with my phone at four percent.
And he’d looked at my two kids and picked them as the ones who could take it.
I didn’t yell.
That’s the part Tricia still can’t get past.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay, Dad.”
I went down and told the kids to pack one bag each. Whatever they’d want in the car.
Charlie asked if we were really going camping.
“Sort of,” I said.
I called Destiny from work. She’s got a pull-out couch and a room over her garage nobody uses.
“How long?” she said.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Bring them. I’m putting sheets on right now.”
It took three trips. Dad watched from his recliner with the TV going.
“You’re being dramatic,” he said. “Over a ROOM.”
“TWO rooms,” I said.
“Where do you think you’re going at nine o’clock at night?”
I didn’t answer that.
Griffin’s door stayed shut the whole time. I could hear his game through it.
On the last trip I set two things on the kitchen table, next to the word search.
The envelope for November. Empty.
And his pill box, every little door open, NOTHING in any of them.
Dad saw it. He opened his mouth and closed it again.
“You’ll be BACK by Sunday,” he said.
I put Charlie’s purple pillow under my arm and turned off the porch light behind me.
The kids slept on Destiny’s pull-out in their clothes.
I didn’t sleep at all.
At 5:52 the next morning my phone lit up on the arm of the couch.
Dad.
I let it ring four times before I picked up.
He didn’t say hello. He didn’t say sorry.
I could hear Griffin snoring through the wall behind him, and Tricia’s voicemail playing on the landline, and the kitchen chair scraping.
Then he said my name the way he used to when I was nine and in trouble, and asked me the one thing I never in my life expected to hear from him.
5:52
“Monika. Which one’s my heart pill?”
That was it. That was the whole question.
Seventy-two years, and my father had never once asked me which of anything was which. He was the one who knew. Which breaker ran the dryer. Which key opened the shed. Which way the gas cap on the Chevy turned, because it was backwards from every other car and he liked that he knew it.
I sat up. Charlie’s feet were in my back.
“Where are the bottles, Dad?”
“On the table. I got them all out. They all look the same.”
They don’t. I could have drawn every one of them. The white oval is the blood thinner. The little pink one is the water pill. The big chalky one, the one he hates, is the one the cardiologist added last fall. The third one. The reason the box has fourteen doors and not seven.
“Don’t take the big one,” I said. “The big one’s at night.”
The chair scraped again. Behind him Tricia’s voicemail ended and started over, her recorded voice saying she’d call right back.
“Dad.”
“I took it at four,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep. Is that bad?”
The Folgers can
The first of the month went the same way fourteen times.
I’d come in off a double, still in my steel toes, and set the envelope by his elbow. He’d lick his thumb and count it twice, out loud, while the kids ate cereal at the other end of the table. Then he’d fold it into the Folgers can that lives on top of the fridge, behind the bread, and push the can back with two fingers.
“Your mother kept the grocery money in that can thirty years,” he said the first time. Like it was an honor to be in there with her.
Every first Friday he drove the can to the credit union on 52nd Street. He put on a collared shirt to do it.
That was Dad. Nicholas Tomaszewski never took a dime from anybody, and he’d tell you so at the VFW fish fry until you moved tables. He paid cash for cars. He thought credit cards were how the government kept track of you.
The heart stuff started last October. The nurse at the cardiologist’s, a woman named Lynda with reading glasses on a beaded chain, printed out the medication list and held it out between us. Dad didn’t take it.
“She handles that,” he said.
So I handled it. I folded the list into my wallet behind my license and it’s been there ever since, soft as a dollar now.
That December, Tricia threw Griffin a party at the VFW hall before he started at Whitewater in January. Sheet cake. GOING PLACES in blue gel. Dad stood up in front of everybody and handed Griffin a card, and Griffin opened it and hugged him a long time, and Tricia cried into a napkin.
“First year’s taken care of,” Dad told the room.
I remember thinking, with what? Two weeks before, he’d told me the porch steps would have to wait till spring because money was tight.
I didn’t ask. I filled the pill box. I put the envelope by his elbow.
Now it was 5:55 in the morning on Destiny’s couch and I had that list unfolded on my knee before he’d finished telling me he felt swimmy.
“Call Lynda’s line when it opens at eight,” I said. “Tell her you took the night one early. Drink water. Sit down.”
“I am sitting down.”
“Then stay sitting.”
He didn’t hang up, and neither did I. We just breathed at each other for a while.
Then the voicemail on his end started over again, and I counted. That was the fourth time he’d called Tricia before he called me.
Destiny’s pull-out
Lynda’s office called me at work at 9:15, because I’m the number on his file.
He was fine. One dose early. Fluids, rest, no second one tonight. She asked if I’d be filling the box this Sunday like always.
I said I didn’t know. She said, “Okay, hon,” the way people do when they’ve heard that before.
Destiny made the kids eggs and drove them to school with a note for the office. She’s worked the line next to me for six years. She doesn’t ask a question unless she wants the answer.
“You’re not going back there,” she said that night. It wasn’t a question.
Bryson coughed in his sleep on her couch. Not bad. The kind of cough a night on wet concrete gives you.
I tried one fix. I took a picture of Lynda’s list, wrote MORNING and NIGHT next to each pill with a Sharpie, and texted it to Dad.
Twenty minutes later: cant read this on the phone
I enlarged it. I sent it again.
Still cant.
Then Tricia called at lunch.
“You left a seventy-two-year-old man with a bad heart and NOTHING in his pill box. Do you know what he did this morning? He could’ve died, Monika.”
“I talked him through it at six.”
“He called me crying.”
He hadn’t called her crying. He’d called her four times and she hadn’t picked up. I didn’t say so.
“You don’t even know what he’s giving up for Griffin,” she said. “His pension. Every cent of Griffin’s school came out of his pension. He told me he’s been living on soup so my kid could have one shot.”
The breakroom microwave beeped behind me. Somebody’s popcorn.
“Did he tell you what I—”
“I don’t want to hear about your rent problems, okay? Kevin’s already pissed at me. Just go fill his box. It’s Sunday in two days.”
She hung up.
I stood there with the phone against my ear for a long time, thinking about soup.
Dad hadn’t bought a can of soup in his life. He thought canned soup was for people who’d given up.
Gray over Grape Soda
Saturday at 3:30 Dad leaves for four o’clock Mass. Fourteen months of Saturdays, he never missed it once.
Destiny borrowed her brother-in-law’s truck and we parked around the corner till his Chevy turned off our street.
The beds were in the garage like he said. Charlie’s mattress was leaning against the lawnmower with a bag of grass seed on it. Bryson’s frame was in pieces, the bolts in a coffee mug on the workbench. Somebody had at least kept the bolts.
We loaded it in twenty minutes.
Then I went in for Bryson’s spare inhaler. He keeps it in a sock in his top drawer, because he’s eleven and that’s his system.
The upstairs hall still smelled like body spray. The weight bench was in Bryson’s room, and the dresser had been pushed into the closet with the drawers facing the wall. I had to pull it out to get the sock.
Charlie’s door was open.
Griffin was in the gaming chair with a headset on, his back to me, a game going on the TV.
The wall behind the TV was gray.
All of it. The purple was gone, every inch of Grape Soda my daughter stood on a step stool to roll on herself. In the hall there was a tray with a roller in it and a gallon can, the lid set upside down on a newspaper.
Griffin pulled one side of the headset off.
“Oh. Hey, Aunt Monika.”
“Who painted the wall?”
“Me and Grandpa. Last night.” He shrugged. “He said gray’s better for streaming. Purple messes up the camera.”
“Last night,” I said.
“He felt better by dinner.”
I reached out and touched it. It came off on my finger.
The second coat was still wet.
The drawer under the phone
I went down to the kitchen because Destiny had told me to.
“Get your water heater receipt,” she’d said in the truck. “If he ever says you owe him, you’ll want it.”
The receipts live in the drawer under the wall phone, with the rubber bands and the dead batteries and a church calendar from 2019. I put mine in there in March myself.
The receipt was on top.
Under it was a little blue book from the credit union on 52nd Street. A savings passbook. On the cover, in Dad’s block capitals, in the same black marker he uses to write the year on the Christmas boxes, it said GRIFFIN SCHOOL.
I opened it standing up.
The first line was September of last year. Deposit, $850.
October. $850.
November. $850.
Every month. The second of every month, the first Friday, the collared shirt. Fourteen lines. I didn’t have to add it. I knew what it came to because I’d been the one handing it over.
$11,900.
Then the other column. January, a withdrawal of $3,950. August, $3,950. And this October, two weeks ago, a cash withdrawal of $1,100.
I looked up at the ceiling. Above me, through the floor, I could hear the game in Charlie’s room.
The weight bench. The futon. The TV screwed into her wall.
Griffin came down the stairs in his socks. He went to the fridge and opened it and stood there in the cold with the carton of orange juice, and then he turned around and saw what I had.
“That’s my school fund,” he said. “Grandpa’s pension.”
“Your grandpa’s pension goes into his checking. On the third. Direct deposit.”
“Okay.”
“This is the second. Every month. Eight-fifty.”
He looked at the book. He didn’t know what to do with his face. He was nineteen and he was holding orange juice.
“He said you lived here free,” Griffin said. “He said it was only fair you didn’t need the big rooms, since you weren’t paying for anything.”
I took out my phone and called my sister.
“Come to Dad’s,” I said. “Now. Bring nothing.”
Out front, the Chevy pulled into the driveway. Mass had let out early.
The kitchen table
Dad came in the back door with the church bulletin rolled in his fist. He saw the passbook in my hand and he didn’t even slow down.
“Put that back.”
I didn’t.
“That’s my private business, Monika. That’s in my house, in my drawer. You don’t live here anymore. You made that real clear Thursday night with your little show.”
He took his coat off and hung it on the back of his chair like it was any Saturday.
“You were living under my roof. What comes into my house is mine to do with. You want to talk about fair? I raised you. I put you through two years at Gateway. I let you come back here with two kids and a divorce and I never said one word.”
“I paid you.”
“You paid what anybody pays. I put it where it’d do some good.” He pointed at the ceiling with the bulletin. “That boy is the only one in this family who ever had a chance to be something. His father’s in Arizona. His mother’s living with a man who won’t let him in the door. Who’s he got? He’s got me. Yours have a mother who works doubles. Yours have you.”
Griffin was still standing at the fridge. The door had swung shut on its own.
Tricia came in the front without knocking, her car keys in her hand and her hair still wet. She looked at me, then at Dad, then at the book.
“What’s going on? Is it his heart?”
I held the passbook out to her. That was all I did.
She read it. I watched her get to the bottom of the first column and go back up to the top and read it again.
“Dad,” she said. “What is this?”
“It’s Griffin’s school.”
“It says eight hundred and fifty dollars. Every month.”
“So?”
“You told me it was your pension.” Her voice went up. “You told me she lived here FREE. You told me you were carrying her and her kids and you were eating SOUP, Dad. I’ve been sending you groceries. Kevin and I had a fight about the groceries.”
“I was carrying her.”
“With her money?”
“It’s my house.” He slapped the bulletin on the table. “It’s my house, and anything handed to me at that table is mine. She wanted to give it. Nobody made her. She can’t stand not being the one who does everything, she never could. You know that, Tricia. You’ve said it yourself.”
Tricia didn’t say anything to that. Her face said she had.
“And the eleven hundred?” she said. “In October? He’d already quit.”
Dad didn’t answer. He looked at Griffin.
Griffin set the orange juice on the counter.
“I’ll take the TV down,” he said. “I’ll put her bed back up. I’ll do the wall.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Dad said. “You sit down.”
“Mom, I didn’t know she paid.”
“I know you didn’t, baby.” Tricia put her keys back in her pocket. “Get your stuff. You’re coming home.”
“Kevin—”
“I’ll handle Kevin.”
That was the cost to her and she knew it when she said it. It was all over her.
Dad turned around to me then, and for the first time since Thursday he looked his age.
“Who’s going to do my pills?”
The bottles were still on the table where he’d dumped them at four in the morning. The empty box was beside them, every door still open the way I’d left it.
I sat down in my old chair. I lined the bottles up. White oval, little pink one, the big chalky one. I filled every door, Sunday morning to Saturday night, one day early. It took six minutes. I’ve done it so many times I don’t have to look.
Then I took Lynda’s list out from behind my license and unfolded it and laid it under the box, and I slid the whole thing across the table to my sister.
Tricia looked at it like I’d handed her a live animal.
I put my house key on top of the passbook.
Dad watched me do all of it. He didn’t reach for anything.
“Sunday nights,” I said to Tricia. “The big one’s at night.”
The paint counter at Menards
Six weeks in Destiny’s room over the garage. Then a two-bedroom on 22nd Avenue, above a laundromat, where the floor hums a little when the dryers run. The kids think it’s funny.
It’s more than $850. I pay it on the first, online, to a woman I’ve never met.
The $2,900 still in that passbook stayed in that passbook. Tricia said I should go to the credit union. I didn’t go.
Our Christmas boxes are still in his cellar, up on the cinder blocks. I haven’t gone back for them. I’ll buy new ornaments.
Every Sunday night around eight my phone buzzes with a picture from Tricia. Fourteen doors, all full, on Dad’s kitchen table next to the word search. She never writes anything with it. I never write anything back.
The first Saturday in December I took the kids to Menards.
Bryson went straight for the greens. He held two chips up to the light and argued with himself about them.
Charlie didn’t look at anything. She went down the rack with one finger out until she found it, and pulled it out, and held it up to me.
Then she turned around and slapped it on the counter in front of the paint guy.
“Grape Soda,” she said. “Two gallons. I’m doing it myself.”
If you’ve ever been the one filling the pill box without being asked, this one’s for you. Send it to somebody who’s still doing it.
Family loyalty gets messy in “I Paid $28,750 For A Room My Grandmother Never Slept In” and “The Boy With My Son’s Mark Called Me Aunt Meredith”; for another painful family twist, read “I Paid $1,400 For The Elks Hall. His Mother Called Me Lucky.”.
