My husband was twenty-seven years younger than me and owned four car washes, and every night he stood over me until I swallowed the pills he’d sorted. “Take them, Freda, or you’ll get confused again,” he said. So I kept one under my tongue, carried it to my pharmacist, and he locked the door before he said a word.
Nine weeks after the wedding I’d put Seth’s name on my house in Bakersfield, because he asked once and I was too embarrassed to ask why.
My daughter Autumn quit answering my calls the day I signed.
“He’s thirty-five, Mom. He’s got a boat. What does he need your two-bedroom for?” she said.
I told her he didn’t need anything. He wanted company.
I believed that.
Seth was good at the small things.
He warmed up my side of the car in January. He cut the crusts off my toast and never once made a joke about it.
He bought one of those long plastic pill organizers, the kind with a little lid for every day, and every Sunday night he sat at the kitchen island and filled it for me.
Blood pressure in the morning. Cholesterol and an aspirin at night.
My first husband never even knew what I took.
So I called it love.
Then my evenings started disappearing.
I’d sit down for the nine o’clock news and wake up at the island with my reading glasses still on and no idea what the weather was going to do.
Twice I left a burner going. Once I called Autumn by my dead sister’s name on her voicemail.
Seth would rub my shoulders.
“It’s just your age, babe. Take your pills and go to bed.”
He always handed me the night ones himself. Pills in one palm, a glass of water in the other hand.
And he waited.
He’d stand there with his arms crossed until I opened my mouth and showed him they were gone. Like a nurse. Like I was a patient in a ward.
One Sunday I came back down for my glasses and he was at the island with the organizer open and a second bottle beside it.
Brown plastic. Label scraped off.
He shoved it in his jacket so fast he knocked Thursday’s lid onto the floor.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Vitamin D. Your levels are low.”
“Then why’d you scrape the label off?”
He laughed. He laughed for too long.
“Freda, you’re doing it again. The paranoid thing. We talked about the paranoid thing.”
The refrigerator was making that ticking sound it made for a year that nobody ever fixed.
I went up to bed and lay there and listened to it tick.
Three nights later I woke up at two and his side of the bed was cold.
The slider to the back porch was open about an inch.
“She’s still signing whatever I put in front of her,” Seth said into his phone. “I just need the doctor to put it in writing. A month. Maybe less.”
He went quiet. Somebody was talking.
“No. She doesn’t remember Tuesday. She doesn’t remember most of the week.”
I got back into bed before he turned around.
I watched the ceiling fan go around until the window turned gray.
Thursday night he handed me two white pills and one small YELLOW one.
I’d been taking a yellow one for months. Nobody had ever prescribed me a yellow one.
I put all three in my mouth. I drank the water. I opened wide for him like always.
The yellow one sat flat under my tongue the whole time he smiled at me.
When the shower came on I spat it into a tissue and tucked it in the toe of my slipper.
In the morning I drove it to the little pharmacy by the laundromat where Isaac Thiel had filled my prescriptions for nineteen years.
He put on his readers and turned the pill over with the tip of a pen.
Then he looked out the front window. At the parking lot. At my car.
He walked me into the consult room, the tiny one with the blood pressure cuff on the wall, and shut the door.
Then he LOCKED it.
“Freda. Does Seth know you’re HERE?”
“No.”
“Okay. Let’s keep it like that for an hour.”
He said it was a sedative. A strong one. The kind of thing they give people before surgery so they won’t remember the surgery.
“Who prescribed that to me?” I said.
He typed my name into his computer and his face went flat.
Then he turned the screen so I could read it.
My name. My birthday. A prescription for those yellow pills, filled at a chain store across town, every thirty days since February.
A doctor I had never met.
And a box at the bottom marked for notes, with five words typed into it.
PATIENT CANNOT MANAGE OWN AFFAIRS.
“I haven’t seen a doctor since my knee,” I said.
“I know,” Isaac said. “That’s why I locked the door.”
He scrolled down to the pickup log.
Every month, the same signature.
Kristy Underwood.
Underwood is Seth’s last name.
On our very first date, over a plate of crab legs he barely touched, Seth told me he didn’t have a single person left in this world. NOT ONE.
The pickup log
Isaac clicked on the signature and a second window came up.
That chain store makes you show a license to pick up for somebody else. There’s a box for it. Relationship to patient.
Kristy Underwood had written daughter.
The address under her name was mine. My own house, the one with Seth’s name on it now.
“I have one daughter,” I said. “Her name is Autumn. She hasn’t talked to me since January.”
“I know Autumn,” Isaac said. “She used to pick up your antibiotics after school and complain about the wait.”
He printed the page. Then the prescription, with the doctor’s name across the top, Roy Bautista, M.D., an office on Truxtun Avenue. Then the log, all seven months of it, and every month the K at the front of Kristy went around twice like a lasso.
Her license had a birth year on it. I wrote it on the back of my checkbook register with his pen. 1968.
Then Isaac picked up the phone on the wall and called Dr. Hana Wong’s office himself. Dr. Wong is the one who sent me to the knee man. He told the girl who answered that I needed blood drawn before lunch, today, and he spelled the drug for her.
“It stays in you a while,” he said to me after. “A blood test is a piece of paper. Nobody gets to call a piece of paper paranoid.”
He put everything in a manila envelope and didn’t write anything on the front.
“Take it home. Don’t let him see it. Can you do that?”
“I keep my good scissors where he can’t find them.”
He almost smiled. Then he looked out at the lot again, at my car, at the street past it.
“Freda. Where are you sleeping tonight?”
The guest book
We got married at the Elks Lodge the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and I kept the guest book, because I taught third grade for thirty-one years and I keep everything.
My side filled four pages. Teachers. Two lunch ladies. The couple across the street, and the husband hates me.
Seth’s side had one line.
A woman in a green coat sat in the last row by the coffee urn. She signed the book with one big looped letter and nothing after it, and she left before the cake.
“She does my books,” Seth said. “For the washes. She’s been with me forever.”
I never saw the inside of one of his car washes. He drove me past the one on Rosedale twice and pointed. Both times it was raining and the sign said CLOSED.
Third grade gives you one skill nobody talks about. You learn to read upside down. Thirty-one years of notes passed under desks and permission slips turned the wrong way on my blotter, and I can read a page across a table faster than the person holding it.
Seth didn’t know that. There was no reason he would.
In April I wrote him a check for forty-one thousand dollars out of my retirement, for a new tunnel at the Rosedale wash. He kissed my forehead and folded the check into his shirt pocket, and I never thought about it again until that Friday.
Autumn still had a key to my house. It was on her ring with a plastic strawberry she won at the Kern County fair when she was nine. I never asked for it back. Asking would have meant saying out loud that she was gone.
She notarizes loan papers at the credit union on Brundage Lane. She keeps her stamp in her purse in a zip bag because she’s scared to death of losing her commission.
I thought about that stamp the whole drive home from Dr. Wong’s, with a cotton ball taped in the crook of my arm and Isaac’s envelope under the floor mat.
It was ten after twelve on a Friday.
Seth’s truck was in the driveway. He never came home before six.
The magnet on the refrigerator
He was at the island with a sandwich he wasn’t eating.
“Where were you?”
“The laundromat.”
“With no laundry.”
“I went to see if the big machine was fixed. For the comforter.”
He looked at my arm. I’d pulled my sleeve down over the cotton ball in the car. He looked at the sleeve anyway, longer than a person looks at a sleeve.
“Look at you,” he said. “You remembered the comforter.”
That night he sorted Friday into my palm. Two white. One yellow.
I did it the way I did it Thursday. Under the tongue, open wide, the smile. Then the bathroom, the tissue, the slipper. By Sunday there were four of them in there, wrapped up like baby teeth.
And I had to play the fog. That was the hard part.
I had to sit for the nine o’clock news and let my chin go down on my chest and not move when he came and slid my reading glasses off my face. I had to ask him twice what day it was. Saturday I put a pot of water on and walked out to the garage, and he came running and shut it off.
“See?” he said. “See, babe?”
He sounded happy.
Sunday morning there was a new magnet on the refrigerator, the kind with a dentist’s phone number on it, holding a white card.
MONDAY 10:00 AM. MEMORY AND COGNITIVE EVALUATION.
“I made you an appointment,” Seth said. “Just so we know where we are. I’ll drive you. I’ll be right there the whole time.”
The refrigerator ticked.
I didn’t have to read the card upside down. I read it standing in front of it with my coffee, the name across the top in blue raised letters.
Roy Bautista, M.D.
The doctor on Isaac’s screen. The one who’d been writing my yellow pills since February.
Barbara
Monday at seven Seth went out to start the truck and warm my side, the way he always did.
I called Autumn from the upstairs bathroom with the fan running.
She picked up on the second ring. Eight months, and she picked up on the second ring.
“Mom? Are you okay? Is Seth there?”
That was the first thing she asked. Is Seth there.
“He’s outside. Autumn, I need you to listen to me.”
“He said you’d call.” Her voice was the one she uses for customers. “He said you might call and say things about him. He said that’s part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“Mom, you called me Barbara. In June. You left me a whole message about the casserole dish like I was Aunt Barbara, and Aunt Barbara’s been dead eleven years.”
I sat down on the lid of the toilet.
“I still have it,” she said. “I play it sometimes. I don’t even know why I play it.”
“He’s putting something in my pills, honey.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. I could hear the credit union’s hold music on her desk phone, the same four notes.
“That’s what he said you’d say. Those words. He called me in July, Mom. He cried on the phone. He said he didn’t know what to do with you by himself anymore.”
“What did you do?”
“I wrote a letter for your doctor. That’s all I did. That you’ve been confused since spring. That the family’s worried.” She stopped. “I’m the family. There’s nobody else to say it.”
“I took a pill to Isaac. He locked the door. He printed it all out. There’s a woman picking up my prescriptions, Autumn, and she signs the book as you.”
“Mom.”
“She says she’s my daughter.”
“He said you might start thinking people were pretending to be other people,” Autumn said. “He read me a list. Of things you might say.”
Down in the driveway the truck horn went. Two short ones.
“He said you’d thank me,” Autumn said. “When you were better.”
Suite 4 on Truxtun
Dr. Bautista’s office was upstairs from a nail salon, and the stairwell smelled like the nail salon.
Seth held my elbow on every step. He talked to me like a crossing guard. Watch the lip, babe. One more. Good girl.
The woman behind the front window had on a green coat with the sleeves pushed up.
She slid a clipboard out through the slot without looking at me. She looked at Seth.
The intake page was already filled out in block capitals. My name. My birthday. The yellow pill written in under MEDICATIONS. And at the bottom, under REFERRED BY, a big looped K that went around twice.
I’d seen that K in my guest book in November. I’d seen it seven times on Isaac’s screen.
“Sign at the bottom, babe,” Seth said.
I signed it. I made my hand slow, my name sliding downhill off the line.
Dr. Bautista was eighty if he was a day, in a sweater vest with a hole by the second button. He gave me three words to remember. Apple, table, pencil. He asked me the year and the president. He asked me to count backward from a hundred by sevens.
I taught arithmetic for thirty-one years. I got to sixty-five and stopped, to see what he’d write.
He didn’t write anything.
The woman in the green coat came in with a second clipboard and set it on his desk, facing him. Upside down to me.
It was a form with the county seal at the top. A score was typed in the box: 12 out of 30. The date typed beside it was last Friday, the morning I sat in Isaac’s consult room with the door locked.
Paper-clipped behind it was a letter on credit union stationery, signed in Autumn’s round handwriting. My mother has been confused since spring.
Dr. Bautista picked up a pen.
“Apple,” I said. “Table. Pencil.”
He stopped with the pen over the line. The woman in the green coat laid her hand flat on the form, next to his.
“She does that, Doctor,” Seth said. “She has good minutes.”
Dr. Bautista signed.
On the way out she buzzed us through the glass door, and Seth stopped in it and turned around. He didn’t lower his voice. Why would he? I didn’t remember most of the week.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said.
She licked her thumb and rubbed something off his cheek.
Sunday, refill night
Dr. Wong’s envelope came Wednesday. I got it out of the mailbox while Seth was still asleep.
That afternoon I drove to Brundage Lane and parked across from the credit union and texted Autumn a picture of every page Isaac printed. The box that said daughter. Kristy’s license number. 1968. The intake page I’d signed, the K at the bottom. The last thing I sent was the lab result with the drug’s name circled in Dr. Wong’s red pen.
I waited an hour. She didn’t answer. She didn’t come out.
So I drove home and let Seth take my glasses off at the nine o’clock news, four more nights.
Sunday he came in at eight with the pharmacy bag and sat down at the island to fill the organizer, and there was already paper on it.
Isaac’s printouts, squared at the corners. The lab result. The tissue from the toe of my slipper, opened flat, with ten yellow pills lined up in a row like a spelling test. And a quitclaim deed I’d typed at the library on Thursday, with Seth’s name on the line that gives his half of my house back to me.
I’d set a pen on top of it.
He read it all standing up. Then he laughed, the long one.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Freda. This is a new one.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You want to know what a judge sees? A sixty-two-year-old woman who leaves burners on. Who calls her own kid by her dead sister’s name. I’ve got that on tape, babe. Autumn sent it to me. Your daughter wrote a letter. And a doctor with a license signed on Monday that you can’t run a checkbook.” He tapped the deed. “You think this is a deed? This is a symptom. This is going in the file.”
“Your mother signs for my pills.”
“My mother’s dead. I told you that.”
“Her license says 1968.”
He quit tapping.
“Isaac sent the prescription to the state board,” I said.
Seth sat down. He put both hands flat on the island and looked at them.
“Do you know what this year was like for me? The crusts? Your cold feet on my legs every night? The goddamn news at nine? You think a man with a boat marries a schoolteacher for the company?” He picked up the deed and dropped it. “The washes are under, Freda. All four of them. Rosedale’s been closed since March. Your house is the only thing on either side of this that’s worth anything. I was going to put you somewhere nice. Mom found a place with a garden. You’d have liked it. You wouldn’t have known the difference.”
“You’d have known.”
“I’d have been fine.” He pushed the organizer at me. “You sign everything. You sign whatever I put in front of you. You think one bad week in your head and you’re somebody else?”
Then a key went into the front door.
Autumn came in with the strawberry swinging off her ring and her purse on her shoulder. She didn’t take her coat off. She set the purse on the island and took out the zip bag, and out of the zip bag a stamp and a black journal.
“Hi, Seth,” she said.
“Autumn. Thank God. Look at this. Look what she’s doing.”
“I played it again,” she said. “The voicemail. Wednesday night, after Mom’s pictures. With headphones this time.” She looked at me and then back at him. “You’re in it. In the background. ‘Did you take the yellow one, babe?’ You say it twice.”
Seth didn’t say anything for the first time all night.
“I’m a notary,” Autumn said. “I can do it right here. Or I can take my letter down to the police on Truxtun in the morning and tell them where it went.”
“And the forty-one thousand?” Seth said. He said it to me. “That’s gone. That went into the washes. You’re never seeing that.”
“Keep it,” I said.
He picked up the pen. He held it over the line a long time, like Dr. Bautista.
Then he signed his name, and Autumn opened her journal and turned it around for him to sign that too.
She pressed the stamp down on his name and held it there.
Thursday’s lid
It was a Sunday in October, eight o’clock, and I was at the island with the organizer open.
Blood pressure in the morning. Cholesterol and an aspirin at night. I filled it myself now, out of bottles with my name on them, from the little pharmacy by the laundromat. Isaac put a sticky note on the bag every time. That week it said Hi Freda and nothing else.
The boat had a FOR SALE sign on it in a lot on Rosedale. I drove past once. I didn’t stop.
There was a letter from the state board in September asking me to come in and say what happened, and I went in and said it. Dr. Bautista’s window had paper over it by then. The nail salon was still open.
The forty-one thousand was gone. My retirement had a hole in it the shape of a car wash tunnel I never saw, and I went to the grocery store with a list and a calculator.
Autumn sat across from me on Sundays. She brought the strawberry key and set it on the counter where I could see it, and she didn’t stand over anything.
Thursday’s lid had a crack in it from the night it hit the floor. I could buy a new organizer for four dollars.
The refrigerator ticked.
“You want me to check them?” Autumn said.
“No,” I said, and I pressed Thursday shut with my thumb.
If someone you love started losing their evenings after a new person moved in, go sit at their kitchen island on a Sunday night and count the pills with them.
For more family secrets and money disputes, read the husband who kept a hospital final notice hidden in his jeans and the parents who collected rent while hiding their daughter from a bride-to-be. Then see what happened when a father refused to co-sign a laundromat loan and the judge called his name.
