My husband spent nineteen months cutting my food and reading my mail to me, and last Sunday I heard him tell his brother, “She can’t find the toilet without me, she won’t know the difference.” He thought I was still blind. Two nights later he slid a folder under our mattress, and it had my name on it next to $7,850 a month.
It was supposed to be the best surprise of our forty-one years.
Instead I sat on the edge of our bed with one eye working and a form in my hands that said I was losing my mind.
The bleeds started in March of last year. Both eyes, two weeks apart, from the sugar I’d been told to watch since I was fifty.
After that the world was wet gray paper.
Hubert did everything.
He laid my pills out in an egg carton every night. He counted the steps to the bathroom with me until I could do it alone, and then he counted them again because I asked him to.
“I’ve got you, Paulie,” he said. “Forty-one years. I’ve got you.”
I believed every word of it.
Then around June he started taking his calls in the garage.
He quit reading me the mail. He’d say “junk” and I’d hear the paper hit the bin before I could ask.
If I knocked a glass over, he’d stand there breathing through his nose until I found the towel myself.
I told myself he was tired. Seventy-one is old to become somebody’s eyes.
The second surgery was in July. Dr. Villareal said the left eye might clear and might not, and for six weeks it didn’t.
Then one morning in September the bathroom light had an edge.
Then the faucet did.
Then my own hand.
At my follow-up three weeks ago I asked Hubert to wait out front, and I asked Dr. Villareal to keep it between us.
She looked at me a long time over her glasses. “That’s your call to make,” she said.
Our anniversary is November 14th. I wanted to sit across from him at the steakhouse in Logansport where he proposed and read him the menu.
So I kept my eyes loose and let him steer me around doorframes.
It’s harder than you’d think, not flinching when somebody reaches past your face.
Last Sunday I was folding towels on the couch and he was in the kitchen on speaker with his brother Efrain.
“She can’t find the toilet without me,” Hubert said. “She won’t know the difference, Ef. Not where she’s going.”
“You tell her yet?”
“Tell her what? She thinks the microwave’s haunted.”
Efrain laughed.
I kept folding.
The microwave had been beeping by itself for a week. I could see now it was the door, which he never shut all the way.
Tuesday night I was lying on top of the covers when he came in.
He didn’t turn on the lamp. The hall light was behind him, and he didn’t need the lamp for my sake.
He lifted the corner of the mattress on my side and slid something flat under it. Blue.
Then he leaned over me and moved his hand back and forth above my face.
Slow. Twice.
I looked at the ceiling fan and let his hand go by.
“You awake?” he said.
“Barely.”
“Go to sleep, Paula.”
The clock on his nightstand said 10:52. It had run eleven minutes fast since Christmas and neither of us ever fixed it.
I didn’t sleep.
Wednesday is his breakfast with the guys from the plant. He left at 7:15 like always, and I waited until the truck was all the way gone.
The folder was right where my hip had been all night.
On the front was the name of a place in raised gold letters, and inside was a picture of a woman my age in a cardigan, smiling at a bird feeder.
Under that, an admission form.
Resident: Paula Voss.
Unit: MEMORY CARE. Secured wing.
I held it four inches from my good eye and read every line twice.
Reason for placement: progressive confusion. Wandering at night. Unable to manage own medications.
He laid out my medications. In an egg carton. Every night.
Monthly rate, $7,850. Deposit, $4,000, already paid from an account ending in 3318.
My account. Where my disability back pay went.
Move-in date: November 3.
Twelve days.
Behind the form was a letter from a doctor I had never met. It said he’d evaluated me in person on October 2 and found me unable to make decisions about my residence or my money.
October 2 I was home on the couch.
Hubert was at “the dentist.”
I said it out loud to the empty bedroom. “I HAVE NEVER BEEN CONFUSED A DAY IN MY LIFE.”
My voice sounded like somebody else’s.
Behind the letter was a listing agreement for the house. $318,000. Signed by Hubert, and signed again on the line under it by Hubert, with POA printed beside his name.
I didn’t know he had power of attorney.
Then I did.
I’d signed something in the hospital that first March. He told me it was for the insurance.
The last thing in the folder was a yellow sticky note in his square handwriting.
“E, tell her it’s REHAB. Two weeks. She’ll believe anything now.”
I was still sitting there with it open on my knees when I heard the truck.
Not at 9:30.
At 8:05.
His key in the lock. His boots on the mat, scraped twice, the way he always does.
“Paula?”
I didn’t move.
He came down the hall and stopped in the bedroom doorway, and I kept my eyes on the wall beside his head, loose, the way I’d practiced.
“Forgot my wallet,” he said.
Then he didn’t say anything.
I could see him. That’s the part I can’t get past. I could see exactly where he was looking.
At the corner of the mattress, still lifted.
At the blue folder open in my lap.
He took one step into the room and held his hand up in front of my face, and this time he didn’t move it.
“Paula,” he said. “How long?”
8:05
“Since September,” I said.
I said it to the wall first, out of habit. Then I turned my head and looked at him.
He had on the brown work jacket with the torn cuff. He’d missed a patch shaving on the left side of his jaw, where he always misses.
“September,” he said.
“The bathroom light. Then the faucet.”
He put his hand down.
“You’ve been reading,” he said.
I peeled the sticky note off the form and held it up at the distance I need, four inches, and read it to him. “E, tell her it’s REHAB. Two weeks. She’ll believe anything now.”
“Give me that, Paulie.”
“No.”
He came two more steps and stopped at the foot of the bed. I pulled the folder against my chest with both arms, the way you hold a cat that wants down.
“That’s not what it looks like,” he said.
“It looks like a secured wing.”
He didn’t answer that. He looked over at his nightstand the way he does when he’s hunting his reading glasses.
There was no wallet on it. There was the clock, the lamp and his comb.
His wallet was in his back pocket. I could see the square of it through the denim.
The calendar by the garage door
We’ve lived in this house since 1987. We paid $61,000 for it, the year after Efrain lost his first tow lot and Hubert cosigned on the second one. We ate a lot of soup that winter.
For forty-one years Hubert has written our life on a free calendar from the feed store. It hangs on a nail by the door to the garage. Dentist. Furnace filter. Efrain’s birthday, which he never once missed.
After the bleeds he wrote my eye drops on it in black marker, and every morning he stood there with his coffee and read me the day.
“Drops at eight. Pills are in the carton. Janina’s bringing the chicken thing.”
Janina lives across the street. She brought a casserole every Thursday for a year and told me at the mailbox that she’d never seen a man do what Hubert did.
“He’s a saint, Paula,” she said. “My first husband wouldn’t have handed me a Kleenex.”
I agreed with her. Everybody on our street agreed with her.
The first call he took in the garage was in June. I know because the phone was on the kitchen table when it rang and I heard a woman say “Dr. Villareal’s office” before he picked it up and walked out. When he came back in I heard the marker squeak on the calendar.
“Surgery’s July ninth,” he said. “We’ll get you there.”
In May my disability back pay had come through. $38,400, into the credit union account I’d had since I worked the bakery counter downtown. The account ending in 3318.
Hubert sat me down at the kitchen table when the letter came.
“That’s yours,” he said. “That’s your money. Don’t you ever let me touch it.”
Now he stood at the foot of our bed and looked at his watch, and then at the window.
“Paulie,” he said. “Put that down and let me talk before she gets here.”
Out front, a car door shut.
Suzanne
Her name was Suzanne Maddox and she was the intake coordinator. She had a lanyard and a tablet in a pink case and the kind of shoes you can stand in all day.
Hubert had set the visit for 8:30. He hadn’t forgotten anything. He’d come back to be in the room when she met me.
He walked me to the kitchen with his hand on my elbow, steering, the way he’d done for nineteen months. I let him. I still had the folder against my chest.
“She’s had a rough night,” he said to Suzanne. “She’s been telling me since I came in that she can read.”
“That happens,” Suzanne said. She set the tablet on our table. “A lot of times family sees it before anybody.”
“I’d like you to call my eye doctor,” I said.
“We can certainly request records, Mrs. Voss.”
“Her office doesn’t open till nine,” Hubert said. “I’ve called it enough times.”
The microwave said 8:34. Its door was open half an inch, same as always.
Suzanne took a white card out of her pocket and held it about a foot from me. “Can you read me the top line, Mrs. Voss?”
I couldn’t at a foot. I leaned in until it was four inches from my left eye.
“Welcome home,” I read. Then the name of the place, the same raised gold letters as the folder.
“She’s had that brochure in her lap all morning,” Hubert said. “She knows it by heart.”
Suzanne made a note.
“Let’s try something else,” she said. “What year did you two get married?”
“Nineteen eighty-four. June second.”
Hubert reached over and patted my hand.
“It was eighty-five, hon,” he said, and Suzanne wrote it down.
The green bin
I asked to use the bathroom.
Hubert pushed his chair back to get up with me.
“I know the steps,” I said. “You counted them.”
I went down the hall past the bathroom door and opened the one to the garage.
It was cold out there and smelled like the truck. The engine was still ticking. Against the wall was the green recycling bin, the one every piece of “junk” had gone into since June.
Pickup is every other Friday. It was close to full.
I dug under a cereal box and a stack of grocery flyers. The envelopes were at the bottom, opened neat along the top with his pocketknife, all from the credit union.
I took them to the light over the workbench and held them up one at a time.
A home equity line of credit on our house. $96,000. Opened June 12.
Signed Hubert Voss, and under it, POA.
The next one said the payment was past due. The one after that said ninety days past due. The last one had a red box at the top and the word foreclosure in it, and a date in January.
Then a statement for the account ending in 3318.
$38,400 in May. The $4,000 deposit to the place with the bird feeder in October. And in the middle, June 16, a check cleared for $20,000.
The credit union sends a little picture of the check now. I held it so close the paper touched my eyelashes.
Pay to the order of Efrain Voss.
My back pay. Signed by my husband, on my behalf.
In the memo line, in his square handwriting, one word. Lot.
June 12
The calendar was on its nail by the door. October’s page was showing.
I took it down and flipped back to June.
There was the twelfth. In black marker, in the same square hand, two lines.
Villareal called. Surg 7/9.
Bank 2:00.
The same afternoon. The call he’d taken out to the garage.
I turned to September.
9/14 P turned to lamp?
9/20 P looked at clock??
9/30 Brouwer. $600 cash.
The name on the doctor’s letter was Brouwer.
I turned to October. My drops were on it, every day at eight. Efrain’s birthday on the eleventh, with a star. On the second, where he’d told me “dentist,” it said Brouwer letter.
On the nineteenth, the Sunday he’d laughed on the phone, it said Ef ok for 11/3.
On the twenty-first, Tuesday, the night of the folder, there was one line.
Hand test. Nothing.
I stood there and read it until the letters went soft.
He’d been checking my eyes since the week they started coming back. Three days after the bathroom light, he’d written a question mark about me on the wall where he wrote my drops.
All those mornings with his coffee. Reading me the day.
He’d been reading it to me off this.
Behind me the kitchen door opened, and Suzanne said, “Mrs. Voss? Is everything all right out here?”
The kitchen table
I carried it all in and laid it on the table in front of her. The calendar open to October. The foreclosure notice. The little picture of the check.
Then I shut the microwave door until it clicked.
It said 9:00.
I picked up the big-button phone Hubert had set up for me and dialed Dr. Villareal’s office from memory, and I put it on speaker.
“Paula,” Hubert said. “Don’t do this in front of a stranger.”
The girl at the desk put me through.
“Mrs. Voss,” Dr. Villareal said. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a woman here from a memory care place,” I said. “You can tell her what I read in your office three weeks ago. That’s my call to make.”
There was a pause. Then she said it. Twenty over sixty in the left eye. Oriented, sharp, every visit since March of last year. And she’d never heard of a Dr. Brouwer in this county.
Suzanne thanked her. Then she turned her tablet face down on the table.
Hubert talked.
“You want to do this here? Fine. Let’s do it here.” He put his finger on the check. “You know what that was? That was Ef or the bank taking his house. Thirty years I’ve kept that man above water. You knew that when you married me.”
Nobody said anything.
“I was going to put it back. The house sells, the line’s paid, you’re somewhere with nurses and a bird feeder instead of here falling over the vacuum cleaner. That place is nicer than this house, Paula. I went and looked at it. I walked the whole wing.”
“It’s locked,” I said.
“Because people wander.” He pushed the calendar away from him. “Nineteen months. I cut your meat. I laid out every pill. I’m seventy-one years old and I haven’t slept a whole night since March. Don’t you look at me like I did something to you.”
Suzanne stood up. “We won’t be admitting Mrs. Voss,” she said. “The deposit is refundable before move-in. I’ll have it returned to the account it came from. And I have to report that letter.”
Hubert didn’t look at her. He looked at me.
“Report it,” he said. “Report whatever. The bank sends a man in January either way. No sale, no house. For either one of us.” He tapped the red box. “You wanted to see so bad. Go ahead and read that.”
I took the listing agreement out of the folder.
His name was on it twice. There was a third line, the owner’s line, empty.
I asked Suzanne for her pen. I held the page four inches from my eye and signed Paula Voss on it myself, and beside the POA I wrote revoked, and the date.
Then I took the egg carton off the counter and set it in front of me.
“You can go stay at Efrain’s,” I said.
“Where am I supposed to sleep at Ef’s?”
“Ask him. It’s his lot.”
November 14th
Janina drove me to the steakhouse in Logansport.
The sign in our front yard has my name on the listing now. There’s an offer at $304,000, and after the line is paid there will be enough for the two-bedroom over the pharmacy on my side of town, where the bus stops out front. Hubert is at Efrain’s. Neither of us has called a lawyer yet, but the credit union has a letter from me, and so does the county.
We sat in a booth by the window. The waitress brought menus and set one down in front of Janina and looked at me and didn’t set one down.
“Could I have one too,” I said.
I read it to Janina, every line, four inches from my face. The specials, the sides, the price of the shrimp.
When the plates came the waitress turned my plate around so the steak was close to me, and looked at Janina.
“Want me to cut that up for her, hon?”
“No,” I said, and picked up the knife.
If you know somebody who’s been somebody else’s eyes for a while, check on both of them this week.
For more stories of trust turned upside down, read “He Paid For My Best Friend’s Steak With My Mother’s Card” and “I Scanned Her Ticket Too. I Had Seventeen Hours Left In That Car.”.
