My son’s wife looked at my belly over Sunday pot roast and said, “That’s not a tumor, Norma, that’s pie, and we’re not paying $280 for some doctor to call you fat.” My son had my checkbook and agreed with her. Then a scan at the ER found what was growing in me, and an old form with my dead husband’s signature on it.
If she was right, I was an old woman going soft in the middle.
If she was wrong, I’d let her talk me out of a doctor while Matt kept a brochure for the assisted living place out on Route 11 tucked behind his sun visor.
He thought I hadn’t seen it.
I’d seen it.
The swelling started back in June.
First it was the button on my good slacks.
By August I was wearing Willard’s old flannel shirts untucked, the ones I never took to the church drive, because nothing else of mine closed over it.
By October I couldn’t tie my shoes without holding my breath.
Tracy noticed every bit of it and said all of it out loud.
“Eating for two now, Norma?” she said at Daisy’s birthday, tapping the front of my shirt with one long pink nail. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
Matt laughed into his beer.
Nobody else did.
Daisy is my granddaughter, twenty-three, Matt’s girl from his first marriage, and she has her grandfather’s way of saying nothing for an hour and then the one true thing.
She found me at the sink afterward, scraping plates.
“Gram, that isn’t fat,” she said. “Fat doesn’t sit like that.”
“I’m seventy-nine, honey. Things sit where they want.”
“Then let me drive you.”
“Your dad has the checkbook.”
She dried the same plate a long time. “I didn’t say anything about the checkbook.”
Since I fell on the ice the winter before last, Matt signs my checks and Tracy fills them out.
I learn what I spent when the statement comes.
So I let it go.
I let it go right through Halloween.
Then on Sunday I woke at ten after five with a weight under my ribs, like somebody was sitting on me from the inside.
I lay there with both palms flat on my belly.
It moved.
Something rolled, slow, the way a jar lid rolls across the counter before it settles.
I didn’t call Matt.
I called Daisy, and she was in my driveway in her work scrubs before the coffee finished.
They put me on a bed at Mercy in Wilkes-Barre, on paper that crackled every time I breathed.
The ultrasound tech had a plastic pumpkin of candy corn on her cart, left from the night before.
She moved the wand around a long time without a word.
Then she said she’d be right back, and she took the pumpkin with her.
Daisy laughed at that, one short laugh, and then she didn’t.
The doctor who came in was a small woman with reading glasses on a beaded cord, Dr. Sarmiento, and behind her was a second doctor who never gave his name.
“Mrs. Tomaszewski, you have a cyst on your left ovary,” she said. “A big one. About fourteen centimeters.”
Daisy held her hands apart in the air, measuring, and put them back in her lap.
“That’s not PIE,” Daisy said.
They wanted more pictures. They wanted my old charts.
Daisy called her father from the hall, and I heard her say “No, Dad, NOW” twice.
He got there at noon.
Tracy didn’t come. Tracy had a hair appointment.
Dr. Sarmiento brought us into an office with one chair too few, so Matt stood behind mine.
“Something came up when we pulled your old records,” she said. “This isn’t new.”
“It started in June,” I said.
“LONGER.” She turned her monitor toward us. “In 2017 you had a CT for a kidney stone at the old clinic downtown. The radiologist saw a five-centimeter cyst on that same ovary and flagged it for follow-up.”
“Nobody ever told me that.”
“Somebody was told.” She scrolled. “There’s a release attached. Follow-up DECLINED by the patient’s health care proxy.”
“Dad,” Matt said.
“Willard Tomaszewski,” she said. “Signed March ninth, 2017.”
He died that May.
I was married to that man FORTY-EIGHT YEARS.
He carried my purse into every waiting room I ever sat in. He knew I couldn’t take codeine and which nurse at Dr. Barakat’s I liked.
And he signed a paper saying I didn’t need to know.
“Why would he do that?” I said.
“There’s a witness line,” Dr. Sarmiento said. “Usually that’s office staff.”
She read it off the screen.
“T. Romano.”
Matt’s hand came off the back of my chair.
Daisy turned to him. So did I.
His face did what it did when he was eight and I found the lamp in pieces behind the couch, the color going out of it from the top down until even his mouth was gray.
“Matt,” I said.
“Let me see that,” he said.
He bent to the monitor and read it twice.
He put one finger on the screen, right over the name, like he could rub it off.
“Who’s Romano?” I said.
He didn’t answer me. He turned to Daisy.
“Dad,” she said. “Who is that?”
“Romano’s her maiden name,” he said. “Tracy’s.”
Daisy’s chair scraped.
“I met her in 2019,” Matt said. “At the Elks bingo. She told me she NEVER MET DAD. She cried at his grave because she was sorry she never got the chance.”
Dr. Sarmiento took her glasses off and let them hang on the cord.
His phone buzzed on the desk. The screen lit up with Tracy’s name and a picture of her in sunglasses.
Matt turned it face down.
It buzzed against the wood five more times, and nobody touched it.
Then Dr. Sarmiento cleared her throat.
“There’s one more file on this release,” she said. “It isn’t medical.”
March ninth
She clicked once, and a page came up on the screen sideways.
Yellow legal paper, the kind Willard bought by the dozen at the Rite Aid and wrote everything on, from grocery lists to his own obituary. Blue ink. His capital N with the little hook on it.
Dr. Sarmiento turned it the right way up.
To the office. Please hold Norma’s follow-up till June. She drives me to Geisinger three days a week and she will not do two of these at once, I know her. Call her yourself on June 1. Do not call me, I won’t be any good by then. Thank you for everything. W. Tomaszewski.
Daisy read it out loud, slow, the way she reads me prescription labels.
Then she read the date at the bottom. March ninth, same as the form.
I put my hand out, and Matt didn’t take it, so I put it on the desk.
“June first,” I said. “Who was supposed to call me?”
Dr. Sarmiento looked at the screen.
“It’s addressed to the office,” she said. “The witness was office staff.”
Matt’s phone started up again.
This time he picked it up and went out in the hall to answer it.
Geisinger, three days a week
Willard found out in January 2017. Pancreas. The doctor at Geisinger said months, and he said it to Willard, not to me, and Willard wrote it on a yellow pad like it was the price of tires.
I drove him. Danville and back, three days a week, an hour and twenty each way with a bucket on the floor of the Buick.
He kept everything in a blue accordion folder. Every bill, every card, every appointment. When he got too weak to carry it, I carried it, and he carried my purse anyway.
The kidney stone was in there somewhere. A Wednesday in March, me bent over in the clinic downtown, him in the waiting room with his port taped up under his shirt.
I remember the CT. I remember the girl at the front window, because he brought her Fig Newtons every time, and she called him Mr. T, and she had a laugh you could hear out in the lot.
I don’t remember her face. I wasn’t looking at faces that spring.
He died May eleventh. The funeral home gave me a guest book with a green cloth cover, and I put it in the hutch under the good tablecloth. The folder went on the top shelf of our closet, behind his flannel shirts, and I shut the door on all of it.
Two years later Matt brought Tracy to Thanksgiving.
She was forty-three, loud, brown in November, and she hugged me before he said her name. She did the dishes without being asked. She told me she was so sorry she never met Willard, that Matt talked about him like a saint, and she cried a little, and I liked her for it.
Something about her laugh. I put it down to the Elks.
When I fell on the ice, it was Tracy who said Matt should take the checkbook. Tracy who sat at my kitchen table with her nails and a pen and said, “Let me worry about it, Norma.”
She worried about it. I got the statements.
In the little office at Mercy, Dr. Sarmiento folded her hands.
“Mrs. Tomaszewski. Did anybody call you that June?”
“That June I was picking out a headstone,” I said.
Room 412
They kept me two nights for the pain and the fluid, and a surgeon with cold hands put me on his schedule for the nineteenth.
Tracy came Monday at three, sunglasses on her head, with a gift shop balloon that said GET WELL in gold.
She tied it to my bed rail and kissed the air near my cheek.
“Well, aren’t you famous,” she said. “Matt told me. That whole thing with the form.”
“T. Romano,” I said.
“Norma, I temped at four offices that year. I witnessed a hundred of those. Old men signing for their wives every day of the week. You think I remember one?”
“You told Matt you never met Willard.”
“I never MET him. I stamped a paper.” She laughed, and there it was, the laugh you could hear out in the lot. “The drugs they’ve got you on.”
Matt sat in the chair by the window and looked at the balloon.
“Matt,” I said. “I need my checkbook. The surgeon’s office wants something up front.”
“Tracy has it,” he said.
“It’s in my purse,” Tracy said. “I’ll handle it.”
“I want to write it myself.”
“You can’t hold a pen with that IV.” She patted the hand with the tape on it. “Matt, show her the balance so she stops.”
He took the checkbook out of her purse and held the register open in front of me like a menu.
My handwriting stopped two winters ago. After that it was Tracy’s, round and leaning back.
Electric. Gas. St. Mary’s, twenty dollars every month, which was right.
October twenty-eighth. Brookside, deposit, $1,500.
Brookside is the place on Route 11.
“What’s this?” I said.
Matt closed the register.
“It’s refundable,” Tracy said. “It holds a room. They’ve got a nurse right on the floor. You’d have been seen in a week.”
“Four days before I went to the ER,” I said.
“Mom, she was trying to help,” Matt said.
Tracy put her sunglasses down over her eyes. “Somebody in this family has to.”
The green book
Daisy took me home Tuesday and stayed. She slept on my couch in her scrubs with her shoes on, like a fireman.
I couldn’t sleep. I had a drain in me and a balloon I’d made Daisy leave at the nurses’ station.
At two in the morning I got the guest book out of the hutch.
Gold letters, the funeral home’s name on the back. I hadn’t opened it since that week. You read those once, to see who came, and then you can’t stand to again.
I read every name.
Dave and Susan from the Elks. The Bible study. Dr. Barakat’s nurse, the one I liked, who wrote that Willard was the only man who ever brought her a tomato. Two cousins from Scranton who didn’t say hello to me at the luncheon.
Page four, bottom, purple ink, a hand that leaned back.
Mr. T, the window won’t be the same without you and your Fig Newtons. I’ll keep my promise. Love, Tracy Romano.
I read it standing, and then I sat down on the dining room floor because the chair was too far.
Daisy found me there at six.
She didn’t ask. She took the book out of my lap and read the page, then turned to the front and read the date stamped inside the cover. May fourteenth, 2017.
“Two years before bingo,” she said.
“She stood in that line,” I said. “She shook my hand.”
“Gram. What promise?”
I didn’t know. But I knew who would have written it down.
The top shelf
The closet still smells like him, or like the cedar block he hung in there, which is the same thing to me now.
I’m not allowed to lift over five pounds. Daisy got up on the step stool and I held it and pointed.
The flannel shirts on the rod, what was left of them. Behind them, the shelf. Behind the hatboxes, the blue folder.
She handed it down. It was heavier than I remembered, or I was lighter.
We spread it on the bed. Geisinger, Geisinger, Geisinger. The Buick insurance. A funeral home estimate he got himself in February and never showed me.
At the back, a yellow pad, the last one, the cardboard soft at the corners.
His lists went down the page in blue ink. Call Matt re gutters. Norma’s sister b-day 4/2. Change oil. The writing got bigger and worse as it went, the way it did at the end.
Then:
Clinic. Signed the hold. Tracy at window will call N. herself June 1 and book it. Promised. Gave her $50 for her trouble. She says don’t worry Mr. T, I got her.
Under it, in a different pen, shakier:
Tell N. myself if I can.
He couldn’t.
Daisy sat down on his side of the bed.
“Fifty dollars,” she said.
I held the page by the edge so I wouldn’t wrinkle it.
Then I got my phone off the nightstand and called my son.
“Ma? It’s seven in the morning.”
“Sunday,” I said. “Pot roast. Bring your wife.”
The good tablecloth
Friday Daisy drove me to the bank on Market Street. A young man named Anand, with a dish of butterscotch on his desk, read my discharge papers where they said alert and oriented, and opened me an account with one name on it.
Then I called Brookside. Refundable, Tracy had said. The woman on the phone said yes, to the account it came from, and she’d mail a check to my address.
At Anand’s desk I wrote the surgeon’s deposit. Then I wrote one to Mercy for $280.
Sunday Daisy carried the roast in, because I couldn’t. I’d put the good tablecloth on.
At Tracy’s place, where her plate should have been, I set the green book open to page four. Next to it, the yellow page, flat under a water glass.
My new checkbook sat by my fork.
Tracy came in talking about the traffic on 309, and stopped.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “This is what this is.”
Matt read the guest book over her shoulder. Then the yellow page. He stayed on one line a long time, and I knew which one.
“You want to do this? Fine.” Tracy dropped into the chair. “I was forty-two, working that window for eleven bucks an hour. A nice old man gives you fifty dollars and a sad face, you tell him what he needs to hear. Then they closed downtown the last week of May and let all us girls go. I didn’t take the appointment book home, Norma. Nobody calls from a job they don’t have.”
“You told me you never met him,” Matt said.
“Look at your face. Look at hers. THIS is why.” She pointed a nail at the book. “I saw Tomaszewski on your Elks card and I bought you a beer because I felt bad. That’s a crime now?”
“You came to the funeral home,” I said.
“Everybody came to the funeral home.” She turned to Matt. “And every time she wanted a doctor I thought, sure, go, they’ll pull the old chart, and I’m the bitch at the window who sat on his mother’s cyst. So yeah. Pie. It was a joke. Everybody laughed.”
“Nobody laughed,” Daisy said.
“Brookside has its own nurses. They’d have looked at her and never dug up a thing from 2017. I was getting her seen.” Tracy reached across my plate. “Matt. The checkbook.”
I put my hand flat on the new one.
“That one’s closed,” I said. “Brookside’s mailing me the fifteen hundred.”
Tracy looked at Matt.
Matt looked at the line about the gutters.
“Get your coat,” she said.
He stood up. He didn’t look at me. “She’s my wife, Ma.”
The storm door hit the frame twice before it caught.
The button
They took it out on the nineteenth. Close to three pounds, the surgeon said, and clean, and he held his hands apart in the air the way Daisy had.
The first Sunday in December I put on my good slacks, and the button closed.
I’d taken Willard’s flannels to the church drive the week before. All but the red one. That one’s on the hook behind the bedroom door.
Daisy made the pot roast. I sat and told her she was doing it wrong.
Matt hadn’t come the two Sundays before. He’d called once, about my gutters, and hung up before I could ask him anything else.
At ten after four his truck pulled in.
He sat in it a while. Then he reached up, took something from behind the visor, folded it in half and put it in his coat.
He came in alone. Wiped his feet. Sat down in his father’s chair.
He looked at the counter. “Who made the pie?”
“I did,” I said. “Hold out your plate.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody whose mother keeps saying it’s nothing.
Family betrayals and old wounds run through the story of a phone that rang eleven times, while a girl’s small tribute to her mother and a bitter accusation over a stolen cake show how much can be hidden beneath an ordinary family gathering.
