Three sitters in five weeks quit after one afternoon alone with my husband, and none of them would look at me on the way out. Tony just shrugged over his plate and said, “Maybe you’re bad at picking people.” So when the fourth one started, I plugged the old dog camera back in and waited for him to come home.
I’d gone back to work in Tulsa that spring, and I needed someone I could trust with Hadley, who was six, and Gage, who was four.
Tony sold flooring in three states and lived in motels.
The agency sent a woman in her late forties with a tote full of coloring books.
Four days later Tony came home early from Wichita and met her over lunch.
When I walked in at six, her coat was already zipped.
“I’m sorry, something came up at home, I can’t keep doing this,” she said to the doormat.
Next came Loretta Pennington, a retired school secretary with peppermints in her cardigan pocket.
All week she left at 5:30, and Tony never got in before nine.
Then on Sunday payroll blew up, and I begged her to come for three hours even though Tony was home.
When I pulled in, Loretta was halfway down the driveway, purse pressed against her stomach.
She didn’t stop.
“She won’t be back, ma’am, and she won’t say why,” the agency woman said that night.
I decided it was bad luck.
Then the third one QUIT after two days, AGAIN on the SAME afternoon she met Tony.
“I said hi, Dana. That’s it,” Tony said when I asked, and went back to his phone.
The dog camera still sat on the bookshelf, aimed at the big chair where he used to nap.
The fourth sitter was Kristen, about forty, the only one Gage didn’t scream at.
Tony texted that he’d swing by for lunch.
I opened the app at my desk, behind a spreadsheet.
12:14.
His truck in the window.
He said hi, and she smiled, and he stepped in too close.
And THEN I saw it.
“WHAT THE HELL IS HE DOING?” I said out loud, and I was already running for the parking lot. ⬇️
The stairwell
Josie looked up from her screen when I went past her cubicle with my phone held in front of my face. I didn’t tell her anything. I hit the stairwell door with my hip.
On the little screen Tony had a fold of twenties in his left hand, held out flat. His right hand was up, two fingers pointed at Kristen’s face. She was backed into the arm of the big chair with both hands raised, like the money was hot.
The speaker on that camera is tinny, but I got it.
“Take it,” Tony said.
“I don’t want it,” Kristen said.
That was what he’d done. He walked in on a woman he’d said hi to four minutes before and tried to hand her cash.
I was in the parking lot with my keys out and no memory of the stairs. It’s twelve minutes to our house if the lights go your way. I propped the phone on the dash and pulled out, and on the screen Tony’s mouth kept going, small as a postage stamp.
There’s a button at the bottom of the app with a microphone on it. I used to hold it down from my desk and tell the dog to get off the couch.
At the red light by the Walgreens I pressed it.
“Tony.”
It came out of the bookshelf in my own voice, a little late and flat. His hand stopped. He turned his head, not toward the door but toward the shelf, and looked into the lens like a man trying to remember where he parked.
Then he put the twenties in the zip pocket of his green fleece. He said something to Kristen I couldn’t make out, and she said something back.
He reached up out of the frame. The picture went gray.
The cord. He’d pulled it out of the wall.
Somebody honked behind me. The light was green, and I sat there with the phone dead on the dash.
My kids were in that house, and I was nine minutes away.
Per diem
When I told Tony in March that I was going back to work, he was at the stove with a spatula. He didn’t turn around.
“We don’t need it,” he said.
“I know we don’t.”
“So why?”
I said I’d done billing for eleven years before Hadley and I missed the smell of toner. He laughed and said I was the only person alive who missed toner. Then he kissed the top of my head and said, “Whatever makes you happy.”
That’s Tony. Anybody who’s met him will tell you he’s easy. He grills on Sundays and learns the name of your dog. Steve, who owns the showroom in Joplin, sends us a ham at Christmas and calls him the best closer he’s got.
He’s gone Monday to Thursday most weeks. Wichita, Springfield, Fort Smith, wherever somebody tore up a floor. He pays for his motels with cash he pulls at the ATM, and he brings the receipts home in a rubber band. On the first Sunday of the month I sit at the kitchen table with the bank statement and the rubber band and I do the books, because I’m the one who does them.
I never added up the cash. A man in a motel needs cash. And the month always came out close enough.
My paycheck goes into that same account, on the first and the fifteenth. Twelve hundred and sixty dollars each time. The mortgage on the ranch house is nineteen hundred and forty.
The dog died two summers ago. Tony bought the camera when the dog was young and couldn’t be left, and the app has only ever lived on my phone. He never opened it. After the dog died I left the camera on the shelf with the cord wound around it, because Gage kept climbing into the big chair to curl up where the dog used to sleep, and I liked knowing where the camera was pointed. It saves a clip every time something moves. For two years it had mostly saved clips of Gage.
Then the sitters.
The agency is Monique’s, a three-room office a few blocks from my building. After each woman quit Monique emailed me the form, and under reason for leaving each one had typed the same thing. Personal. Family. Something came up at home.
Nobody had a thing come up at home. I know because I asked Loretta, in her last week, whether everything was all right with her people, and she laughed and said her only people were two cats and a church.
She gave Hadley two peppermints a day from the cardigan pocket and said three would rot her teeth. Hadley had opinions about this. She told me every night that Miss Loretta was the best one.
And Tony was the one who came home early or showed up at lunch, in three cases out of three. Every time I asked him he was surprised I’d asked.
“I said hi,” he’d say. “What am I supposed to do, not say hi?”
I wasn’t angry at him. That’s what I keep trying to tell people. I thought I was running a bad streak, and I thought maybe he was right and I picked people wrong. I checked their references twice.
I drove into my own street at 12:31. Kristen’s Corolla was at the curb.
Tony was on the front step with his hands in his pockets, and he was smiling.
Kristen’s coat
“There she is,” he said. “Jesus, Dana, what was that, was that the dog thing? I thought that was dead.”
“Where are the kids?”
“Coloring. Everybody’s fine. Come on in.”
I walked past him. Hadley was at the kitchen table with a box of crayons. Gage was on Kristen’s lap, and Kristen was sitting very straight on a kitchen chair with her coat on.
It was zipped to her chin.
“Hi, Mommy,” Hadley said. “Miss Kristen can draw a horse.”
“That’s great, baby.”
Tony came in behind me and took a beer out of the fridge at twelve-thirty on a Tuesday. “So here’s what happened,” he said. “She asked me for an advance. Pay. On her first day. I said that’s between you and the agency, and she got upset, and then I felt bad and offered her a couple hundred out of my pocket. And she got hysterical, honest to God. I’m sorry you had to see that on a screen.”
He’d said that in one breath, and he’d had eleven minutes to put it together.
“I heard it,” I said. “She said she didn’t want it.”
“Because she’s embarrassed.”
I looked at Kristen. She was looking at Gage’s hair.
“Kristen. Can I talk to you on the porch?”
On the porch I shut the door behind us and asked it straight. “Did he touch you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did he say something to you?”
“I need to go home,” Kristen said. “Please. I’m sorry. My husband’s going to wonder.”
“I’ll pay you for the day. I’ll pay you for the week. Just tell me what he said.”
She had her car keys out already. She had them pinched between two fingers like she was about to sign for something.
“I’ll lose the job anyway,” she said. “I know how this goes.”
“How does it go?”
She went down the steps. At the bottom she turned and, for the first time, looked me in the face.
“He said everybody takes it,” she said. “Ask him who everybody is.”
I stood on the porch and let her go, and I told myself I’d fix it by dinner. That was my first try, and I want it on the record that it was a bad one. I let the only person who’d tell me anything drive off, because I didn’t have a thing to hold her with.
Tony was on the phone when I came back in. He was standing at the sink with his back to me and the kids’ crayons in front of him.
“Monique? Tony Mayfield, Dana’s husband. Hey, listen, I hate to do this. It’s about Kristen.”
He put it on speaker. He did that on purpose, with me standing in the doorway.
He said she’d asked for money. He said she’d cried. He said he wasn’t going to push it, he just thought the agency ought to have it on file.
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Monique said. “I’ll make a note.”
Tony hung up and gave me the look of a man who’s had a hard day at someone else’s expense.
“See?” he said. “You’ve got to be careful who you let in the house.”
Four hundred
I did the books on a Tuesday night, which is not when I do the books.
The kids were down. Tony was on the couch with the game on and his phone on his chest, and I sat at the kitchen table with the laptop and the bank open, and I didn’t need the rubber band for this.
I scrolled back five weeks.
Every ATM pull in that account was sixty dollars or eighty dollars or a hundred. Motel money. Gas. I’d looked at those numbers on the first Sunday of every month for six years and never once thought about them.
Except three. Three withdrawals of four hundred dollars. April 2. April 16. April 29.
I had to count on my fingers. April 2 was the Friday the first woman put her coat on. April 16 was the Monday before Loretta came. April 29 was the day before the third one quit.
Twelve hundred dollars. That is almost an entire paycheck of mine, and my checks are what land in that account, because nothing of Tony’s goes in except his deposit on the fifteenth.
I sat there with the number until the game went to commercial.
Loretta’s number was on the fridge, on the agency sheet, under a magnet from the dentist. I took the phone out to the back step and shut the sliding door.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Loretta, it’s Dana. I’m not calling to accuse you of anything.”
There was a long breath on the line.
“I wondered when somebody would call,” she said.
“Did something happen on that Sunday?”
“He came to the laundry room.” Her voice went small. “I was getting Gage’s shirt out of the dryer. He shut the door behind him and he had a bank envelope. He said it was for my trouble. He said I’d be doing your family a favor.”
I thought of her halfway down the driveway with her purse against her stomach, like she was holding in a stitch.
“How much?”
“Four hundred. In twenties.”
I put my hand over my mouth. Behind me, through the glass, the game came back on.
“I took it, Dana. I did. I’m sixty-four and my roof needs work and I took it and walked out and I haven’t been able to look at a peppermint since. I haven’t spent it. It’s in my sewing drawer in the same envelope. It’s got his handwriting on the front. Just an L.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said it’d be a kindness. That’s all he said.” Then she added, in the voice she must have used on fourth graders who’d already been caught, “He said you’d be home by June. Is that so?”
The clip
I stayed on the back step a long time after we hung up.
Everybody takes it. Kristen had said. Three twenties short of a fold, and a man who looked into a lens like he’d misplaced something.
I opened the app. At the bottom is a list of the clips it saved, each one a thumbnail with a time stamp, and I had never once scrolled past Gage. Today’s was the biggest. 12:14, four minutes and eleven seconds. Tony had pulled the cord at the end, and the app had kept everything up to there.
I took the phone upstairs to the bathroom and shut the door and ran the sink, and I held the speaker to my ear.
Tony: “Sit down, sit down, you’re fine. I’m not here to bother you. Dana says you’re good with the kids.”
Kristen: “Thank you. They’re sweet.”
Tony: “Here’s the thing, though. Can I be honest? My wife goes back to work, and she’s thrilled, she’s got her little desk. Then what happens? She’s tired. She’s short with the kids. She calls me in Wichita crying. And then she quits. Every time. You go home today, take this, say something came up, and she’s home by June. Good for everybody.”
Kristen: “I don’t want it. I like this job.”
Tony: “Everybody takes it.”
Kristen: “That’s your wife.”
Tony: “You know what that check is? Her check? That’s a door. She’s got her own money now, and you know what that is? That’s a door. And I’m not going to be the guy stuck on the other side of it.”
There was a gap. A chair creaked. I could hear Gage somewhere behind them saying “Truck, truck, truck.”
Tony: “Take the four hundred. You’ll tell her the kids screamed at you. They did at the other ones. Nobody’s going to ask you anything.”
Kristen: “I don’t want it.”
Tony: “Take it.”
And then my own voice came out of the bookshelf, small and flat. Tony.
I played it twice. The second time I wrote down the times on the back of an envelope in case something happened to the phone, and then I emailed the clip to myself, and to Monique, and to Josie, who has never once asked me why I cried in the supply closet.
Three envelopes. Twelve hundred dollars from my check, to pay three women to walk out of my life so the check would stop. I’d kept that house going, and my pay had been the money he used to take it from me.
Somebody tapped on the bathroom door. Tony’s voice. “Dana? You okay in there?”
I turned off the sink.
“What are you listening to?” he said.
The kitchen table
I didn’t say anything to him that night. I said I had cramps, and he said okay and went to bed, and I slept in Hadley’s room with my phone under my pillow.
At 6:10 the next morning, before he was up, I called the payroll office at my building and changed my direct deposit to a new account at the credit union across from the Walgreens. I know where that form is. I’ve filled it out for other people eleven hundred times.
At 6:40 Monique called me back. She’d watched the clip. She didn’t say much. She said she was sorry, and she said she’d pull Tony’s complaint on Kristen that day, and that she’d call Kristen herself.
At 7:30 Loretta rang the doorbell.
I hadn’t asked her to come. She was in her church coat with a bank envelope held in both hands, and she walked straight past me to the kitchen and sat down at the table where Hadley’s crayons had been the day before.
Tony came down at eight in his socks. He took one look at Loretta and stopped on the bottom step.
“What is this?” he said.
I set the phone on the table, face up. I pressed play.
I’d turned the volume all the way up. The kitchen filled with his own voice. That’s a door. She’s got her own money now. He listened to four lines of it. Then he reached for the phone, and I slid it across the table to the wall, out of his reach, and Loretta put her hand on the corner of it like she was holding down a paper in the wind.
“You recorded me in my own house.”
“It’s my camera.”
“It’s my house! I pay for this house! You want to know what that check of yours covers? It covers a quarter of the mortgage, Dana. You think you’re going to run this place on toner money? You’ll be calling me by August. And I’ll tell you what I’ll say. I’ll say I tried.”
I didn’t answer him.
“She goes behind my back,” he said, to Loretta now, “to a woman I don’t even know, and you took the money, you took the money, so don’t sit there like you’re the one who’s clean.”
“I took it,” Loretta said. “I brought it back.”
She put the bank envelope in the middle of the table. It had one letter on the front in blue ballpoint. L.
“I want a lawyer,” Tony said. “You want to do this, we’ll do it with a lawyer.”
“Okay,” I said.
“The savings are mine. Half’s mine. I’m taking it today, and the truck.”
“Okay.”
He looked at me like I’d stopped speaking his language. He’d come down to the kitchen expecting me to cry and beg him to take it back, and I think that if I had, he’d have forgiven me.
“The credit union’s on Harvard,” I said. “My check goes there now. Your bag’s in the hall closet. You know how to do motels.”
He stood there with his hands open at his sides, and then he said, “The kids are going to ask where I went.”
“I’ll tell them Wichita.”
He took the duffel and the keys. He left the truck’s door open when he backed out, and I watched the dome light come on in the driveway and stay on while he drove off with the door swinging.
He cleaned out the savings at ten. Eleven thousand, four hundred dollars. I got the text from the bank at 10:04.
I did the math on the back of the envelope again. Twelve-sixty twice a month against nineteen-forty and everything else. It doesn’t work. It has not worked for any month since. Some months I cover the gap with the car fund, and some months I don’t cover it.
June
The first week of June, Kristen came back.
Monique had called her twice, and then Josie had written her a note, and I’d written her a longer one that I threw away and rewrote three times. She didn’t call. She rang the doorbell on a Monday at a quarter to eight, without any coat at all.
The weather had turned. I stood in the door and looked at her, and she looked at me, and for once it went both ways.
Gage ran past my legs and hit her at the knees and said “Truck, truck.”
“He remembers me,” she said.
“He’s been drawing you a horse.”
The camera was still on the bookshelf, aimed at the big chair. I’d unplugged it myself the week Tony left and plugged it back in the week after, because it’s mine, and because it saves a clip every time something moves, and there’s nothing in this house I mind it seeing now.
Loretta comes Tuesdays and Thursdays. I pay her out of the envelope. She refuses to take a cent of it, so I put it in the sewing drawer she keeps at my place, with the peppermints, and she hasn’t said a word.
Hadley counted her two at the door. Kristen hung her own sweater on the hook by the garage and held out her hand for the phone number.
“What time’s lunch?” she said.
“Noon,” I said. “Nobody’s coming.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s ever been told they were bad at picking people.
For more stories about family members crossing unforgivable lines, read My Mother Stood in My Doorway for Forty Minutes With Her Gloves On and My Father Charged Me Rent at Fifteen and Came for Grandma’s Orchard Anyway. Then see what happens when a mother-in-law brings a notary to a recovery room.
