My brother-in-law lifted me out of my power wheelchair at the end of the marina dock and pushed the empty chair into the lake while thirty-one relatives watched. Then he looked down at me on the wet boards and said, “You’re not riding that thing one more foot.” Nobody on that dock knew what he’d already smelled under my seat.
Nine years I’d been in that chair.
It was my legs, my car keys and my front door, all bolted to one black frame with a joystick worn smooth under my right thumb.
The battery sat in a box under the seat. It was the third one. Insurance had turned down two requests for a whole new chair, and after the second letter I quit asking.
Every August the Costellos meet at Table Rock Lake on what would have been Alfred’s birthday.
We take the pontoon out to the cove where we put his ashes in the water, and somebody plays his favorite song off a phone too quiet to hear over the motor.
I’d NEVER once skipped it.
Terrence smelled it first.
We were halfway down the ramp to the dock when he stopped walking beside me and said, “What is that?”
“Sunscreen,” I said. “Eunice’s. She bathes in it.”
He crouched and laid his palm flat against the side of the seat, then yanked it back like the plastic had bitten him.
“Marisa. Get off this chair.”
“I’m not getting off anything. The boat’s right there.”
Terrence is sixty-one, built like a chest freezer, and has run a small-engine shop for thirty years without once raising his voice at a woman.
He raised it then.
“The case is swelling. Listen to it.”
Under me there was a little tick, like a car cooling in a driveway. I told him it always did that.
It didn’t ALWAYS do that.
“So roll me onto the boat and look at it after,” I said.
He planted himself in front of the pontoon’s gate with both arms out.
“No.”
“It’s MY chair, Terrence.”
“I know whose chair it is.”
People were drifting down from the picnic shelter by then. Somebody’s cooler had a sticker of a cartoon walleye on it. Two of the cousins had their phones up.
I told my dead husband’s brother he was treating me like a busted lawn mower, and I said it loud enough for every one of them to hear.
He stood there and let me finish.
Then he looked over at his son.
“Keegan. Hold her up.”
Keegan came around behind me and hooked his arms under mine. Terrence slid one arm beneath my knees and lifted me out of that seat like a sack of feed, and they set me down on the boards with my back against a piling.
I figured he was going to open the battery box.
He didn’t touch it.
He kicked the brakes loose, swung the chair toward the water, and shoved it off the end of the dock with both hands.
It hit the lake on its side.
Four seconds, and it was GONE.
Eunice screamed.
My cousin Daniel went straight at Terrence yelling that you don’t do that to a woman in a chair, you just DON’T DO THAT, and it took two of the in-laws to hold him back.
I sat there with my legs out in front of me like somebody else’s and watched the bubbles come up green.
“You son of a bitch,” I said. “You son of a BITCH.”
Terrence turned around. His face wasn’t red.
It was gray.
“That thing was about to light up under you,” he said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I watched one go in the shop. It took the whole bench with it.”
I tried to shove myself toward the edge, toward him, toward the chair, I don’t even know which. Keegan held my shoulders down. I called every last one of them a coward for standing there with their phones.
Terrence waited until I was out of breath.
Then an outboard turned over on the far side of the boathouse.
Nobody docks back there. Those are the rental slips, and they’d been chained shut since Labor Day.
Our second pontoon nosed around the corner, slow. Valencia was at the wheel.
Strapped to the middle of the deck with orange ratchet straps was a brand new power chair, plastic film still on the armrests.
A man in a gray polo I’d never seen stood next to it holding a clipboard. The seating tech from the medical supply place in town, it turned out.
They’d been collecting for fourteen months.
Terrence sold his bass boat. Eunice raffled off a quilt at two different churches. Keegan picked up Saturdays at the tire store and signed his checks over without telling his wife. And the cousins skipped the Fourth of July fireworks and never told me why.
They kept my name off all of it, because I’d have shut it down.
So nobody gave me the chance.
The plan was to switch chairs out at the cove, right where Alfred is.
Nobody planned on the old battery cooking itself on the ramp.
Terrence had maybe a minute to get me off it, and he spent that minute standing there while I screamed at him.
Valencia tied up and passed him the clipboard. He crouched down on the boards next to me and turned it so I could see the page.
“Most of it came from one person,” he said.
The biggest number on that sheet was bigger than the bass boat.
The name beside it was Brittney.
My daughter.
My daughter who hasn’t said ONE word to me since the night I was driving and her father wasn’t coming home.
“Where is she?” I said.
Terrence looked back at the second pontoon.
“She’s been on the boat the whole time,” he said.
The back rail
She was at the back rail, under the canopy, where Valencia’s shoulders had blocked her the whole way in.
Brittney is thirty now. She had her hair cut short, which I’d never seen, because I hadn’t seen any of her since she was twenty-one. She still stands with all her weight on one hip like her father did.
Somebody had handed her a gas can to hold. She was holding it with both hands.
I looked back at the clipboard. The number was $13,200, in Eunice’s handwriting, with a date from June of last year. The bass boat was the line under it. $8,500.
Brittney set the gas can down on the deck. She stepped over the side onto the dock, onto the same wet boards I was sitting on, and stopped about ten feet from me.
She didn’t look at me. She looked at the water where the chair went in.
I put my hand flat on my blouse pocket. It’s a habit, I’ve done it a thousand times a day for nine years. The pocket was still heavy.
Brittney saw me do it.
“Is Dad’s phone in the lake?” she said.
Twelve forty-one
Alfred’s phone is a silver flip phone from the Verizon store in Branson, the kind they quit making. I carry it in my left pocket every day. I plug it in on my nightstand every night.
Daniel calls it my pacemaker. He means it as a joke and I let him.
The night Alfred died, his phone rang at 12:41.
He’d had four beers at the Elks fish fry and he was asleep in his recliner with a paper plate on his chest. I answered it in the kitchen. It was Brittney, crying so hard I made her say the address twice. A lake house out past Kimberling City. The boy who drove her there had left with somebody else.
Alfred wasn’t driving on four beers. So I drove his truck, and he rode with the window down to wake himself up.
There was a deer. I think there was a deer. There was a curve on 13 and the shoulder was soft from rain.
At the hospital the trooper asked where we’d been going at that hour, and I said we were coming home from the fish fry. I said it to Terrence and Eunice. I said it to the pastor. I never once said the name of the road or who we were driving out to get.
Brittney got a ride home from the lake house with the boy’s sister. She came to my room the next afternoon and stood at the foot of the bed for maybe a minute and left before the nurse came back. At the funeral she sat with Eunice. Then she moved to Springfield, and every card I mailed her either came back or didn’t.
There’s one voicemail saved on that phone. She left it at 12:39, two minutes before I picked up. I’ve never let anybody hear it.
And every year, a little after midnight on the anniversary, a number I don’t know calls that phone. It rings through to Alfred’s greeting and hangs up. I always figured it was some telemarketer who couldn’t sleep.
On the dock my daughter was still waiting.
I took the phone out of my pocket and held it up so she could see it.
She took a step back, like it was the battery.
Irving
The seating tech’s name was Irving. He had a pencil behind each ear and he never used either one.
He and Valencia and Keegan cut the orange straps and walked the new chair off the pontoon onto the dock. It was black like the old one. The film on the armrests flapped in the wind off the water.
Brittney turned around and walked up the dock to the boathouse and sat down on a dock box with her back to all of us.
“Put it back on the boat,” I said.
Terrence was still crouched next to me. “Marisa.”
“I’m not sitting in her money. Send it back.”
“Then you’re sitting on the boards,” he said. “Your call.”
So I tried. I put both palms down and dragged myself along the dock toward the ramp, a few inches at a time, my legs coming along behind like a rug. Thirty-one people stood there and let me. I made it maybe four feet. A splinter went into the heel of my hand and stayed there.
Keegan picked me up again without asking. He’s thirty-four and he still said, “Sorry, Aunt Marisa,” like he was twelve and had broken something of mine.
He set me down closer to the chair than I’d started.
Irving squatted beside the footplates. “Ma’am, it can’t go back. It’s built to you.”
“It’s built to whoever.”
“Eighteen-inch seat. Joystick on the right, mounted low, because you rest your elbow. Backrest at a hundred and four degrees.” He tapped the clipboard. “Those came off your fitting at our store in May. You came in because your daughter called and booked it.”
“I came in because they said it was a free check.”
“She paid for the check,” Irving said. “She’s been the contact on your account since last spring. She calls us about every two weeks.”
Eunice’s phone
Eunice came down the dock with her flip-flops in her hand so she wouldn’t slip.
She’s sixty-three and she has never once in her life kept her mouth shut about anything, so I knew before she knelt down that whatever she was about to say she’d been sitting on for a long time.
“Don’t be mad at Irving,” she said. “Be mad at me.”
“Why would I be mad at you.”
“Because I’ve talked to her every Sunday since the funeral.”
Every Sunday. Nine years of Sundays. I’d sat in Eunice’s kitchen on half of those Sundays and eaten her pound cake and asked her if she’d heard anything from Springfield, and Eunice had said, Not a word, honey, and cut me another piece.
“She asked me not to tell you,” Eunice said. “She said you’d push. You’d drive up there in that van and sit in her parking lot.”
“I would have.”
“I know. That’s why I didn’t.”
Daniel had come up behind her. He’s sixty-six and he’s my side of the family, and he looked at Eunice the way you look at somebody who’s been reading your mail.
“You let her think the girl was dead to her,” he said.
“I let her think the girl was busy,” Eunice said. “Which she was. She’s a dental hygienist. She works Saturdays.”
Then Eunice got her phone out of the pocket of her shorts and opened the pictures and handed it to me.
It was the cove. It was our pontoon heading out of the marina, small, from a long way off, with the boathouse roof in the corner of the frame. Eunice swiped. The same picture, a different year. A different shirt on Terrence at the wheel. She swiped again.
Nine of them. One every August. Every one taken from behind the boathouse, from the rental slips.
The dock box
Terrence didn’t say anything. He just tipped his head at the new chair.
If I wanted to get up that dock to my daughter, I was going to do it in her money. So I let Keegan and Terrence lift me one more time, and Irving set the joystick height, and I peeled the film off the right armrest myself.
It drove better than the old one ever had. It didn’t tick.
Brittney heard it coming and didn’t turn around until I was beside the dock box. Everybody else hung back by the gas pump, which on a dock that size is about fifteen feet.
She looked at the phone in my lap.
“Did you ever play it for them?” she said.
“No.”
“Then what did you tell them?”
Eunice answered before I could. “She told us they were coming home from the fish fry.”
Brittney looked at Eunice. Then at Terrence. Then she looked at me, all the way at me, for the first time in nine years.
“The fish fry,” she said.
“I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t know what else to—”
“They don’t know?” She stood up off the dock box. “None of you know?”
Nobody said anything. Terrence had his cap in both hands.
“I called them,” Brittney said, loud, to all of them. “I was at a party out past Kimberling and the guy I went with left, and I called Dad’s phone and she picked up, and she came and got me because he’d been drinking. That’s where they were going. They were coming to get ME.”
Eunice put her hand over her mouth. Daniel sat down on a cooler.
“I thought everybody knew,” Brittney said. “I thought that’s why you were all so nice to me.”
She looked at Eunice, at nine years of Sundays.
“Then who have I been hiding from?” she said.
The cove
“You,” she said, before I could answer. “That’s who. You knew the whole time and you let me carry it by myself.”
“Brittney.”
“No. You don’t get to say my name like that.” She was crying and she was furious and she didn’t wipe her face once. “You told a trooper a lie while you were lying there with your back broken, and you never told me you did it. I thought you were saving it. I thought one day you’d say it at Thanksgiving in front of everybody, so I just never came to Thanksgiving.”
“I wasn’t saving it.”
“I sat behind that boathouse every year so I could see you go out to him. Every year. I paid for that chair because you are IN a chair because of me, and I didn’t want you to thank me for it. I wanted you to have it and not know. That was the whole deal, Uncle Terrence, that was the one thing I asked.”
Terrence said, “The battery didn’t ask.”
“Don’t you dare tell me it wasn’t my fault,” Brittney said to me. “Everybody’s going to say that now. Don’t you be one of them.”
I didn’t say it.
I opened Alfred’s phone and went to the call log, because there was one thing I had to see, and I already knew what it would say. The number that calls every year after midnight. The Springfield number. I held it out to her.
“That’s me,” she said. Her voice went small. “I just call to hear him say his name.”
This is Al, I’m out on the water, leave it. That’s the whole greeting. I’ve played it every night for nine years before I plugged the phone in. It’s the only place left where I can hear him.
And she’d been calling it from a parking lot in Springfield on the worst night of the year, and getting him, because I kept it charged.
I closed the phone and put it in her hand and folded her fingers down over it.
“Keep it charged,” I said. “Charger’s in my bag. My bag’s in the lake.”
She stared at it. Terrence made a sound that wasn’t a laugh and turned around and walked out to the end of the dock and stood there a while by himself. Eunice went after him. Keegan finally called his wife.
Nobody played Alfred’s song at the cove that year. Brittney sat on the bench beside my new chair the whole way out, with the phone in both hands like she was afraid the wind would take it.
When we got to the spot, Valencia cut the motor.
Labor Day
Terrence and Keegan pulled the old chair up the Saturday before Labor Day with a come-along off the boathouse beam.
It sat at the end of the dock in the sun, draining lake water out of the joystick housing, with the battery box empty. Terrence had taken the battery out with oven mitts and a bucket of sand. He still won’t tell me how it looked.
I rolled out to the end of the dock in the new one and parked beside it. The film was off both armrests now. The right one already had a scuff.
A little after noon my phone rang. A Springfield number. I’ve had it saved since the cove.
“Mom,” Brittney said. “I’m at the top of the ramp. Is it okay if I come down?”
I pushed the joystick forward and went up the ramp to get her.
If this one got to you, call the person whose number you still haven’t saved.
For more family betrayals that unfold in front of a crowd, read the hardware-store encounter no one could explain and the stranger wearing a daughter’s yellow cardigan. And for another shocking public scene, there’s the party where sixty-four kids watched.
