I held my phone out so my husband’s dying father could hear his son’s voice one more time, and a woman answered instead and said, “Honey, he’s in the shower, but I’ll tell him the old lady called about the old man.” Raymond heard every word of it. Then he reached for his shirt pocket.
Thirty-eight years I’d been married to his son, and the last fourteen months of it I’d spent sleeping on a cot beside his father’s recliner.
Alan was on the road three nights a week.
Feed sales, the whole southern half of the state.
So I was the one counting pills into the little plastic box with the days on the lids.
I was the one who learned what the swelling in his ankles meant before the hospice nurse said it out loud.
Raymond didn’t talk much by then. Two or three words a day, and most of those went to the television.
That afternoon he lifted one finger off the afghan and pointed at my phone.
“Alan,” he said.
So I called.
I put it on speaker and held it out over the arm of his chair so he wouldn’t have to reach for anything.
Four rings.
Then a woman.
She sounded young, and she sounded like she was lying down.
“This is Alan’s phone,” she said. “He’s in the shower right now.”
I said, “Who is this?”
She laughed. A real one, from the belly, like I’d told a good joke at a party.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Is this the old lady? He said you’d call about the old man.”
Raymond’s hand closed on the afghan over his knees.
I should have hung up. I know that.
My thumb wouldn’t move.
“He talks about you, you know,” she said. “He says that house smells like hospital soap and canned soup now. He says you turned into a nurse he never hired.”
I looked at Raymond. His eyes were on the phone, and they didn’t move off it.
“Ma’am,” I said. “His father is sitting right here.”
There was a little pause, and when she came back her voice had gone softer, the way you’d talk to a dog you were about to put outside.
“Then he can hear it too,” she said. “Alan’s got a buyer lined up for the farm. Four hundred and ten thousand. We’re putting the deposit down on a place at the lake the week of the funeral.”
THE WEEK OF THE FUNERAL.
She said it like she was reading it off a calendar on the fridge.
Behind her a door opened somewhere, and running water shut off.
Then Alan, far away from the phone.
“Danica? Who are you talking to?”
A rustle. The phone changing hands.
“Ingrid.”
Just my name, the way he says it when I’ve backed the car into the mailbox again.
“Take me off speaker,” he said.
I didn’t.
“Look, I was going to tell you after,” he said. “There’s no point doing this now. Dad’s on so much morphine he won’t remember any of it tomorrow. He doesn’t even know what day it is.”
Raymond leaned toward the phone.
It took him a long time. His breath went in and out twice before there was enough of it to use.
“IT’S TUESDAY, ALAN,” he said.
Nothing came back.
No word, no breath, no water running.
Then the call dropped, and the screen went back to the picture of our grandkids holding a rabbit at the county fair.
Behind us the Weather Channel was on mute, running a map of the Dakotas that nobody in that room had any use for.
I sat down on the cot. My legs just quit.
Raymond was working at his shirt pocket.
His fingers stopped doing buttons a while ago. I’ve done his buttons since Thanksgiving.
I leaned over to help, and he pushed my hand off and kept at it.
The flap came loose.
He pulled out his wallet.
The brown one with the corners rubbed white, the one he carried when I first came out to this farm outside Beatrice to meet his family at twenty-four.
He pressed it into my palm and folded my fingers shut over it with both of his hands.
His hands were cold. They’re always cold now.
“Behind the license,” he said.
I opened it.
His driver’s license, expired in 2019.
A five-dollar bill folded in thirds.
A picture of Laverne cut out of a church directory, her hair still dark.
And behind the license, pressed into a square no bigger than a postage stamp, a piece of pink paper gone soft as an old dish towel.
I unfolded it on my knee.
There was a county seal at the top and a stamp from the recorder’s office, the ink gone purple.
On the second line, typed out in full, was my name.
I looked up at him.
“Raymond,” I said. “What is this?”
He reached over and tapped one corner of the paper with his fingernail, right where the date was.
“READ IT,” he said. “READ THE DATE.”
Outside, gravel popped under tires.
Headlights swung across the front curtains and stopped.
Alan’s truck.
Twenty minutes after a shower that was supposed to be in a motel three hours south.
Raymond’s hand found my wrist and held on harder than it had held anything in months.
“Don’t you give him that wallet,” he said.
June 14, 2019
The truck door shut out in the drive.
I read the slip anyway, fast, the way you read a pill bottle in bad light.
Gage County Register of Deeds. Received for record. Transfer on Death Deed. Grantor, Raymond J. Kozlowski. Beneficiary, Ingrid M. Kozlowski. Fee, sixteen dollars, paid cash.
June 14, 2019. 10:52 a.m.
Alan’s name wasn’t anywhere on it.
I don’t know much about deeds. I know what “on death” means, and I know whose death we’d been waiting on in that room since Thanksgiving.
“Raymond,” I said. “June?”
He looked at the picture of Laverne in the wallet, then at me.
We buried Laverne on the eighth of June, 2019. That slip was six days younger than her grave.
Boots on the porch steps.
I folded the paper back into its square, slid it behind the license, and pushed the wallet down into the front pocket of my sweatshirt with both hands over it.
Raymond nodded once, at the pocket.
What had he seen in six days that sent him to the courthouse by himself?
The basement at St. Joseph’s
Laverne’s funeral lunch was in the church basement. Ham buns, potato salad and four kinds of bars on paper plates, and somebody’s grandson running laps around the support posts with a balloon from the florist.
I was cutting a pan of lemon bars when Alan stood at the coffee urn with a man from the co-op and said it plain.
“We’ll list it by fall. Dad can’t run four hundred acres by himself, and I’m sure as hell not moving back out there.”
Raymond was ten feet away with a plate in his hand. He set it down on the radiator, full.
A little after that Alan said he had to move the truck because it was blocking the hearse, and he was gone forty minutes.
Raymond went and stood at the basement window, the high one that looks out on the back lot. He stood there the whole forty minutes. Everybody thought he was looking toward the cemetery. Somebody brought him a folding chair and he didn’t sit in it.
The Friday after, he took the pickup into Beatrice alone. He said errands. He came home with a sack of mouse bait and a pound of bologna and nothing else to say.
That August, Alan took his keys. For safety, he said, and it wasn’t wrong. Raymond had put the pickup in the ditch on the section road in July. Nobody renewed the license.
That was Alan. Sensible. The one who handled things.
When Raymond fell in December of 2024, Alan was the one who drove up with the power of attorney forms and had his dad sign them at the kitchen table. Alan took over the checking account. “You’ve got enough on your plate,” he told me, and kissed my forehead, and went back on the road.
Tuesdays he was always in a motel. Hastings, Holdrege, McCook. He’d text me a picture of the sunset from the parking lot.
Every Tuesday night Raymond asked me where Alan was. Every Tuesday I told him a town.
At Christmas, Alan spent an afternoon in Raymond’s rolltop desk looking for “the abstract,” for the hospice file, he said. He left every drawer pulled out an inch.
In January the pharmacy in Beatrice called because the check for Raymond’s morphine had come back. Sixty-one dollars and forty cents. I paid it on my own card. Alan said the bank had moved some money around wrong and he’d get after them.
The storm door opened behind me, and the cold came in ahead of him.
“Hey, Dad,” Alan said, like he’d been gone a week.
The manila folder
His hair was wet. That’s what I saw first. Wet from a shower twenty minutes up the road, combed straight back with his fingers.
He had a manila folder under his arm.
He didn’t look at me. He went to the recliner and put his hand on his father’s shoulder and squeezed, the way you’d check a fence post.
“How you doing, Dad. You eat today?”
Raymond looked at the television.
“Ingrid,” Alan said. “Where’s his wallet? Hospice needs his Medicare card for the file.”
“Stephanie copied his Medicare card in December.”
“They need the original.”
“They don’t.”
He let it go. He set the folder on the TV tray, right on top of the pill box, and opened it so I could see, like he was doing me a favor.
The page on top had a heading in capital letters. REVOCATION OF TRANSFER ON DEATH DEED.
Under it, a line for Raymond’s signature. Under that, a box for a notary.
“The title company in Beatrice ran the farm last week,” he said. “For the buyer. They found something Dad filed after Mom died. He wasn’t himself that summer, you know that. This just cleans it up.”
“Did you know it was me?”
“Ingrid.”
“Did you know it was my name on it?”
“It doesn’t matter whose name,” he said. “It matters that it’s a mess, and I’m the one who has to clean it. I’ve been carrying this whole family for a year and a half.”
The woman on the phone had said the week of the funeral like she was reading it off a calendar. Now here was the calendar, in a folder, sitting on Raymond’s pills.
“About the phone,” Alan said, lower. “Danica’s a friend from the co-op office. It wasn’t what it sounded like.”
Raymond made a sound down in his chest. It could have been a cough.
“She’s sitting out in the truck,” Alan said, “so let’s not drag this out.”
Headlights came up the drive again, slower. A second car parked behind his truck, and a woman got out carrying a zippered bag.
Julianna
I went into the kitchen and called our daughter.
Julianna lives in Omaha, an hour and some. She’s thirty-four, she’s the mother of the two kids with the rabbit, and she’s the only person I know who ever told Alan no and made it stick.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Mom? Is it Grandpa?”
I told her. All of it, fast, standing at the sink with my back to the living room. The woman, the shower, the lake, the folder, the car in the drive.
She was quiet a long time.
“Mom,” she said. “Dad told me at Easter.”
The faucet was dripping. I put my hand under it, I don’t know why.
“Told you what?”
“About Danica. He said you two had an understanding. He said you’d been living out at Grandpa’s for a year anyway and you didn’t want to deal with any of it till after.”
“I’ve been sleeping on a cot.”
“I know. I know you have. I’m not saying it’s right.”
Then she said the part I hadn’t heard.
“He already put twenty thousand down on the lake place. Out of Grandpa’s account. He says it’s a loan against the farm and it all goes back at closing. If the sale falls through he’s in real trouble, Mom. Like, real.”
Twenty thousand dollars. The morphine check had been sixty-one dollars and forty cents.
“He took it out of your grandpa’s checking.”
“He’s got power of attorney. It’s legal.”
“Is it?”
“Mom, please. Just let Dad handle the paperwork. Grandpa doesn’t even know what day it is.”
Alan’s sentence. Word for word, in my daughter’s mouth.
Tamiko Segura
The woman from the second car was sitting on the footstool by the recliner when I came back, the zippered bag open on her lap. A notary stamp, an ink pad, a ledger book with a rubber band around it.
“Tamiko Segura,” she said, and shook my hand. “I do closings for the title company. Alan asked if I’d come out, since his dad can’t travel.”
Alan stood at the front window with his arms crossed. Out past him the truck sat running with its parking lights on.
Tamiko did it the way she must have done it at a thousand kitchen tables. She leaned toward Raymond and talked slow and clear, not loud.
“Mr. Kozlowski, before anybody signs anything I have to ask you a few things. Can you tell me your full name?”
“Raymond. Joseph. Kozlowski.”
“And who’s this gentleman?”
“My son.”
“Do you know what this paper does?”
Raymond looked at the folder on the TV tray. He didn’t look at Alan.
“Takes it back,” he said.
“Takes what back, sir?”
“What I gave her.”
“See?” Alan said. “He’s fine. He’s sharp as a tack today.”
Tamiko kept her eyes on Raymond. “And do you want to take it back?”
It took him a long time. In and out, twice, the same as before.
“Church lot,” he said.
Tamiko looked at me. I didn’t have anything to give her.
“June,” Raymond said. “She had his jacket on.”
Alan turned around from the window.
“His good jacket,” Raymond said. “The funeral one. Sitting in his truck.”
Forty minutes. The high window in the basement. Raymond with a folding chair behind him he wouldn’t sit in, while the whole church said how hard he was taking it.
He turned his head against the back of the recliner and looked at me. Not at his son.
“Tuesdays,” he said. “I wanted you to hear it from her.”
Sixty-one dollars and forty cents
“Oh, come on,” Alan said. “Come on. He’s on morphine, Ingrid. He’s making up stories about a parking lot from six years ago.”
Tamiko said, “A minute ago you told me he was sharp as a tack.”
“He’s in and out. Everybody knows that. Ask the hospice.”
I put my hand on the pocket of my sweatshirt.
“Twenty minutes ago,” I said to Tamiko, “he told me on the phone his dad’s on so much morphine he won’t remember any of this tomorrow. He said his dad doesn’t know what day it is.”
Tamiko looked at Alan for a while.
“Is that so?” she said.
“I was upset. I was in a motel room and my wife was screaming at my girlfriend on speakerphone. What was I supposed to say?”
“You weren’t in a motel,” I said.
That was the last thing I said for a while. Alan did enough for both of us.
“You want to know what this is?” he said. “This is fourteen months of you playing nurse so you could sit right here when the paper came out. That’s what this is. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. Don’t tell me he never said anything. You’ve been working this the whole time.”
Raymond’s hand closed on the afghan.
“I’ve got a buyer, Ingrid. I’ve got a man coming with a check for four hundred and ten thousand dollars, and I’ve got twenty grand already gone, and you’re going to stand there with his wallet in your shirt like a damn raccoon and blow up the whole thing over a piece of paper he got from the courthouse when he couldn’t find his own truck.”
“He found it,” Tamiko said.
Alan looked at her like he’d forgotten she was in the room.
She zipped the bag shut.
“I can’t notarize for a signer when his own family tells me he isn’t competent,” she said. “And if he is competent, he just told me no. Either way I’m not stamping it.” She stood up and put her coat over her arm. “And Alan, I’d talk to somebody about that twenty thousand before the bank does. An agent can’t pay himself out of the account. I see that go bad about twice a year.”
“I’m paying you for the drive out.”
“Don’t,” she said.
He turned on his father then. I think he’d held it all afternoon.
“They told us October,” he said. “The nurse sat right there at the table and said October. You were supposed to be gone by Halloween, and I’d have had this all done, and nobody would’ve had to hear one word of it. You know that? You did this. Not me.”
Raymond looked at the television.
The truck horn went outside, two short ones.
Alan picked up the folder. A couple of Raymond’s Wednesday pills had stuck to the bottom of it, and they rolled off onto the carpet.
“Don’t bother coming home,” he said to me. “I’ll have your stuff on the porch.”
He went out. Tamiko followed him and stopped at the door long enough to say she was sorry, to Raymond, not to me.
I locked the storm door behind them. The key had been hanging on a nail by the frame all along.
The second Tuesday in March
The Weather Channel is still on mute. It’s Kansas now.
My clothes came in black trash bags, five of them, dropped at the end of the drive and not on the porch. The papers from the lawyer in Beatrice are in the rolltop desk, in the drawer that closes all the way now. Julianna sent a card with the kids’ drawings in it and no note.
I count the pills on Sunday nights. I picked the Wednesdays up off the carpet that night and threw them out and started a new box.
That afternoon Raymond lifted one finger off the afghan.
I’d buttoned the wallet back into his shirt pocket the morning after, the pink slip folded behind the license where it’s been since 2019. He pats it sometimes.
He pointed at my phone.
“Julianna,” he said.
So I called. I put it on speaker and held it out over the arm of his chair.
Four rings.
Then my daughter, out of breath, a kid yelling somewhere behind her.
“Grandpa?” she said. “Grandpa, is that you?”
If this one sat with you, pass it to somebody who’s been sleeping on a cot beside someone else’s chair.
Family tensions and old wounds run deep in the story of baby pictures kept on the fridge and the fiancé who opened the mint tin. There’s another unsettling in-law story in the cheese she put on everything.
