Four sitters in SIX WEEKS, and not one of them stayed long enough to fill out a second timesheet.
I had gone back to the hospital billing office, my girls were six and four, and the mortgage did not care who watched them.
Warren traveled Monday to Thursday and came home when he came home.
The first woman lasted three days.
“Something has come up at home,” she told me on the phone, and she was gone before I could ask what.
The agency sent Priscilla next, forty-seven, four grown kids, a laugh you could hear from the driveway.
She clocked out at five thirty on a Thursday and NEVER came back for the tote she kept by the coat hooks.
I still have that bag.
The third lasted one lunch.
I decided it was the money and I raised it TWICE.
Then Bernadette, fifty-two, quit in my driveway with her coat still on and her keys in her hand.
“I can’t be in a house with HIM,” she said.
“With who, exactly?” I said, and my voice came out wrong.
She looked at the chalk drawings Nadine had left on the walkway and got into her car.
“Ask him yourself,” she said through the glass.
The agency would only tell me our file was CLOSED.
So when Ruthann started on a Tuesday, I did not buy anything.
Fern’s old baby monitor was still in the hall closet, the wide one we bought the winter she had croup.
I set it on the bookshelf between a jar of pennies and a dead succulent.
“Don’t worry about the girls,” Ruthann said, and I told her my husband would be home by NOON.
At my desk, between two claim denials, I opened the app.
He came through the mudroom and set his keys in the bowl.
He said her name.
He said it like a name he had already said a hundred times, and Ruthann had been in my house two hours.
Then he did the thing that had emptied my kitchen four times, and I watched it on a nine-inch screen.
My chair went over.
By the time his phone rang, I WAS ALREADY IN THE PARKING LOT.
Noon
I sat in my car in row C with the door open and one foot still on the asphalt and I made the app play it again.
There is Ruthann at the sink with the water running. There are my girls at the table behind her, nine feet, eating grapes from a bowl between them, Fern picking the ones off the bottom.
Warren comes in. He says her name. Then he steps in behind her and puts his hand flat on the back of her neck, under her hair, and leaves it there.
He talks while he does it. The water covers the words. His hand does not move for eleven seconds. I counted them twice.
Ruthann’s shoulders come up around her ears and stay there. She keeps washing the same cup.
When Nadine looks over, his hand slides down to Ruthann’s shoulder and he squeezes it the way a man squeezes a shoulder in front of a child, and then he takes a glass out of the cabinet.
That is all of it. That is the whole thing four women left my house over.
I called Ruthann from the parking lot. She picked up on the second ring and she was outside, I could hear a car go past her.
“Is he still there,” I said.
“He left. He got a call.” A pause long enough that I checked the screen to see if she was still on. “He asked me not to tell you he comes home.”
The croup winter
We bought that monitor the January Fern turned two and could not breathe lying down.
Warren sat on the bathroom floor with her and the shower running hot for four nights and I watched the two of them on my phone from the bedroom because one of us had to sleep. That is the man I married. I want that on the page before anything else is.
He sells commercial flooring across Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, leaves Monday, home Thursday, and he is the kind of husband other women say they wish they had. He remembers the names of their kids. He carries the neighbor’s cans up.
We are eleven hundred behind on the second mortgage. That is why I went back to work in July, and why I said yes when the agency quoted me what they quoted me.
Denise came first. Three days, and I never got past her first name.
Priscilla was ten days and she was the one I wanted. She kept a canvas tote by the coat hooks with a paperback and a bag of the good pretzels in it and she let Nadine draw on the walkway with the sidewalk chalk instead of making her do it on paper.
She left at five thirty on a Thursday, and Thursday is the day Warren comes home.
Then Sherry, one lunch. Then I raised the rate two dollars an hour, and then two dollars again, and it bought me Bernadette for nine days.
She was in my driveway with her keys in her hand and she would not come inside.
The chalk on the walkway
I got home in nineteen minutes. Ruthann’s car was in front of the house with her still in it.
She came in with me and she stayed. That is the part I did not expect. She sat on my couch with her coat on and told me he had done it twice in the same ten minutes, once by the dishwasher before he ever got to the sink, and then again at the sink, and that the first time she told herself she had leaned back into him by accident.
“I’m not quitting,” she said. “But I’m not being in here alone with him.”
I called Warren from the garage.
He was warm about it. He was so warm about it. He said he had come home to change a shirt, that Ruthann had been crying about something with her boyfriend, that he had patted her on the shoulder and gone back out.
Then he asked me how much I was sleeping. He asked it gently. He said Joyce at the agency had been worried about me too, and that we could talk about all of it Thursday.
I stood in the garage next to the recycling and I could not think of one thing to say back, because I had not told him I had a camera.
I had not told anyone I had a camera.
I hung up and went and looked at the walkway. Nadine’s chalk from August was still there in the low spots, rained down to nothing, a pink smear where a house had been.
Joyce at the agency. I had spoken to that woman one time in my life, in June.
The cans at the curb
Here is what I did that night, and I am putting it down because I think there are women reading this who will do the same four things in the same order and get the same four answers.
The first thing I did was go next door.
Deb Ankrum has lived on that side of us for nine years and she is the neighbor whose cans Warren carries up. She had her porch light on. I stood in it and I tried to find a way to ask a question that I did not have words for yet, and what came out was that our sitters kept quitting and I wondered if she had ever noticed anything.
Deb said, “Oh, honey.”
Then she said that if I meant did anybody on this street think my kids were being neglected, absolutely not, and that Warren had told her back in the summer that the agency had sent us some real characters and that I was taking it hard.
Back in the summer.
I said that was nice of him and I went home and stood in my own kitchen with my coat still zipped.
He had been there before me. He had been there before me at the agency and he had been there before me on the porch next door, and the thing about a man who is liked is that he does not have to lie about you. He only has to worry about you out loud, early, to the right people, and then everything you say afterward arrives already explained.
The second thing I did was call the bank.
The mortgage company’s line runs until nine, and I got a man in Delaware who was perfectly decent to me. I asked what a hardship deferral looks like on a second, one month, two if they had it, because I did not know yet how many days of a house I was going to need to buy myself.
He pulled it up and told me the loan is in both names and any modification takes both signatures.
I said what if the marriage is the hardship.
He said, kindly, that he was not able to advise on that, and that either party could initiate but both would have to sign, and did I want him to mail the packet to the property address.
To the property address. Where the mail comes in through a slot in a door I was not sure I wanted my husband to have a key to by the end of the week.
I said no thank you.
The third thing I did was ask for money at work.
I got in at seven on Wednesday, before the phones opened, and I stood at Charlene’s desk while she was still in her coat and I asked her what my odds were on the coding position that had been posted in July. Two dollars more an hour. Days.
Charlene has been in that department twenty-two years and she does not enjoy any of it. She said the position went to a girl from Miami Valley in August. She said there was a freeze on merit increases until the fiscal, which is April. She said the only thing she had was nights, seven to three, and there was a differential on it, and it was mine if I wanted it, and she said it the way you offer somebody a coat that does not fit.
I said let me think about it.
Then I sat down at my desk and looked at the queue and understood what I had actually learned in eleven hours.
I could not get help from the street, because he had the street. I could not get a month of room out of the house, because the house needed his hand next to mine on the paper. I could not buy my way out of the sitters, because the money moved once a year and it had already moved.
Every ordinary door in my life opened onto him, and I had not noticed, because until Tuesday at noon I had never had a reason to try all of them in one night.
The only door left was the agency that had closed my file.
Joyce Mendoza
She called me back Wednesday morning while I was working denials, and she was not warm at all, which is how I knew I was going to get something.
Our file was closed, she said, because of documented incidents. Four of them.
I asked her to read them to me.
Denise, three days, left a five-year-old unsupervised on the stairs. Priscilla, arrived smelling of alcohol on two occasions. Sherry, screamed at a child. Bernadette, took forty dollars off a dresser.
“Every one of those is an incident report filed by the client,” Joyce said. “That’s you.”
I have never signed anything for you, I said. Joyce read me back the date on the Priscilla one, and the time, 6:15 in the evening, and I did not have to look at a calendar, because that was the Thursday, and that was forty-five minutes after Priscilla walked out of my house without her bag.
Forty-five minutes. She was still on the road. I was still at my desk in the billing office with an hour left on my shift.
I asked how they come in. She said fax or scan, signed, and that they had our number on file and the client’s name printed and signed at the bottom of each one, and did I want copies.
I said yes. Then I said something I did not plan.
“Send them to the four women too.”
She was quiet. Then she said, “Mrs. Vasko, one of them already asked me for them in August.”
The tote by the coat hooks
The tote had been by the coat hooks since the second week of August with a coat of mine hung over it, and I had walked past it every day for three weeks telling myself I would drop it off.
Paperback. The pretzels, gone soft. A cardigan. A pair of reading glasses with tape on the hinge.
And a spiral notebook, the little kind, with a rubber band around it.
She started it on her second day. Every entry the same shape. Date, time, one line. Aug 4, 10:40, came home not scheduled, stood too close in kitchen, moved away. Aug 7, 1:15, hand on my back, said nothing. Aug 12, 5:40, told me not to mention he was home.
Twenty-two entries. The last one is the Thursday, 5:25, and it says: told me the agency was going to hear I’d been drinking. Told me first.
Told me first.
In the back, in a different pen, a phone number and the word Denise, and under it, three days, same.
And folded into the back cover, a photocopy of an agency incident report about Priscilla Doyle, dated August fourteenth, with my name printed at the bottom and my name signed under it in block capitals, the way Warren writes on the freezer bags, the way he has written since he was in the Navy.
He did not lose his temper four times.
He cleared the house four times, and he got there first every single time.
Thursday, 8:40
The girls were at my mother’s in Xenia. The notebook and the photocopy were on the kitchen table, squared up, and I sat where I could see the mudroom door.
He came in at twenty to nine and he looked at the table before he looked at me.
“That’s Priscilla’s,” he said.
Then he sat down across from me and he talked for eleven minutes and I said almost nothing, because I did not have to.
He said the agency was a racket. He said I had given a stranger a two-dollar raise twice while we were eleven hundred behind on the second, and that he had never once said a word about it. He said I had been different since July, ask anybody. He said the notebook was a woman covering herself for getting let go, and that people who steal write things down.
“Those are signed by you,” I said.
“Those are signed by you,” he said back, and he did not blink, and I understood that he had said it to himself enough times that it had gone smooth.
Then he leaned back and told me he was done being made a villain in his own kitchen. He said, “Denise. Priscilla. The one from Trotwood, Sherry. Bernadette.”
Four names, in order, no pause between them. I never learned Denise’s last name. I never met Sherry.
“How do you know their names,” I said.
“I’m the one who’s home,” he said.
I told him Joyce Mendoza had the notebook and the form as of two o’clock that afternoon, and so did Priscilla, and so did the number in the back for Denise.
He asked me what I wanted.
I said his keys.
He set them in the bowl.
The pennies
It is March. The monitor is still on the bookshelf, unplugged now, between the jar of pennies and the succulent I keep not throwing out.
I took Charlene’s nights. Seven to three in the same office, which is six hundred dollars a month less than the day job I could not get, and my mother’s spare room on Tuesdays. Ruthann still comes Wednesdays so I can sleep. She has a key.
Priscilla came for the tote on a Saturday and would not come in past the mat, and we stood in the door with the cold coming in while Nadine did chalk on the walkway behind her, big pink boxes going all the way to the mailbox.
I handed her the bag. I had put the pretzels back.
She looked in it and saw the notebook was still there and pushed it down under the cardigan with two fingers.
“Keep drawing,” she called past me to Nadine, and went down the steps around the chalk.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who has ever left a job in a hurry and never told anyone why.
For more tales of unexpected twists and turns, you might enjoy reading about My Father Laughed at My Uniform. Perry Handed Him $140,000 in Yuma. or discovering why I Kept One Photograph From Vosberg Freight for Thirty-One Years. And for another story that brings back a name from the past, check out The Second Line on That Deed Was a Name I Hadn’t Spoken in Sixteen Years.
