Six days after my hip replacement, my husband of forty-eight years told our son I’d be recovering at my sister’s, and told my sister I was coming to the lake with him. Then he left sixty dollars by the toaster and said, “You’re a grown woman. Figure it out.” It took four days and one wrong phone call for anybody to find out.
The surgeon had been clear about it. Somebody in the house with me for TWO WEEKS, no exceptions, because one bad twist and the new joint could slip right out.
I couldn’t bend past my own knees.
I couldn’t get down our four porch steps without a hand on each rail and somebody below me.
Roger had arranged everything, or that’s what he told me in the hospital.
“Mabel’s making up the sewing room for you,” he said. “Esteban will drive you over Saturday.”
Mabel is my older sister. She lives on the far side of Kokomo, forty minutes when the lights are bad.
Friday night Roger said Esteban couldn’t get off work, so he’d take me himself on his way up to the lake.
He goes up every spring with Jacob Lindquist. Thirty years of the same cabin and the same bad coffee.
Saturday morning he packed the trunk.
His tackle box. One suitcase.
Only his.
I was at the kitchen table in my housecoat with the walker parked by my chair, waiting for him to come back in for my bag.
He came in drying his hands on a dish towel.
“Mabel called. Her back’s out again,” he said. “She can’t take you this week.”
“Then I’ll go to Esteban’s.”
“He’s got the twins and a new boss. You’re staying here.”
“Here by myself?”
“Everything you need is on one floor. The laundry can wait.”
“Roger, the doctor said…”
“The doctor says whatever keeps him from getting sued.”
He pulled three twenties out of his wallet and laid them by the toaster. Then he set my pill organizer beside them, every day of the week already filled.
That’s the part I keep going back to.
He’d sat up the night before and filled all seven. He knew.
“Does Esteban know about this?” I said.
“I called him last night. He’s fine with it.”
“He didn’t call me.”
“Because I asked him not to. And don’t you go calling him either, Dolores. The man is drowning. He doesn’t need his mother whining at him over one little week.”
He put his cap on.
“Tuesday’s our anniversary,” I said.
“I know what Tuesday is.”
He didn’t kiss me goodbye. The screen door slapped twice and the car backed down the drive.
I sat there until the clock on the stove said eleven, which meant ten forty-nine, because it has run fast ever since the ice storm.
That afternoon I made a list on the back of the electric bill. Pills at eight. Crackers. Walk the hallway twice. Pills at eight.
At the bottom I wrote: don’t call Esteban.
Around four my phone buzzed.
How’s Aunt Mabel’s sewing room? She feeding you ok? Love you Mom.
My thumb sat over the letters for a long time.
Three words and he’d have been on the highway in ten minutes.
But I kept hearing Roger say whining.
So I typed back that she was spoiling me rotten.
He sent a heart.
Mabel called twice that weekend. I let it ring, because I couldn’t remember which lie I was supposed to be living in.
Sunday I couldn’t reach the shower knob without twisting, so I washed at the sink.
Monday I knocked the pill organizer off the counter with my elbow.
Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s pills rolled under the refrigerator.
I stood over that dark gap for a long time, holding the walker, knowing I wasn’t allowed to bend for them.
I left them there.
Tuesday morning I set out two coffee cups before I remembered.
I left those there too.
Every time Esteban texted, I gave him something nice. Mabel’s pot roast. Mabel’s fat orange cat.
Wednesday at ten the phone rang instead of buzzing.
Esteban.
I almost let it go.
“Hi, honey.”
“Mom, Aunt Mabel just called me. She wanted to know if you’re getting any sun up at the lake.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Mom. Where ARE you?”
“In the kitchen.”
“WHOSE kitchen?”
“Ours.”
“Who’s there with you?”
“Nobody.”
“Since WHEN?”
“Saturday.”
He made a sound I’d only heard from him once, the morning we buried his father’s mother.
“Dad told me you were at Mabel’s. He told Mabel you went with him.”
“He told me you knew.”
“I didn’t know. NOBODY KNEW YOU WERE ALONE.”
“He said you were drowning,” I said. “He said you didn’t need me whining.”
The line went quiet for so long I checked the screen.
“Mom, have you been taking your pills?”
I looked at the gap under the refrigerator.
“Most of them.”
“I’m getting in the car. Aunt Mabel’s already on her way. Don’t you get up for anything, you hear me?”
“Did you call your father?”
“Five times. Straight to voicemail.”
I could hear his keys, then the garage door going up behind him.
Then it stopped going up.
“Mom. Did Dad say anything before he left? Anything about where he was really going?”
I looked at the two cups.
Friday night, late, Roger had been out in the garage on his phone with the side door open. He didn’t know the kitchen window was open too.
He laughed out there in a way I hadn’t heard in years.
“There’s something,” I said. “I wasn’t going to tell anybody.”
“Tell me.”
So I told my son what his father said in the garage the night before our anniversary week, and who he said it to, and it wasn’t Jacob.
Ten o’clock Wednesday
“He called her Cilla,” I said. “Priscilla Kraus.”
Esteban didn’t say anything, so I gave him the rest the way I’d heard it through the window screen, every word, because I’d been saying it to myself for five days.
“Tuesday’s yours, Cilla. She’s had forty-seven of them.”
And then, after the laugh: “She won’t call anybody. She never calls anybody. By the time I’m home, she’ll have proved it for me.”
“Priscilla Kraus from church?” Esteban said. “The lady with the dock?”
“He fixes that dock every spring. Since her husband passed.”
“Proved what for him, Mom?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
I pulled the electric bill across the table and found the pen in my housecoat pocket. I drew a line through don’t call Esteban. It took two tries, because the pen was the cheap kind from the bank and it skipped.
On the other end the garage door started up again.
“Mom, I need to tell you something before I get there, so you don’t hear it from Dad.”
“All right.”
“In March he called me and asked what a power of attorney costs.”
Pre-op, five-forty in the morning
This house was my mother’s.
When she died in 2011 it came to Mabel and me, half and half, and Mabel didn’t want a second roof to worry about. She signed her half over to me at this same kitchen table. She was a notary at the title company on Sycamore for thirty-one years, so she stamped it herself, and she still carries that stamp in her purse. She says a notary without a stamp is just a nosy woman.
So the deed has one name on it. Mine.
Roger never said a word about it. He’s not that kind of man, or he wasn’t the kind people saw. He ushers at ten o’clock Mass. He fixes widows’ docks. When my hip got bad last fall he carried the laundry basket up from the basement every Sunday and told everybody at coffee hour about it.
The morning of the surgery he held my hand in the pre-op bay. They had the IV in the back of my other hand already, taped down crooked.
He had a manila folder on his knee.
“Hospital wants a few more signatures before they put you under, Dee,” he said. “In case.”
“In case what?”
“In case of whatever they say in case of. Here. And here. And on the last page.”
I signed three times. My name came out like a fence somebody had backed into, on account of the tape.
There was a woman out in the hallway in a yellow raincoat, with her back to the curtain. Roger stepped out to her with the folder and came back without it. I thought she was from admitting. I was counting backward from a hundred about ten minutes later and I never thought about her again.
The day they sent me home, the physical therapist came by the room. Amira. Small, quick, a ponytail she kept redoing.
“I’ll come do your home check on day thirteen,” she said. “That’s a Friday. I look at the bathroom, the steps, who’s around. If you’re not safe at home, Dolores, I’m required to say so.”
Roger asked her twice what “say so” meant. Whether it went on a form. Who saw the form.
She told him the doctor did, and the insurance.
He wrote the date on his hand.
Fifteen minutes after Esteban hung up, I heard his tires in the drive.
The screen door slapped once. My son has never knocked at this house in his life.
Under the refrigerator
He came in still in his work shirt with the name of the plant over the pocket, and he didn’t hug me. He went straight to the refrigerator.
“Don’t you bend,” he said. “Don’t you even look at bending.”
He got the yardstick out of the broom closet and lay down flat on the linoleum, forty-six years old, and swept under there with his cheek on the floor.
Out came Tuesday’s pills. Then Wednesday’s. Then a bread tie and a penny from 1987.
He lined the pills up on the counter beside the three twenties like he was building a case.
“I believed him,” he said from the floor. “Friday night he said you wanted to rest, you were sore, you’d text me when you felt like it. And you did text me. You told me about the CAT.”
“Mabel does have a cat.”
“Mom.”
“She does. It’s orange.”
He sat up with his back against the refrigerator and put his face in his hands. I let him. I didn’t have anything that would have fixed it.
Then he went out on the porch to call Jacob Lindquist. He thinks he’s out of earshot when he’s on that porch. He has been wrong about that since he was fourteen.
“Jacob, it’s Esteban. Is my dad up there with you?”
A long pause.
“February? He said that in February?”
When he came back in he stood in the doorway and didn’t sit down.
“Jacob’s home. He’s been home all week. Dad told him in February he wasn’t going up this year, because of your hip. He said he had to stay home and take care of you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Jacob said he mailed you a get-well card with a twenty in it. He wanted to know if you got it.”
The mail comes at two. Roger has walked out to that box every day for forty-eight years.
I never saw any card.
Wabash Valley
Mabel came in at ten-forty with her back perfectly fine and her big purse on her arm, the one with the stamp in it.
She looked at me. She looked at the walker, and the two cups, and the pills on the counter.
“Goddamn him,” she said, and she doesn’t say that. Then she sat down next to me and held on to my wrist the way you hold a railing.
“He told me you insisted on going to the lake,” she said. “He said you wanted to sit on the dock and be waited on. I said, Roger, she can’t get down her own steps. He said that was why she wanted the dock.”
I picked up my phone.
“Who are you calling?” Esteban said.
“Your father.”
“He won’t answer. I’ve called nine times.”
He answered on the second ring.
“There she is,” Roger said. Wind behind him, a boat motor somewhere. “See? Doing fine. I told you.”
“Where are you.”
“Up at the lake, where do you think.”
“Jacob’s home.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. The motor went by and faded.
“Is Mabel there? Put Mabel on. No. Don’t put her on. Dee, listen to me. I’ll be home Friday by noon. Amira’s coming at one for that home check, remember? I want you to be honest with her about this week. All of it. How hard it’s been. You tell her you couldn’t manage the shower. You tell her about the pills.”
“Why would I tell her about the pills?”
“Because it’s the TRUTH, Dee. Since when are you afraid of the truth?”
He hung up. He was the one who hung up. In forty-eight years I don’t think that had ever happened, and I sat there holding the phone like it had spoken a language I didn’t have.
Mabel had already gotten up. She went to the drawer by the phone where we keep the checkbook, because she’s my sister and she knows where every drawer is. She turned the carbon copies back one at a time with her thumb.
She stopped in March.
“Dee,” she said. “Who wrote this one?”
March 14. Five hundred dollars. Wabash Valley Residence. In the memo line, in Roger’s square printing: deposit, D.
Mabel took her reading glasses off.
“Daddy’s cousin went into Wabash Valley,” she said. “Nobody comes home from Wabash Valley.”
The bottom drawer
I went out to the garage myself.
They both tried to stop me. I told them I’d been doing things by myself since Saturday and I could do one more. There’s a single step down from the kitchen to the garage floor, and Esteban stood below me on the concrete with his arms out while I set the walker down and then my good leg and then the new one.
Roger’s desk is an old door laid across two filing cabinets. The side door was still unlatched from Friday night. There was a coffee can of screws, and the seed catalogs, and in the bottom drawer, under the seed catalogs, the manila folder.
Esteban opened it on the door top and we all three looked.
Durable Power of Attorney. Financial and Health Care. Agent: Roger A. Valente.
My crooked fence of a signature. Three times.
And under it a stamp. Priscilla J. Kraus, Notary Public, Howard County. The date was the morning of my surgery.
Mabel bent down close to it with her glasses back on.
“She didn’t even fill in the county line,” she said. “She stamped it and she didn’t fill in the county line.”
“Mabel,” I said. “Does Priscilla Kraus own a yellow raincoat?”
My sister looked up at me over her glasses.
“She’s worn that yellow raincoat to every fish fry since 2009.”
Esteban was reading the second page with his finger, the way he used to read his spelling words.
“With this he can sign for you,” he said. “At the bank. At the doctor. Where you live. If Amira writes down you can’t be alone, he signs you into Wabash Valley, and nobody has to ask you.”
“The house is Dee’s,” Mabel said. “My name’s on that quitclaim as giving it away.”
“He can sell what’s hers, Aunt Mabel, if he signs as her.”
I didn’t hear the rest. I was thinking about the forty-seven Tuesdays he said I’d had, and about him in this garage with the door open, laughing.
I took my debit card out of my housecoat pocket. Mama’s money is in an account with just my name on it, the money she left each of us besides the house, because Mama wanted us each to have something nobody else could touch.
I called the number on the back of the card and pushed the buttons.
“Your available balance is eleven dollars and sixty-two cents.”
Friday, twelve-forty
Thursday morning I wrote the revocation in my own hand on a sheet of Esteban’s legal pad. He looked up the words on his phone and read them to me slow, and I wrote them down. I, Dolores Valente, being of sound mind. Mabel sat across the table and watched me sign it, sober as a stone, and then she took the stamp out of her purse and pressed it down so hard the table jumped.
“There,” she said. “That’s how you do it. You fill in the county.”
Esteban drove copies to the bank and to the hospital. The bank told him the account was emptied Tuesday morning at 9:12, our anniversary, nineteen thousand four hundred dollars, a cashier’s check, signed for by Roger A. Valente as my attorney-in-fact. They told him it was a civil matter now.
Friday at twelve-forty Roger’s car came up the drive.
He came in with the tackle box in one hand and his cap on, and he stopped when he saw the three of us at the table.
On the table was the revocation, and the copy of the March check, and the three twenties lined up the way he’d left them.
“Well,” he said. “Look at this. A party.”
Nobody said anything. He set the tackle box down by the back door.
“I see what this is. Mabel’s been in your ear. Mabel’s been in your ear since 1971. Esteban, you’ve got a job, don’t you have a job? This is between me and your mother.”
He picked up the revocation and read it and laughed.
“This is nothing. She’s on pain pills. Nobody’s going to take a thing she signed on pain pills.”
“I watched her sign it,” Mabel said. “Ask me how many I’ve watched.”
He threw the paper down.
“You want to know? Fine. You want to know, Dee? I have been married to that walker for a year. A year before you ever got a new hip. Carrying baskets. Cutting your meat at Applebee’s in front of people. Cilla has a place on the water and a pension and she LAUGHS, Dee. When’s the last time you laughed?”
I didn’t answer that.
“I wanted one thing to go easy. One. Amira writes down that you can’t be by yourself, which you CAN’T, look at you, and you go somewhere with nurses and a nice dining room, and I don’t have to be the son of a bitch who put you there. The form does it. That’s all. I’d have visited.”
“With her money?” Esteban said. “With Grandma’s money?”
“That money was OURS. Forty-eight years, everything’s ours.”
“It’s in my name,” I said.
He looked at me like the walker had talked.
At twelve fifty-eight somebody knocked on the screen door. Amira, with her clipboard and her ponytail, a few minutes early.
“Get the door, Roger,” I said.
He didn’t move. Esteban got it.
“Hi, Dolores,” Amira said. “How has the week been?”
Roger stepped toward her and smiled the coffee-hour smile.
“It’s been rough,” he said. “She’s been struggling. The shower, the pills, she knocked them all…”
“I’ve been alone since Saturday morning,” I said. “He left Saturday. He came back twelve minutes ago.”
Amira looked at Roger. Then she looked at the pills on the counter, and the two cups by the sink, and she clicked her pen and wrote for a long time.
Roger picked up his tackle box.
On the way out he reached past me and took the three twenties off the table and put them in his shirt pocket.
The screen door slapped twice.
Four porch steps
Eight weeks after the surgery Amira cleared me for stairs.
It was a Saturday. Mabel had slept on my couch for the first two weeks and then most of the next six, and her blanket was still folded on the arm of it. Esteban had fixed the stove clock. It says what time it is now, which took some getting used to.
The tackle box shelf in the garage is empty. The folder is in a lawyer’s office downtown with Priscilla Kraus’s stamp on the front of it, and the nineteen thousand four hundred is still wherever he put it. Esteban talks to his father on the phone sometimes. He doesn’t tell me what they say and I don’t ask.
I went out on the front porch in real shoes.
Four steps. A hand on each rail.
Mabel was standing at the bottom of them in the grass with her purse on her arm.
“Don’t you look at me like that,” she said. “I’m not below you. I’m just standing here.”
I put my weight on the new hip and took the first one.
If this one got to you, call the person in your family who just came home from the hospital and ask them who’s in the house tonight.
For another family betrayal tangled up with surgery and secrets, read Two Days Before My Surgery, My Husband’s Other Woman Asked My Son About Our House Deed. You can also follow the fallout in I Gave My Son the Cabin Key the Week We Buried His Father and My Brother Tipped Me Twenty Dollars in a Dining Room I Run.
