At my sister-in-law’s Wednesday supper, my husband of thirty-six years twisted a capsule apart over my glass of sweet tea and stirred the powder in with her long spoon. He carried it out, put it by my plate and said, “Drink up, Pam. You’ve been dragging around like a zombie for months.” So I waited, and I traded one glass.
His sister Rita laughed into her napkin.
“She’s been dragging since the Reagan years,” she said.
I smiled the way I always smiled at Rita.
The glass stayed where he’d put it.
Eight months.
That’s how long I’d been sleeping through whole afternoons and waking up not sure if it was Tuesday or Friday.
I left a burner going under the kettle twice in March.
In August I drove to the credit union and sat in the lot for ten minutes trying to remember what I’d come for.
Dr. Haller ran bloodwork in June and found nothing, then said “early changes” while Lenny nodded beside me like a man hearing a forecast he’d already checked.
Two weeks later a power of attorney form showed up on my nightstand.
Little yellow flags on every line I was supposed to sign.
“Just in case, hon,” Lenny said. “So I can handle the bills if it gets worse.”
I hadn’t signed it yet.
Every Wednesday since Rita’s hip, we drove forty minutes to her place in Kenosha and ate at four sharp, because Rita didn’t hold food for anybody.
Lenny never crossed his sister. Not once in thirty-six years.
That Wednesday he drove with the radio off.
He checked his watch at every red light.
“You okay?” I said.
“Fine. Long week.”
That was the voice he used when a conversation was finished.
After the pot roast came out I went down the hall to the bathroom.
Coming back up the hall, I got as far as the kitchen doorway and froze.
Lenny was by Rita’s sink, half turned away from me.
Rita’s tray was on the drainboard beside him, five glasses of tea lined up on it.
He reached for the one on the end.
Mine. The ONLY one with a lemon wedge, because I’m the only person in that family who takes lemon.
He took something small and white out of his shirt pocket.
A capsule.
He pulled it in half over my glass and tapped each end with his finger until both were empty.
Then the spoon went round and round, a lot longer than sugar ever needed.
Then he glanced back toward the hall.
I was already two steps back in the dark, one hand on the wallpaper.
My pulse was banging in my ears.
The kettle. The parking lot. The afternoons I couldn’t account for.
All of it came back at once.
I’d blamed menopause. Then my thyroid. Then being sixty-two.
Lenny brought the tray out and set my glass down by my plate himself.
“Got your lemon in there, hon,” he said.
His mouth smiled fine.
His heel kept drumming the chair leg, down under the cloth where nobody could see.
I almost said it right there.
But what had I seen? A capsule. It could’ve been fish oil, and he’d say exactly that.
Rita would take his side. She always took his side.
And who believes the woman who leaves kettles on?
So I ate my pot roast.
Bertram told the ice-fishing story again.
Their daughter Tanya rolled her eyes at him and reached for the rolls.
Lenny kept looking at my glass. Then at me. Then the glass again.
He was counting on something.
That’s when I stopped doubting.
Then Bertram’s elbow caught the gravy boat and sent it across Rita’s good tablecloth.
Rita jumped up hollering. Everybody grabbed napkins.
Nobody’s eyes were on me.
I reached over and traded my glass for Rita’s. Lemon and all.
Once the gravy was mopped up, the table looked just like it had.
Rita sat back down, fanned her face, and drank half her tea without looking at it.
I sat on my hands.
Lenny leaned over. “Ice is melting, Pam. Drink up.”
“Too sweet today,” I said.
His eyes went to my glass. No lemon.
Then over to his sister’s.
For one second his face went completely empty.
Then he picked up his fork.
Maybe twenty minutes went by.
Rita was going on about the neighbor’s dog, and partway into it she just quit talking.
She blinked at her plate.
“I don’t feel right,” she said. The words came out soft at the edges.
“Mom?” Tanya said.
Rita went to get up and her hand missed the table.
Bertram caught her by the arm. “RITA, SIT DOWN.”
Tanya had her phone out. “I’m calling 911, DAD.”
Chairs scraped. The basket of rolls hit the floor.
Everybody crowded around Rita.
Not me.
I kept my eyes on Lenny.
His sister was sliding sideways in her chair and he never turned his head toward her.
His eyes were on ME.
Up and down, fast. My eyes. My hands. Whether I could hold my head up.
I sat up straight and stared back at him.
Then he got up, lifted Rita’s glass off the cloth and carried it into the kitchen.
The faucet ran.
He came back with wet hands and a face the color of dishwater.
Bertram was counting Rita’s breaths out loud.
Lenny bent down next to my ear.
“Pam,” he said. “WHICH GLASS DID YOU DRINK?”
The one without the lemon
“The one without the lemon,” I said.
I said it at a normal volume, straight into his face, the way you’d tell a waitress you wanted the dressing on the side.
Lenny pulled back like I’d poked him with a fork.
He looked down at my glass. Plain tea, no lemon, still full to the line where the ice had been.
Then he looked at the wet ring on the tablecloth at Rita’s place, where her glass had sat until he carried it off and washed it.
“You didn’t drink any,” he said.
“Too sweet today.”
On the far side, Bertram was still counting. “Eleven. Twelve. Rita, honey, look at me. Thirteen.”
Rita’s eyes were open. That was the best I could say for them.
Tanya was on her knees by her mother’s chair with the phone mashed to her ear, spelling Kenosha for the dispatcher like the woman had never heard of it.
I got up. My legs worked fine, and I’d like that on the record.
I walked around to Rita’s chair and held her free hand. It was warm and heavy and it didn’t hold mine back.
“Rita,” I said. “It’s Pam. Stay with Bert.”
She made a sound that might have been my name.
Thirty-six years that woman had said my name like it was a stain on her blouse. Right then I’d have paid cash to hear her say it that way again.
The ambulance took nine minutes. Bertram counted those too.
Two paramedics came in with a stretcher and a lot of cold November air. The older one, a woman with a gray braid, crouched by Rita and asked her what day it was.
“Pot roast,” Rita said.
“What did she have tonight?” the paramedic said. “Any medications? Anything to drink?”
“Pot roast,” Bertram said. “Rolls. Sweet tea.”
“Where’s her glass?”
Bertram went into the kitchen to get it.
Nobody else moved. I didn’t, and Lenny didn’t, and the space between us was about the width of a gravy boat.
Bertram came back holding a tumbler upside down by its bottom, the way you carry a clean one. Water was beaded all over it.
A lemon seed was stuck to the inside of the rim.
Bertram looked at the seed. Then at my glass, the plain one, with no lemon in it.
“Somebody washed this,” he said.
“I did,” Lenny said. “Habit.”
The January supper
Lenny was the most patient man in southeastern Wisconsin. Ask anybody. Ask the girls at the bank, who kept the good pens for him.
Ask Rita.
Rita had raised him after their mother died, a bossy fourteen-year-old with a ten-year-old brother and a stepfather who drank. She’d packed his lunches and signed his report cards. By the time I met him, at twenty-six, he’d stopped arguing with her about anything, and he never started again.
I used to think that was sweet. A man who loves his big sister. Who could hate that?
Rita never cared for me. I was the girl from Racine with the loud laugh who took her brother away to live in my mother’s house.
The house. I should tell you about the house.
It’s a brick ranch on a corner lot, and my mother left it to me when she died in 1998. My name is the only name on the deed. That was her doing, not mine, and she did it with her reading glasses on.
Every spring for about eleven years, Lenny brought home brochures for Mesa, Arizona. Sun. Golf. No snow to shovel.
Every spring I said no, and he put the brochures in the recycling and said, “Your house, your call, hon.”
He said “your house” the way other men say “your mother.”
Last January, at Rita’s table, the brochures came up again. Rita was two months out from her hip, sitting on a pillow, eating Bertram’s chili because she couldn’t stand at the stove yet. She was in a mood.
“My sleeping pills go like candy,” she said. “I had to call the pharmacy for an early refill and that little girl acted like I was selling them in the parking lot.”
“You’re taking two,” Bertram said.
“I take one.”
“Then they’re walking off by themselves.” Bertram wiped his mustache. “I’m counting them from now on. Every night. It’s going in the book.”
The book was a green spiral notebook he’d kept since 1979. Every fish he ever caught was in it, with the date, the lake, the weight, and what the weather did.
“Bert,” Lenny said, “you’d count the snowflakes if they’d hold still.”
Everybody laughed. I laughed.
Lenny got up and took his plate to the sink. He always used Rita’s bathroom the minute we arrived, too, every single Wednesday. Forty minutes of driving was the limit of his bladder. I used to tease him about it in the car.
In February I got the flu. The real kind, with the fever and the shaking. I missed two Wednesdays in a row, flat on my back on the couch with a bucket.
Lenny went to Rita’s alone both times. He took her a pot of my chicken soup, the one with the dill. I made it with a fever of a hundred and one, because Rita had a new hip and I was raised right.
The first week of March, I got better.
The second week of March, Lenny started bringing me tea at two o’clock every afternoon. Sweet, with a lemon wedge, in my blue mug.
“You work too hard,” he said, setting it by my crossword. “Sit for once.”
I told my friend Cristina at church that I had no idea what had gotten into him. She said, “Pam, honey, don’t ask. Just drink it.”
So I drank it.
Two weeks after that, I left the burner going under the kettle for the first time.
Now I rode in the back of Lenny’s Pontiac, because the paramedic said only one family member could ride along, and that was Bertram.
Lenny drove.
Lenny didn’t say a word until we pulled into the lot.
Then he turned around in his seat and said, “You switched them.”
Bay six
The emergency room at Kenosha put Rita in bay six behind a curtain with ducks on it. Yellow ducks.
We sat in the plastic chairs outside the curtain. Bertram on one end with his hands on his knees. Tanya next to him. Then me. Then Lenny, at the end, by the vending machine.
Nobody talked. The vending machine hummed.
After an hour, a doctor came out. She was about thirty-five and looked like she’d been awake since Labor Day.
“She’s going to be fine,” she said.
Tanya started crying. Bertram put a hand on her back.
“She’s got a sedative in her system, a strong one,” the doctor said. “We’re watching her breathing. She’ll sleep it off. Does she take anything at home to sleep?”
“Pills from her hip,” Bertram said. “One at bedtime. She hasn’t had one since last night.”
“This was a lot more recent than last night.” The doctor looked at each of us. “Did she take something at dinner?”
Lenny stood up.
I knew the way he stood up. He did it at the parish council when the roof fund came up short, and at my mother’s funeral, and at the car dealership in 2011. It was a slow stand. It said, I’m sorry to be the one.
“Can we talk somewhere?” he said. “As a family?”
The doctor said she’d be back. She went.
Lenny turned to Bertram and Tanya. He did not look at me. He put his hand on my shoulder instead, like a man resting his hand on a fence post.
“I didn’t want to do this here,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it at all. Pam’s been having trouble.”
“Lenny,” I said.
“Hon, let me.” He squeezed the fence post. “She left the stove on twice this spring. She got lost going to the credit union, a place she’s been going for thirty years. Dr. Haller’s worried. I’ve been worried sick. I didn’t tell you all, because she was embarrassed.”
Tanya looked at me. Her face was wet and blotchy and very young.
“And I think,” Lenny said, “I think she’s been helping herself to Rita’s pills. To sleep. She can’t sleep, she gets up at all hours. Rita said they were going fast, remember? Back in the winter?”
“I remember,” Bertram said.
“She was in the bathroom right before,” Lenny said. “Right before. Where Rita keeps them.”
I said, “He put something in my glass. In the kitchen. I saw him do it.”
I said it plain. I want you to know I said it plain, in a normal voice, with my purse on my lap.
Lenny closed his eyes for a second, like it hurt him.
“Hon,” he said. “Listen to yourself.”
“I saw you. You broke a capsule over my tea with Rita’s spoon.”
“Why would I do that, Pam?” He said it gently. He said it to Tanya.
And there it was. I had no answer anybody in that hallway would buy. I had a capsule, a spoon, a kettle, and eight months of my own word against the most patient man in southeastern Wisconsin.
“Why’d he wash the glass?” I said. “Ask him that.”
“Because I was out of my mind,” Lenny said. “My sister was falling out of her chair. I grabbed the first thing I could do with my hands. You ever see somebody you love go like that, Pam? You don’t think. You just do.”
Bertram looked at the floor tiles. He was counting them. I’d have bet the house on it.
Tanya wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
“Aunt Pam,” she said. “I saw you switch the glasses.”
Midnight, the washer
We got home at eleven-forty. Lenny had driven me back himself, both hands on the wheel, the radio still off.
Tanya stayed at the hospital. Bertram stayed with Rita.
In the car Lenny said exactly one thing. At the light by the Piggly Wiggly, he said, “We’ll talk tomorrow, when you’re thinking straight.”
I was thinking straighter than I’d thought since February.
That’s the thing nobody tells you. You can be so frightened your teeth hurt, and under it, in the basement of yourself, there’s a clear cold room. I’d been missing that room for eight months. That night I sat right in the middle of it.
I went to the bedroom and sat on my side of the bed in my coat.
The power of attorney form was still on the nightstand. The yellow flags stuck out of it like little tongues.
Lenny went into the bathroom. The shower ran.
His shirt. The capsule had come out of his shirt pocket, and he’d put the two empty halves back in, I was almost sure. I’d seen him tuck something in there after the spoon.
For thirty-six years I’d emptied that man’s pockets. Every Monday, laundry day, into a Folgers can on top of the dryer. Golf tees. Receipts from the Kwik Trip. I knew what was in his pockets better than I knew what was in my own heart.
I went down the hall to the hamper.
The shirt wasn’t in it.
The shower stopped. I went back to the bedroom and got under the covers in my clothes and pulled them up to my chin.
He came in in his undershirt, smelling like Irish Spring, and stood at the foot of the bed.
“I made you some chamomile,” he said. “It’ll help you sleep.”
The blue mug was in his hand. A lemon wedge was riding on the top.
“Put it on the nightstand,” I said. “I’ll have it in a minute.”
He put it on the nightstand, right on top of the power of attorney form. The bottom of the mug left a wet ring on the first page.
He got into bed with his back to me. In about twenty minutes his breathing went long.
I took the mug into the bathroom and poured it down the toilet, slow, so it wouldn’t splash. I rinsed the mug. I put the lemon wedge in my bathrobe pocket, I don’t know why. Some part of me wanted to keep it.
Then I lay down again and didn’t sleep.
At ten after midnight, the bed moved.
Lenny got up. He went down the hall in his socks. I heard the basement door.
Then I heard the washer start. The thump of the lid. Water filling.
I lay there with my eyes open, listening to it run. Spin cycle. Rinse. Spin.
In thirty-six years of marriage, I had never once known Lenny to touch the washing machine.
He didn’t know which cup the soap went in.
He’d found it anyway.
Rita’s recliner
I called the hospital at seven in the morning. They said Rita had been released at six. They didn’t say to whom.
Lenny was already gone when I came out of the bedroom. A note by the toaster, in his square printing, said, At Rita’s. Stay home and rest. L.
He’d taken the Pontiac. He’d left me my own car, which was decent of him, and I’ve thought since that it was the last mistake he made for a while.
I washed my face. I put on my good slacks and the blue sweater Rita had once said made me look “less washed out.” I stopped at the Pick ‘n Save and bought yellow mums, because Rita liked yellow. And I drove the forty minutes to Kenosha with the radio on, loud, so I’d know I was awake.
Lenny’s Pontiac was in the driveway. So was Tanya’s car.
Tanya opened the door. She didn’t open it far.
“Mom doesn’t want to see you,” she said.
“I brought her mums.”
“Aunt Pam.” Her chin wobbled. “Please.”
“Let her in.” Rita’s voice came from the living room. Flat, and slower than usual, but Rita. “Let her in, Tanya. I’ve got something to say to her.”
Rita was in her recliner with an afghan over her knees. Her face was gray. Her hair was flat on one side from the hospital pillow, and nobody had fixed it, and that, more than anything, scared me.
Lenny was in the chair beside her. He was holding her hand.
Bertram was in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel slung on one shoulder. He nodded at me. Just one nod. I couldn’t tell what it meant.
“Rita,” I said. “I’m so sorry you got sick.”
“Sick.” Rita laughed, a dry one, like a cough. “My brother sat up with me the whole night. Where were you? Home sleeping?”
“Lenny drove me home.”
“Because you can’t drive at night anymore. He told me.” She turned her head on the recliner to look at him, and the love on her face was so plain it was hard to look at. “He told me everything. The stove. The parking lot. That you go off in the afternoons and don’t know where you are.”
“Rita, I’m not confused.”
“You took my pills.”
“I didn’t take your pills.”
“Tanya saw you switch the glasses.”
“I did switch the glasses,” I said. “Because he—”
“Pam.” Lenny’s voice, soft, the voice for finishing conversations. “Don’t. Not today. She just got home.”
Rita squeezed his fingers. “You want to know what I think? I think you put something in your own tea so you could sleep through my supper, like you sleep through everything. And then you got mixed up and gave it to me. That’s what I think, and I’m being generous.”
“I didn’t put anything in anything.”
“Thirty-six years,” Rita said. “Thirty-six years I’ve had you at my table. I gave you my mother’s gravy boat at your wedding. And you could’ve killed me.”
I looked at Bertram. He was folding the dish towel into smaller and smaller squares.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Rita said. “Tanya wanted to call the police this morning. My brother said no. My brother said you’d get help. He said you’d sign that paper so he can take care of you, and you’d see somebody, and that would be the end of it.”
“Rita.”
“And you won’t come Wednesdays anymore. Lenny can come. You stay home.”
The mums were still in my hand. Yellow. I could feel the plastic sleeve getting damp where I held it.
“And you’re not driving,” Rita said. “Not to my house. Not anywhere. Give him your keys.”
“It’s my car.”
“Give him your keys, Pam,” Tanya said from behind me, crying. “Please. You could hurt somebody.”
Lenny stood up. He didn’t come at me. He just held out his hand, palm up, patient as a crossing guard.
Every person in that room was waiting.
I took my keys out of my purse and put them in his hand.
He dropped them into his shirt pocket. The same pocket.
The yellow flags
Tanya drove me home. Lenny followed in the Pontiac. Tanya didn’t speak for forty minutes, and when we got to my driveway she said, “I’m sorry, Aunt Pam. I love you. I’m so sorry.”
She said it like I was already gone somewhere.
That was Thursday.
On Friday my car sat in Rita’s driveway, and on Saturday morning it was parked in Rita’s garage, because Rita “had room.”
On Saturday afternoon I called Tanya. She let it ring five times and then she answered and said, “Uncle Lenny said you might call,” and she hung up.
On Saturday evening Lenny sat down across from me at our kitchen table with the power of attorney form and a pen.
It was a nice pen. One of the ones the girls at the bank saved for him.
“I want to talk to you like an adult,” he said. “Can we do that?”
“We can try.”
“Nobody’s mad at you, Pam. Rita’s not even mad. She’s scared.” He smoothed the form flat. The wet ring from the chamomile mug had dried into a brown circle on the top page, right over the word attorney. “Tanya wanted the police. You know what the police do with a woman who puts pills in somebody’s drink? Even by accident? At your age?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I talked them down,” he said. “That was me. Me, and nobody else. Because I love you. And all I asked them for was this.”
He turned the form around to face me.
The flags were on every page. Yellow, yellow, yellow. On the third page, the one about real property, a flag pointed straight at the line where the address of my mother’s house was already typed in.
He’d had it typed in. In June.
“This covers the house,” I said.
“It covers everything. That’s what it’s for.” He leaned back. “If something happens to you, God forbid, I can’t even fix the furnace without your signature. Is that fair? Thirty-six years I’ve paid the taxes on that house.”
“My mother paid the mortgage.”
“Your mother,” he said. Then he stopped and smiled, and it was a good smile, the one the bank girls liked. “I’m not fighting with you. You sign it Wednesday, at Rita’s, with everybody watching, so they can see you’re taking care of it. Then it’s done. Then you come back to supper the week after. Everybody forgets. That’s how this family works.”
“And if I don’t?”
He looked at me a long time.
“Then I can’t help you anymore, hon,” he said. “Then it’s Tanya, and the police, and Dr. Haller, and a judge who’s going to look at a sixty-two-year-old woman who leaves the stove on and poisoned her sister-in-law. You think a judge gives you the house? A judge gives you a room.”
My hands were in my lap. I held one with the other so it would stay still.
He got up and went to the stove. He filled the kettle and lit the burner. He made a show of turning the knob and checking it, looking back at me.
When the tea was ready he set the blue mug down by my hand. A lemon wedge sat on top, turning slowly.
“Sweet, the way you like it,” he said.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Pam.”
“I’ll sign,” I said. “Wednesday. At Rita’s. With everybody watching.”
He let his breath out through his nose. His shoulders came down an inch. For the first time all week he looked like a man who’d had a long week and could finally go to bed.
“Good girl,” he said.
He picked up the form, tapped it square against the wood, then put it on top of the refrigerator where I couldn’t reach it without the step stool.
He left the mug where it was, by my hand.
“Four sharp,” he said. “Rita doesn’t hold food for anybody.”
Bertram’s fish book
Lenny golfed on Tuesdays. Rain or shine, eighteen holes in Pleasant Prairie with three other men who all wore the same polo shirt in different colors.
At nine-fifteen on Tuesday morning, the Pontiac backed out of the driveway.
At nine-twenty I called a cab.
The driver was a young man named Anwar. He said Kenosha was going to be sixty-one dollars. I said fine. I paid him out of the coffee can on the dryer, in fives and ones and a roll of quarters, because Lenny had the checkbook and I wasn’t sure anymore what else he had.
Anwar counted it twice and looked at me in the mirror.
“You okay, ma’am?”
“I’m going to see my brother-in-law,” I said.
He seemed to think that answered it.
Bertram opened the door before I knocked. He must have seen the cab. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a pencil behind his ear.
“Rita’s sleeping,” he said. “She sleeps days now. Since.”
“I know about afternoons,” I said.
He looked at me a while. Then he stepped back and let me in.
The kitchen table was covered in newspaper, the way it was every winter when he cleaned his reels. There weren’t any reels on it. There was the green spiral notebook, open, and a pill bottle with a white cap, and a mug of coffee with a skin on it that had been there since morning.
He’d been sitting with them. You could tell.
“I keep thinking about that glass,” Bertram said. “I keep thinking. Thirty-one years married to Rita, I never saw her brother wash a dish.”
“He washed his own shirt Wednesday night,” I said. “At midnight.”
Bertram took his glasses down onto his nose.
“Sit,” he said.
I sat. He turned the notebook around.
It was in pencil, in Bertram’s careful little printing, the same printing he used for walleye. Every night since January: a date, a number. The count of Rita’s sleeping pills. Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Down by one a night, steady as a clock.
Except on Wednesdays.
On Wednesdays the number dropped by four. Sometimes five.
“I figured it was you,” Bertram said. Not mean. Just a fact, like a weight. “You were in that bathroom every Wednesday.”
“So was Lenny,” I said. “First thing, every week. The minute we walked in.”
“That’s what I can’t get past.”
I put my finger on the page and moved it up, back toward the winter.
“Bert,” I said. “February.”
He looked at me.
“I had the flu,” I said. “Two weeks. I didn’t come. I was on my couch with a bucket. Lenny came by himself and brought you my soup.”
Bertram didn’t move for a long moment. Then he wet his thumb and turned back the pages, slowly, one at a time, the way you’d turn back a sheet over somebody sleeping.
February.
He ran his finger down the column.
The second Wednesday in February, the count dropped by four.
The third Wednesday in February, the count dropped by five.
I wasn’t in that house either day. I was forty minutes north with a fever of a hundred and one, stirring dill into a pot of soup for his wife.
Bertram took his glasses all the way off and set them on the newspaper. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and his first finger, hard, for a long time.
“He called me,” he said. “Monday before last.”
“Called you?”
“Asked me to make sure Tanya came to supper. She doesn’t come Wednesdays, she’s got her bowling. He said he was worried about you. He said he wanted her to see for herself how bad you’d got.” Bertram opened his eyes. “I told Tanya to come. I told her that. Her uncle’s worried about Aunt Pam.”
I had a picture then, plain as the pill bottle. Me, in my good blue sweater, going soft and slow at Rita’s table with all of them watching. My hand missing the table. Tanya on the phone. Everybody’s eyes on me, everybody remembering it, everybody nodding when Lenny brought out a form with yellow flags.
He’d wanted an audience. He’d checked his watch at every red light so he wouldn’t be late for it.
“He’s coming tomorrow at four,” I said. “With the paper. I told him I’d sign it with everybody watching.”
Bertram closed the notebook. He put his big hand flat on the cover.
“Rita won’t hear it from you,” he said.
“I know.”
“She’ll hear it from me.” He pushed back his chair. “I’ll set the table. You make the tea.”
Four sharp
Lenny drove us down at three-twenty on Wednesday. The radio was on. He was whistling.
He had the form in a manila envelope on the seat between us, and he’d bought a box of bakery cookies for Rita, the butter ones with the jam in the middle, which she liked and pretended she didn’t.
“You look good,” he said at a red light. “Rested.”
“I’ve been sleeping fine,” I said.
He gave me a quick look. Then the light changed.
Rita was in her chair at the head of her table. Somebody had fixed her hair. Tanya was there, bowling night or not, and when I came in she stood up and then stood there a second, lost, and sat down again.
Bertram was at the stove with the pot roast. He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to.
“I’ll do the tea,” I said. “Rita shouldn’t be carrying a tray on that hip.”
“Let her,” Lenny said, warm and easy. “Let her help, Rita. It’s good for her.”
Rita waved a hand. Fine.
I went into the kitchen. Rita’s tray was on the drainboard. I set out five glasses, filled them with ice and sweet tea from the jug, and took the long spoon out of the drawer and stirred each one, round and round, a lot longer than sugar ever needed.
Then I cut one lemon wedge and dropped it into the glass on the end.
I carried the tray out. I set one glass by Tanya, one by Bertram, one by Rita, one by my own plate.
I set the last one by Lenny’s plate, myself.
“Got your lemon in there, hon,” I said.
Lenny looked at the glass.
He looked at the lemon wedge, turning slowly in it, riding up on the ice.
His heel started on the chair leg.
Nobody said anything. Bertram set the pot roast down and took his chair.
“I don’t take lemon,” Lenny said.
“Try it,” I said.
“What is this, Pam?”
“Ice is melting,” I said. “Drink up.”
Tanya looked at her uncle, then at the glass, then at me. “Uncle Lenny, it’s just tea.”
“I know what it is.” He pushed it six inches away with the back of his hand. His voice was still patient but there was something underneath it now, like a car idling too fast. “I think we should get the business done first. Then we eat. Pam, I’ve got the paper right here.”
He opened the manila envelope and took out the form and laid it next to my plate. He uncapped the bank pen and set it down on top, crossways, like a fork.
Bertram took the green notebook out of his cardigan and laid it on the tablecloth beside the pot roast.
“Before the business,” Bertram said.
“Bert, not now with the fish.”
“It’s not fish.” Bertram opened it to February and turned it around to face Rita. “It’s your pills, honey. I’ve been counting since January, like I said. Look at Wednesdays.”
Rita looked. She had her reading glasses on a chain and she put them on.
“Now look at February,” Bertram said. “The two Wednesdays Pam had the flu. Who came?”
Rita didn’t answer. Her finger stopped on the page.
“Lenny came,” Bertram said. “With the soup. Four pills one week. Five the next.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Lenny said. He laughed. He actually laughed. “She took them before. She took a handful in January and kept them in her purse. She’s sick, Bert. She hides things. She hid the checkbook in the freezer in July. You want to see the freezer? Come over and I’ll show you the freezer.”
“I never hid any checkbook,” I said.
“You don’t remember hiding it, Pam. That’s the whole point.” He turned to Rita. “Rita. Come on. Rita, look at me.”
Rita was looking at the notebook.
“I washed the glass because I panicked,” Lenny said. “I told you. I told all of you. My sister was going down and I had no idea what to do with my hands. And this one”—he pointed at me without looking at me—”this one switched the glasses. Tanya saw her. Tanya, tell them what you saw.”
“I saw her switch them,” Tanya said. Her voice was small. “Uncle Lenny, why did she switch them?”
“Because she’s confused.”
“Why would she switch them if it was hers?” Tanya said. “Why wouldn’t she just drink it?”
The table got very quiet.
Lenny opened his mouth. He closed it.
“And you called Dad,” Tanya said. “You called Dad to make me come. You never want me at supper. You said I talk too much.”
“Because I was worried about her!”
“Lenny,” Rita said.
Just his name. The way she used to say it when he was ten and had something behind his back.
He stood up. His chair scraped. He put both palms flat on the cloth and leaned on them, and for one second he looked exactly like Rita.
“You want to know?” he said. “Fine. You want to know? Thirty-six years in her mother’s house. Her mother’s dishes. Her mother’s name on the deed and mine on the property tax bill every December. Eleven times I asked her to sell. Eleven times. You know what she said? No. Every time. And I’d say, ‘Your house, your call, hon.’ I’m sixty-four years old. I’ve got bad knees and I shovel her mother’s driveway, and I’m going to die in that house shoveling it, unless somebody signs a piece of paper.”
“Lenny,” Rita said again.
“I wasn’t going to hurt her! A couple pills in the afternoon. Slow her down. Let her get a little foggy. Let Dr. Haller see it, let the family see it, and she signs, and we go to Arizona, and she’s happy, she’d have been happy, she’d have had sun—”
“You put my pills,” Rita said, “in a glass.”
“It was supposed to be HER glass.”
He heard it a half second after everybody else did.
Tanya put her hand over her mouth.
Rita took her reading glasses off. She folded them, slowly, and set them on the notebook. Then she put both hands on the arms of her chair and pushed herself up. Her hip had been replaced a year ago and she hadn’t stood up that fast since. Bertram put out a hand to steady her and she didn’t let him.
She stood there, sixty-eight years old, both hands braced on her own table.
“You took my glass to the sink,” she said. “I was falling out of my chair, and you took my glass to the sink.”
“Rita, I—”
“You washed it. Before you looked at me. You washed it first.”
“I was scared.”
“Of what?” Rita said. “Of what, Leonard?”
He didn’t have anything. For the first time in his whole patient life, he didn’t have the next sentence ready.
“Get out of my house,” Rita said.
“Rita.”
“I packed your lunches. I signed your report cards. Get out of my house before Bertram has to put you out of it.”
Bertram stood up next to her. He was seventy-one and had a bad shoulder from forty winters of augering holes in the ice, and he looked about ten feet tall.
Lenny turned my way.
That dishwater color was back in his cheeks. He reached over the pot roast, not for me, just toward me, the way he used to reach for the salt.
“Pam,” he said. “Hon. Tell them. Tell them I’d never—”
I picked up the glass with the lemon in it and held it out to him.
“Drink up, Lenny,” I said.
He looked at it a long time.
Then he took his car keys out of his pocket, dropped them on the floor, picked them up again, and went to the door without his coat.
“Lenny,” I said.
He stopped with his hand on the knob.
“My keys.”
His fingers went to the shirt pocket. My car keys came out and went down on the little stand by Rita’s door, next to the bowl where she kept her rosary and her coupons.
The door shut behind him.
Tanya was crying. Rita sat down hard, and Bertram caught her by the arm, and she let him this time.
I picked up the bank pen and capped it.
The apartment over the vacuum shop
Rita drove to the police station Thursday morning. Not me. Rita.
She took the green notebook and the pill bottle and her discharge papers from the hospital, and she took Bertram, and she wore her good coat with the fur collar. She told me later she sat across from a detective with a mustache and said, “My brother put my own sleeping pills in a glass of tea at my own table, and I’d like to know what you plan to do about it.”
It was her pills, her glass and her body. She said that made it hers to report.
Lenny never crossed his sister in thirty-six years. It turned out that once was enough.
Tanya drove me to a lawyer the following Monday. The lawyer had an office over a dentist in Racine and a dish of butterscotch candies she kept pushing toward me.
“Whose name is on the house?” she said.
“Mine,” I said. “Just mine. My mother did it with her reading glasses on.”
The lawyer smiled like that was useful.
Here is how it went, in order.
In December, Dr. Haller ran my bloodwork again. Five weeks with nothing to drink in my house that I hadn’t poured myself. I sat on the paper on the exam table while he read it, and Tanya sat in the chair where Lenny used to sit.
“Nothing there,” Dr. Haller said.
Those were his two words. I made him say them twice.
In January the charge against Lenny came down. Rita pressed it. She has a copy taped inside her kitchen cabinet next to her pharmacy number.
Lenny’s lawyer cost him $14,000, my lawyer told me. He paid it out of his half of the savings account, which by the time it was divided was $22,817.40. His half was $11,408.70. That lawyer ate every other dollar Lenny owned, and his good golf clubs went too, sold to one of the three polo-shirt men.
He did not get the house. His name was never on it. My mother made sure.
He did not get the Pontiac, either. The Pontiac was in my name too, because in 2011 his credit was bad and mine was not. I’d forgotten that. My lawyer hadn’t.
He got his clothes, his bowling ball, and a twelve-year-old recliner, and he moved into an apartment over a vacuum repair shop in Pleasant Prairie, with a window that looks out on the shop’s dumpster.
He sent me a letter in February. Three pages, in his square printing, about Arizona. I read the first paragraph. Then I put it in the Folgers can on the dryer, with the golf tees and the Kwik Trip receipts, because that’s where Lenny’s things go in my house.
The power of attorney form I kept, too. I peeled off the yellow flags one at a time and stuck them on the side of the refrigerator, where I could reach them without the step stool.
I did sign a power of attorney in the end. My lawyer drew it up in March. It names Bertram.
He counts everything.
A Wednesday in April
The first Wednesday in April, I drove myself to Kenosha with the radio on.
Forty minutes. No red lights that I bothered to count.
Rita’s daffodils were up along the front walk. Bertram came out in his cardigan to watch me park.
“Four sharp,” he said.
“It’s three fifty-two.”
“I know what time it is.” He held the door.
Tanya was there, bowling night or not. She hugged me in the hall so hard my glasses went crooked.
Rita sat at the head on her pillow, the pot roast before her, and her reading glasses on the chain. The good tablecloth was back on. There was a faint brown shadow on it, near the middle, where the gravy boat had gone over in November. She’d never gotten it out. She said she wasn’t going to try.
Nobody went down the hall to the bathroom the minute they walked in.
Rita’s tray was on the sideboard with four glasses of sweet tea on it.
She wouldn’t let me carry it. She wouldn’t let Tanya carry it either. She got up off her pillow with both hands flat on the cloth, and she brought the tray around herself, one slow step at a time, and set the glasses down at every place.
Mine came last.
A lemon wedge was in it, riding up on the ice.
She’d cut it herself. You could tell, because Rita cuts a lemon like she’s mad at it.
“Got your lemon in there, hon,” Rita said.
She’d never called me hon in her life. She said it like it was a word in a language she was still learning, and she put her hand on my shoulder, not like a fence post at all.
I picked up the glass and drank half of it without looking.
If this one got to you, send it to the woman in your family who always takes the lemon, then pour her a glass and sit with her a while.
Family dinners can hide some painful surprises – there’s more family tension in the birthday bill my son stopped me from paying and the loan against the inn bearing my daughter’s signature. For another story of old family wounds surfacing, read the moment my ex-husband called Zoey’s name.
