My husband twisted two capsules open over my coffee at his mother’s Friday supper, four days after he’d booked me a memory test and printed a power of attorney for my late father’s $612,000 house. He set the mug by my plate and said, “Drink up, Mari. You know how you get after dark.” So I waited for the room to look away.
I’d been losing whole evenings since March.
Not minutes. Evenings.
I’d sit down after supper with the crossword and wake at two in the morning on the couch, the pen still in my hand, no memory of the TV going off.
I left the back door unlocked twice. I put the car keys in the freezer once.
Rodrigo found them. Rodrigo was always the one who found things.
“This is how it started with your dad,” he said in August. “I’m not trying to scare you. I’m trying to get ahead of it.”
My father left me the house on the corner lot when he died. Me. Not us.
It had been in my name for nine years, and Rodrigo never once brought it up until my evenings started going missing.
Then an appointment card showed up on the fridge. Memory clinic, Thursday, 10:15.
Then a stack of paper showed up in the printer tray. Durable power of attorney. His buddy Orlando had drawn it up “as a favor.”
I hadn’t signed. I kept saying I wanted to read it first.
Every time I sat down to read it, I fell asleep.
Friday supper at Viola’s is older than our marriage. Thirty-one years of pot roast in Muskogee, the same checked oilcloth, the same rooster clock over the stove that runs four minutes slow and that nobody has ever fixed.
Clayton and Felicia were already there when we pulled in.
I went down the hall to wash up.
Coming back, I passed the kitchen doorway and stopped.
Rodrigo stood at the counter with his back half to me.
My mug was in front of him. The blue one with the chip in the rim, the one Viola always hands me because she says I won’t notice.
He had a capsule between two fingers.
He twisted it, the halves came apart, and he tapped them over MY coffee like he was salting it.
Then a second one.
Then he stirred it with the handle of a fork.
Then he looked over his shoulder at the hallway.
I was already back around the corner with my palm flat on the wallpaper.
The couch at two in the morning. The keys in the freezer.
The coffee he’d started making me every night since March, because he was “on his way to the pot anyway.”
He came out with two mugs and put the blue one by my plate, handle turned toward my hand.
“Drink up, Mari,” he said. “You know how you get after dark.”
Viola laughed into her napkin.
“She’s going just like her daddy did,” she said to Felicia. “Bless her, she can’t even tell.”
I wrapped both hands around the mug.
I didn’t drink.
If I said one word at that table, I’d be the woman who loses her keys, accusing her husband of drugging her coffee, in front of his mother, six days before a memory test.
So I sat.
Rodrigo ate his roast and kept looking at my hands.
At the mug, really.
He asked if it was too hot. I said it was.
He asked again five minutes later.
“Let her be, Rigo,” Felicia said. “Lord.”
Then the rolls Viola had forgotten in the oven started to smoke, and the alarm in the hall went off, and the whole table stood up at once.
Clayton grabbed a dish towel to fan it. Viola went for the oven. Rodrigo went to yank the battery.
I went into the kitchen like I meant to help.
The fork was still by the sink. So was everything he’d left beside it.
I swept it into my cardigan pocket.
On my way back to the table I passed Clayton’s place. Same blue mug. No chip.
It took me one second.
When everybody sat down again, the rooster clock said 7:52, which meant 7:56, and Clayton drank half of what was in front of him while he complained about his transmission.
Rodrigo watched me lift mine.
Plain coffee, three sugars, the way Clayton takes it.
Rodrigo smiled at me for the first time all night.
Twenty minutes later Clayton stopped in the middle of a sentence.
He laid his fork down slowly, like it weighed more than a fork.
“I’m not right,” he said.
“You’re tired, hon,” Felicia said.
“I’m NOT tired. My hands feel wrong.”
He tried to stand and sat back down hard enough to rattle the gravy boat.
Felicia was up. Viola was up. Felicia had her phone to her ear and was giving someone the address.
Everybody was looking at Clayton.
I was looking at Rodrigo.
And Rodrigo wasn’t looking at his brother.
He was looking at me.
My eyes. My hands. The empty mug with the chip.
His face had gone the color of the oilcloth.
He was waiting for me to go slow.
I sat up straighter than I had since March.
The paramedics came in through the kitchen with a red bag and a lot of questions.
One of them crouched by Clayton’s chair and looked around the table.
“Has he taken anything tonight? Anything at all?”
Viola said he only takes his blood pressure pill.
Felicia said no.
“No,” Rodrigo said. “Nothing. He’s just worn out.”
The paramedic looked at me, since I was the only one still sitting.
I stood up and put my hand in my pocket.
“ASK MY HUSBAND WHAT HE PUT IN MY COFFEE,” I said.
Then I opened my fingers over the oilcloth, and four empty capsule halves rolled across it toward Rodrigo’s plate.
Four halves on the oilcloth
The paramedic picked one up between two gloved fingers and held it under the ceiling light.
Green on one end. White on the other. A little powder still caught in the seam.
“Sir?”
“Those are hers,” Rodrigo said. “Her sleeping pills. She carries them around loose in her pockets, I’ve told her a hundred times. She’s been confused since spring. Ask anybody here.”
“I don’t have sleeping pills,” I said.
“Mari.”
“I take one pill. It’s for my thyroid. You can call the pharmacy on Shawnee and ask them.”
The paramedic didn’t call anybody. He peeled off a glove, turned it inside out over the four halves, knotted it and dropped it in the red bag.
Then he looked at Rodrigo again.
“How many went in the cup?”
“She didn’t drink it,” Felicia said. “Clayton drank… Rigo, why is he asking you?”
Rodrigo opened his mouth and shut it.
Clayton was trying to lift his right hand off his knee. It came up an inch and went back down.
“Sir. How many?”
“Two,” Rodrigo said. “Just two. It’s a sleep aid. It’s nothing, he’ll sleep it off.”
Viola sat down in her chair hard, the way Clayton had.
The other paramedic had a cuff on Clayton’s arm and was reading numbers out loud to nobody.
The first one zipped the red bag and stood up. He looked at me, at the mug with the chip, at the mug without it, and back at my husband.
“Two of what, sir?”
The cedar box
My father died in the front bedroom of that house nine years ago in April.
The will was two pages. A woman from the lawyer’s office read it to us at his own kitchen table, the one with the burn mark from his percolator. Everything was “to my daughter, Mariana.” She read it in the same voice she’d have used for a grocery list.
Rodrigo held my hand under the table the whole time.
At the funeral lunch, Viola patted my arm and said, “Well. That’ll come in handy for the boys someday.”
I thought she meant our boys. We don’t have any. We tried for six years and stopped trying.
The deed went into my father’s cedar cigar box with his watch and his Army discharge, and the box went under my side of our bed. I rented the house to a couple with a baby, then to a retired mail carrier who grows tomatoes against the south fence. The rent goes into an account with only my name on it.
Rodrigo never asked about that account. Not once.
Other people asked.
At his sixtieth birthday last year, out back by the grill, his buddy Orlando held up a beer and said, “What’s that corner lot worth now, Mari? Six? Six and a half?”
Rodrigo laughed and said, “Don’t ask me. Ask her. It’s hers.”
Everybody laughed. I laughed.
Two things about Viola’s house mattered later, and neither one seemed like anything at the time.
The first was the cabinet over her refrigerator. That’s where she keeps her “green-and-whites,” the sleeping capsules she’s taken for twenty years. Since about April she’d been on the phone with the pharmacy every few weeks saying they’d shorted her. “I count them,” she’d say. “I’m not senile.”
The second was at our house. The old desktop in the den, the one we both use. The password has been my father’s house number since the day I set it up: 1408. Rodrigo never changed it. He doesn’t know how.
Back at Viola’s table, the paramedics were lifting Clayton onto a chair with wheels, and he was saying “I’m fine” in a voice that wasn’t.
Felicia grabbed her purse off the counter and took my wrist.
“You’re riding with me,” she said.
Bay four
The emergency room put Clayton in bay four behind a curtain with ducks on it.
Rodrigo came twenty minutes after us with Viola in his truck. He went straight to the doctor in the hallway, not to his brother.
I could see him through the gap in the curtain. Hands moving. Pointing at his own head. I heard “freezer.” I heard “Thursday.” I heard “her father had it too.”
When the doctor came in, she talked to me slowly and a little loud, the way you talk to somebody’s grandmother.
“Mrs. Salinas, your husband says you’ve had some trouble with your memory.”
“Since March,” I said. “In the evenings. Only in the evenings.”
“Okay.” She wrote something. She didn’t ask what I meant by only.
A nurse came in to check Clayton’s line. Her badge said KASEY in marker.
“Can you test me too?” I said. “Whatever’s in him. Check me for it.”
Kasey looked at the doctor.
“Mari, you didn’t drink anything,” Rodrigo said from the curtain. “You’re getting worked up. Let them take care of Clay.”
“I drink what you make me every night,” I said.
It was the most I said all night.
Felicia was sitting on the end of Clayton’s bed holding his foot through the blanket. She didn’t look up.
“Draw it,” she said. “Draw hers. I’ll pay for it if insurance won’t.”
The doctor shrugged and said fine.
Kasey took two tubes out of my arm while Rodrigo stood at the curtain with his keys in his hand.
An hour later the doctor came back with a sheet of paper. Clayton’s screen was positive for a benzodiazepine. With the capsules the paramedic had described, she said, most likely temazepam. A prescription sleeping medication. Two capsules was a full dose for a large man, and Clayton is not a large man.
“He’ll be groggy until tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “Does anyone in the family have a prescription for this?”
Viola was in the plastic chair by the sink. She raised her hand like she was in church.
“I do. Twenty years.” Then she turned and looked straight at me. “And I’ve been short every month since spring. She’s in and out of my kitchen every Friday. Somebody’s been in that cabinet.”
“See?” Rodrigo said. Quietly. To the doctor, not to me.
The doctor turned all the way around in her chair.
“Mrs. Salinas, have you been taking your mother-in-law’s medication?”
Saturday, 3:40
“No,” I said.
That was all. Nobody wrote it down.
Rodrigo drove Viola home and called me from her driveway at one in the morning. He said he was going to sleep there. He said it would give me room. He said, “We’ll talk about Thursday when you’re rested.”
Felicia dropped me at our house. She sat in the driveway with her headlights on me until I got the front door open.
I didn’t sleep. I didn’t make coffee. I sat at the kitchen table in my cardigan with the TV off and the lights on and listened to the refrigerator.
At six I did the crossword from Friday’s paper. I finished it. I hadn’t finished one since February.
The phone rang at 3:40 Saturday afternoon. It was Kasey, the nurse.
“I’m not really supposed to call people myself,” she said. “But you asked. Your screen came back positive. Same family of drug as your brother-in-law, much lower level. The doctor says it fits a dose sometime Thursday night. Not Friday.”
Thursday night.
I hadn’t been to Viola’s on Thursday. I’d been home. Rodrigo had brought me a cup at eight with the crossword folded on the saucer, like every night since March, because he was on his way to the pot anyway.
I’d woken up on the couch at 2:10 with the pen in my hand.
“Mrs. Salinas? You still there?”
“Can you send me a copy?”
“You can pick it up at records. Bring your license.”
I hung up and went to the cabinet where we keep the coffee. Same can, same scoop, same sugar bowl. I don’t know what I thought I would find. He never kept anything there. He carried it.
Then I went down the hall to the printer, to read the power of attorney awake for the first time.
The tray was empty.
The appointment card was still on the fridge. Memory clinic, Thursday, 10:15. But the stack of paper with Orlando’s favor in it was gone.
I stood in the hall for a while.
Then I went to check the house, the way you do.
The back door was unlocked. I hadn’t touched it since Friday.
1408
Nobody was inside. His truck wasn’t on the street. The drawer of his nightstand was pulled out an inch and his reading glasses were gone.
I went into the den and moved the mouse.
The screen asked for the password. I typed my father’s house number.
Rodrigo prints everything from his email, because he can’t work the phone app. He never closes anything either. His inbox was open behind a game of solitaire he’d quit halfway through.
The printed files were all in one folder, in the order he’d printed them.
The first was the power of attorney, the one from the tray. Eleven pages. I read every one.
The second I’d never seen.
Petition for Appointment of Guardian of the Person and Estate. In the matter of Mariana Lenihan Salinas.
Petitioner: Rodrigo Salinas, husband. Grounds: progressive cognitive decline, documented. Supporting physician’s statement attached, and next to it a blank line for the date.
The clinic was Thursday. The blank was for Thursday.
The third file was two pages long and the first page said Residential Purchase Agreement. The property was the corner lot. My father’s house. Purchase price: $350,000. Seller: Rodrigo Salinas, as guardian of the estate of Mariana Salinas. Buyer: Orlando, with his last name and the office by the Walmart.
Three hundred and fifty thousand. For a house Orlando had priced himself at six and a half, by the grill, with a beer in his hand.
The second page was a handwritten note scanned crooked. Rigo gets 60 at closing, cash, separate. — O.
I sat back in his chair.
Then I opened the email those files came from. It was from Orlando, sent on the Monday before supper, the day the appointment card went on the fridge.
Clinic’s Thursday. If the letter says what we think, I file Friday and Judge Pillai signs these in a week. Make sure she’s good and tired for it.
Rodrigo had answered eleven minutes later.
She sleeps like a baby. Mom’s bottle has plenty.
I read that line until the screen dimmed, and I moved the mouse and read it again.
Then I clicked print, and the printer down the hall woke up.
Friday, 6:30
I went to the memory clinic on Thursday at 10:15, by myself. A young doctor asked me to remember five words and draw a clock. I drew the hands at 7:56.
I scored twenty-nine out of thirty. I missed the day of the month. She said most people her age miss that one. She printed me a letter and signed it.
From there I drove to the sheriff’s office on Main and sat with a deputy for an hour and forty minutes. I gave him copies of everything and kept the originals.
The next night I went to Friday supper.
Rodrigo had been sleeping at Viola’s for six days. He’d called the house twenty-two times. I’d answered twice, both times to say I was fine.
They were all at the table when I came in. Clayton was pale, but he was eating. Felicia sat close enough to him to cut his meat. Viola had set my place, with the blue mug, the one with the chip, already full.
I didn’t sit down.
I put a manila folder on the oilcloth next to the pot roast and opened it.
My lab result. The clinic letter. The petition. The purchase agreement. Orlando’s note. The email.
Rodrigo looked at the top page and then at me.
“You went through my email.”
I didn’t answer.
“That’s private, Mari. That’s a federal thing, going through somebody’s… You don’t even know what you’re looking at. Orlando was doing us a favor. You know what the taxes are on that place? You know what that roof’s going to cost? You were forgetting the stove. You were forgetting the back door. I was getting ahead of it before some stranger got hold of you and that house both. Somebody had to. Your daddy didn’t plan for anything, he just left it all on you like you could handle it, and look at you. Look at this. You’re standing in my mother’s dining room with a folder.”
“It’s twenty-nine out of thirty,” Felicia said. She had the clinic letter in her hand.
“That’s one test.”
“There’s a blood test too,” Felicia said. “Rigo. She had it in her blood from Thursday. You were the one home with her Thursday night. Nobody else was.”
“I never gave her anything that would hurt her.”
Clayton put his fork down.
“It hurt me,” he said. “I couldn’t hold this fork, Rigo. I couldn’t feel my own hands for a day and a half. Felicia had to button my shirt.”
Rodrigo turned to his mother. “Mom. Tell them. Tell them what’s been going on with her.”
Viola folded her napkin in half. Then in half again.
“I gave him the bottle in March,” she said. “He said she wasn’t sleeping. He said she’d sign easier rested.”
“Mom.”
“Well, I did.” She looked at me, and she was not smiling. “And I’ll tell you the rest, since we’re doing this. I told him that house should have come to this family the day her daddy died. Nine years she’s had it. Nine years of strangers in it.”
Felicia put the clinic letter down very carefully, the way you put down something hot.
Clayton looked at his mother for a long time.
“You knew what was in that cup,” he said. “You knew, and you laughed.”
Viola didn’t answer him. She answered me.
“Sit down, Mariana. Your coffee’s getting cold.”
I told Rodrigo a deputy named in my report would be at Viola’s door on Monday, and that the locks at our house were changed on Wednesday.
Then I picked up the blue mug and set it down in front of Viola.
My father’s kitchen
I moved into the corner lot on the first of November. The mail carrier’s lease ran out and he bought a place nearer his daughter, and he left me the last of his tomatoes in a sack on the porch.
The divorce papers came in a big envelope the week before Thanksgiving. I read every page at my father’s table, the one with the percolator burn, and I signed them in blue pen.
Felicia calls on Sundays. She doesn’t go to Friday supper anymore either. Clayton doesn’t. Viola eats with Rodrigo, I hear, and the rolls burn about half the time.
Friday nights I make my own pot. One cup, a white mug from the dollar store, no chip, two sugars. I drink it all.
I do the crossword at the table and I finish it.
At ten I turned off the TV myself, and then I went and locked the back door and checked it twice.
If this one got under your skin, send it to the woman in your family who always gets handed the same mug.
For more family betrayals tangled up with money and property, see the appraiser who changed everything and the photo that interrupted a eulogy. There’s also the tense standoff over a set of car keys.
