My best friend of fifty-one years reached behind the Christmas tablecloth in my hall closet for my late husband’s instant camera like she’d hidden it there herself. “One more picture of us, Faye,” she said. “After Thursday you won’t let me stand this close.” On Thursday the bank would tell me who got his $640 a month.
Edmund had been gone fourteen months.
Yvonne was the reason I still ate.
She came every Tuesday with a pot of lentil soup and her own key, and if I didn’t feel like talking she’d sit in Edmund’s recliner and do the crossword out loud to nobody.
She’d had that key since her divorce.
That was nineteen years ago, when Salvatore walked out and left her a second mortgage and a dog that bit.
Edmund carried her boxes into our spare room himself and told her to stay as long as she wanted.
She stayed four months.
After that she was at our table every Sunday and every Thanksgiving, and she knew which drawer had the batteries.
She knew Edmund took two sugars and lied to his doctor about it.
We’d met at seventeen, pressing shirts at a dry cleaner in Altoona where the owner kept a jar of buttons nobody ever came back for.
When Edmund died, Yvonne did the things I couldn’t.
She called the funeral home. She sat at my kitchen table and opened his mail so I didn’t have to.
So when the letter came from the bank two weeks ago, she was the first person I showed.
A woman named Justine Chopra had found a transfer while she was closing out Edmund’s checking.
$640.
On the third of every month.
For NINETEEN YEARS.
Into an account the letter wouldn’t name. Justine wanted me in her office Thursday at ten to walk me through it.
Yvonne read the letter twice, folded it back along its creases and said, “That’s probably nothing, honey.”
Then she skipped that Tuesday.
And the one after.
Tonight she came at seven, without the soup.
She kept her coat on. She walked right past me into the hall, opened the closet and reached for the top shelf.
She came back with Edmund’s old instant camera.
I hadn’t told her it was there.
I hadn’t told anybody. I’d shoved it up there myself the week of the funeral because I couldn’t stand to look at it.
“There’s one picture left in this,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
She didn’t answer. She propped it on the mantel on two of Edmund’s paperbacks and fussed with the timer.
“Come stand with me.”
“Yvonne, what is this?”
“One last picture. That’s all I want.”
“Last?” I laughed, because what else do you do. “Are you running off to Florida on me?”
“No.”
“Are you sick?”
“No, Faye.”
Her hands were shaking so bad she missed the button.
Twice.
Fifty-one years. Those hands held my son the morning he was born. Those hands signed her divorce papers without a wobble.
“I was going to tell you at the funeral,” she said. “Then at Christmas. Then every single Tuesday.”
“Tell me WHAT?”
“After Thursday you’ll know what I’ve been. I’d rather have one picture from before you knew.”
I sat down on the arm of Edmund’s recliner because my knees made the decision for me.
And then, the way you do after forty years of balancing a checkbook at the kitchen table, I started adding.
Nineteen years.
Her divorce was nineteen years ago.
And for nineteen years, around the third or fourth of every month, Yvonne had called me up and said, “Sal’s check came. Lunch is on me.”
Every month.
Every lunch.
I never laid eyes on Salvatore again after the divorce. Edmund used to say that man wouldn’t pay a parking ticket if the judge stood on his foot.
A hundred and forty-five thousand, nine hundred and twenty dollars.
I did that math sitting on my dead husband’s chair.
The little red light on the camera started to blink.
“Yvonne. Look at me.”
She looked at the camera.
“DID SAL EVER SEND YOU ONE CHECK? EVEN ONE?”
She stepped in beside the recliner and put her arm around my shoulders, the same way she held me up at the cemetery.
“Smile, honey,” she said.
The camera clicked and pushed out the last picture of us, and neither one of us reached for it.
The picture on the rug
It slid off the mantel and landed face down on the rug, between her shoes and the leg of the recliner.
Her arm was still around me.
“No,” she said. “Not one. Not ever.”
“Then whose check was it?”
She took her arm back and put both hands in her coat pockets.
“You already did the math, honey. You did it while I was missing that button.”
“Edmund’s.”
“Edmund’s.”
I bent over and picked the picture up. It was a gray square with nothing on it yet. I held it by the white edge, the way Edmund always told me to, and that made me want to throw it at her.
“He paid my house note,” she said. “Sal left me that second mortgage and Edmund paid it. Six-forty, that was the payment. He didn’t want you fighting him on it.”
“Fighting him.”
“You had Kurt’s tuition. You’d have said we couldn’t. He knew you’d be right, and he did it anyway, out of his own account. And I lied about Sal because it was easier than saying your husband paid my mortgage.”
She said it fast, like she’d practiced it in the car.
She went into the hall and stopped at the hook where her key always hung when she was here. She didn’t take it off her ring.
“Go to your appointment,” she said. “After that, if you want this key, I’ll leave it on the hook.”
“If it was only the house, why couldn’t you tell me at the funeral?”
She opened the front door. “Thursday, Faye.”
The grill lighter
Edmund kept two checkbooks our whole marriage.
Mine was the house. Groceries, the electric, the Buick, Kurt’s braces, Kurt’s college. I balanced it every Sunday night at the kitchen table to the penny, and if it was off by eleven cents I stayed up until I found the eleven cents.
His was his. Tools, golf, the lake in August, presents for me he didn’t want me to see coming. He had his own statements and he opened his own mail, and in forty-two years I never once asked to see that account.
I was proud of that. I want that on the record.
Yvonne had been in our lives so long that Kurt couldn’t remember a time before her. He still calls her Aunt Yvonne, and he is forty-four years old.
She held him before Edmund did. Edmund was parking the car.
In the summer of 2015 she threw a party in her backyard on a Saturday. Paper plates, a sheet cake from the store where I worked the bakery counter, and a folder from her bank.
“Paid off,” she said, and held the folder up over her head. “Sal’s mortgage is dead and buried.”
She burned the last statement in a coffee can with Edmund’s grill lighter. Everybody clapped. Edmund was at her grill flipping burgers, and he kept flipping them. He didn’t come over to watch it burn.
I remember thinking he was being a man about it. Men and fires.
That was 2015.
The other thing I kept coming back to, sitting in the recliner after her car pulled away, was a phone call.
In thirty years at that bakery counter, Yvonne called me at work exactly once. March of 2011, a Friday morning, the week the ice took the power out on half of Altoona. The manager came out from the back and said, “Faye, personal call,” with his eyebrows up.
It was Yvonne. She said, “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to hear your voice. Is Edmund home today?”
I said he was at work, where else would he be.
She said, “Okay. Okay, honey,” and hung up.
I’d thought about that call maybe twice in fifteen years. It was the kind of thing you shelve under “Yvonne gets lonely.”
At eight-fifteen I looked down at what was in my hand.
The picture had come up. Me on the arm of the chair, my mouth open, looking at her. Yvonne beside me, her arm around me, looking straight into the camera.
She was the only one of us who smiled.
Kurt
Kurt drove over from Hollidaysburg Wednesday on his lunch hour.
I hadn’t meant to tell him anything. I’d meant to ask him whether his father ever mentioned money to him, and then my face did the telling for me.
He sat at the kitchen table where Yvonne used to open the mail and he rubbed the back of his neck.
“Mom. Dad helped her with her house.”
“How do you know that?”
“He told me. At my wedding. We were out back of the hall, he’d had a couple, and he said Aunt Yvonne’s house would have gone to the bank if he hadn’t. He said don’t tell your mother, she’ll worry about the money.”
“Your wedding was 2010.”
“So?”
“So he told you about the house in 2010. She burned her mortgage in a coffee can in 2015. You were there. You ate two burgers.”
He opened his mouth. He closed it.
“And the money kept going,” I said. “Eleven more years after the house was paid off. Seven thousand, six hundred and eighty dollars a year, into a house that didn’t owe anybody anything.”
“Maybe he just kept helping her. She’s alone, Mom. Sal cleaned her out.”
“For eleven years.”
“Dad was like that.”
He was like that. That was the hell of it. Edmund carried her boxes in. Edmund drove her to her colonoscopy. Edmund told everybody she was family, and meant it, or I thought he meant it.
Before he left, I went to the hall closet to put the camera back where it belonged.
The Christmas tablecloth was folded in thirds. I fold it in half. I have folded it in half since 1984.
Last Christmas I couldn’t do anything, so Yvonne took it down and set my table for Kurt and Leah and the grandkids. She’d have pulled it off that shelf and seen the camera sitting there behind it with the little window that counts down your pictures.
That was all it was. A tablecloth and a little window.
It should have made me feel better, and it didn’t.
Kurt stood in the doorway with his car keys.
“Mom, whatever it was, Dad’s not here to ask. She is. She’s the one who came every Tuesday.”
“She skipped two.”
“Don’t burn that down over six hundred dollars.”
Justine Chopra’s office
The bank is on Eleventh Avenue, and I was there at twenty to ten in my good coat.
Justine Chopra was about fifty, with reading glasses on a chain and a dish of peppermints she didn’t offer. She had a folder ready for me, which I appreciated more than she knew.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, and checked my name on the paper.
She turned a printout around on the desk so it faced me.
“The receiving account is at another bank, so the letter couldn’t name it. I can tell you the name on it, because you’re the executor and it’s coming out of the estate. It’s a personal account. Yvonne Madden.”
I nodded. She waited for me to fall apart, and when I didn’t, she kept going.
“The standing transfer was set up nineteen years ago in July. Your husband came in and did it at this branch, in person.”
July. Yvonne moved out of our spare room the last week of June.
“Now. This is the part I needed you here for.” She ran her pen down to the bottom of the page. “Your husband passed fourteen months ago. A standing order doesn’t know that. Nobody stopped it. So it kept going out on the third. Thirteen payments since his date of death.”
“Thirteen.”
“Eight thousand, three hundred and twenty dollars. That was never hers to get. That’s yours. That’s the estate.”
I said, “He had eleven thousand in there when he died. I remember the number.”
“Yes. There’s a little under three left.”
I thought of every Tuesday. The soup. The crossword out loud. The way she’d hand me a spoon and say, “Three bites, Faye, and then you can stop.”
“Didn’t anybody send statements?”
Justine looked at me over her glasses.
“Every month. Paper. To the house.”
March of 2011
I asked her for the full history, and she printed it, nineteen years of the third of the month in a stack as thick as a church bulletin. She clipped it and slid it over.
I didn’t read it the way you read a letter. I read it the way I read my own checkbook on a Sunday night. Down the column, one line at a time, looking for the thing that isn’t there.
$640. $640. $640.
July. August. September. Every year the same.
My finger stopped in 2011.
February 3, $640.
March 3, nothing.
There was a line in March, but it wasn’t a transfer. It said STANDING ORDER CANCELLED, and the date beside it was the first.
April 3, $1,280.
I put my finger on the March line so I wouldn’t lose it.
“Justine, what does this mean, where it’s cancelled and then it starts again?”
She leaned over. “He stopped it at the beginning of March. Then he came back in and set it up again, the middle of March. Looks like he made up the missed month in April. Double.”
“Does it say what day he came back?”
She clicked her mouse a few times and read off the screen. “March seventh. A Monday.”
The ice storm was that week. The power was out on our whole side of town. That Friday, the fourth, the day after the money didn’t come, my manager stuck his head out of the back and said, “Faye, personal call.”
Is Edmund home today?
She wasn’t asking where he was. She was letting him know where she’d called.
I didn’t say anything for a while. Justine took a peppermint out of her dish and unwrapped it and put it in her mouth, and I remember being grateful she didn’t look at me while she did it.
“I’m going to ask you something,” I said, “and I don’t know if it’s a stupid question. The thirteen payments after he died. Can you get those back?”
She took her glasses off.
“Anything after the date of death, I can try to recall. I file it against her account. She’d get a letter from her own bank. You’d sign as executor, and you’d have to be sure, because it’s her name on it.”
I picked up her pen.
“Show me where.”
The third
The third came on a Monday.
At ten after nine in the morning my phone rang and it was Yvonne, and I let it ring. It rang again at nine-thirty. At eleven it stopped ringing, and at eleven-forty her car was in my driveway.
She used her key.
I was at the kitchen table. I had the printout on the table, clipped, with the March page on top. I had the picture beside it, face up.
She had a letter from her bank in her hand. She threw it on the table on top of the printout.
“Eight thousand dollars? You’re putting a claim on my account? The bank says it’s FRAUD, Faye, it says it right there, they froze it. I can’t get my own money out to buy groceries. Do you know what that is, to stand at a register?”
I didn’t answer her.
“I did your groceries for a year. I did your mail. I called the funeral home because you were on the bathroom floor and couldn’t hold a phone. And this is what I get for it. A claim.”
She looked at the printout. She saw which page was on top. Something went out of her shoulders, and then something else came into them.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. You want to know what I’ve been.”
She pulled out a chair and didn’t sit in it.
“You worked Saturdays. That whole spring I was in your spare room, you were at that bakery counter every Saturday, seven to three. He came in and sat on the end of the bed to ask was I okay. That’s how it started. Him asking was I okay.”
“Three Saturdays. Then he said it was wrong and I had to find someplace else, and he carried my boxes back out the same way he carried them in. Very polite.”
“And I said fine. I said I’ll go. And my house note is six hundred and forty dollars a month, Edmund, and you’ll pay it, or I’ll sit down with Faye and tell her about your Saturdays.”
She laughed, one breath of a laugh.
“I didn’t ask him. I told him. And he paid it. For four years, not one word, until he got brave and stopped it. So I picked up the phone and called you at the store. That’s all I had to do. Ask you was he home. He went right back in that Monday and paid me double.”
“When the house got paid off he asked could it stop. I said no. I said I liked having it.”
She pointed at me.
“And you know what I did with a lot of it, Faye? Lunch. I bought you lunch every month for nineteen years with his money, and you said thank you, Yvonne, every single time, and I liked that. God help me, I liked hearing it.”
“Then he died, and it just kept coming. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t touch it. I opened his statements at your table and put them in my purse, that’s all.”
She sat down after all.
“Still. I came every Tuesday. I meant every Tuesday. You can’t take that out of my account.”
I held out my hand, palm up, over the table.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she worked the key off her ring with her thumbnail, which took a while, because her hands were doing what they did at the mantel.
She put it in my hand.
She didn’t look at the picture.
She went out the front door and pulled it shut behind her, and she didn’t slam it.
Tuesday at seven
The bank got back $6,400 of it. Justine called to tell me herself. The rest was gone before the freeze, and I told her to leave it.
In December I made lentil soup on a Tuesday. I don’t know what she put in it. Mine came out thin, and I ate the whole bowl standing at the stove.
Kurt called while it was on.
“Is Aunt Yvonne coming Christmas? Leah wants to know how many chairs.”
“She’s busy this year, honey.”
“Busy,” he said, and he let it go, because his father’s son lets things go.
After I hung up I went to the hall closet and reached for the top shelf.
The tablecloth was still folded in thirds. The camera was behind it, and the picture was in my cardigan pocket, where it had been for a month.
I took the camera down. I put the picture on the shelf where the camera had been, face down, and shut the closet door.
Then I took the tablecloth down too, shook it out over the kitchen table and folded it in half.
If this one stayed with you, call the friend who knows which drawer has your batteries, and ask them how they’re really doing.
For more family stories where old memories return with unexpected weight, read about a class ring kept for thirty-one years and the paper signed without her glasses. And for another tale of longtime friends and a daughter’s secret, there’s the phone that said she was on the ice.
