My fourteen-year-old daughter scrubbed bakery trays every Sunday for five months to buy a $412 laptop, and it never came home. Then her boss rang me at work and said, “Mr. Fowler, find a chair. Your daughter’s been feeding you a story about her pay since June.” I was holding a brake rotor at the time.
Emery had wanted that laptop since the night her old school one died in the middle of a history essay, two weeks after we buried her mother.
She never once asked me for it.
She’d watched me open the hospital bills at the kitchen table.
She’d heard me on the phone with the insurance people after she was supposed to be asleep.
So when she said Harvey Theodorou needed somebody to wash trays at his bakery on Sunday mornings, I just nodded.
“Five to eleven,” she said. “Thirteen an hour. I’ll have it by Halloween.”
“You don’t owe this house anything, Em.”
“It’s not for the house. It’s a laptop.”
“Homework comes before trays.”
“Obviously.”
Every Sunday she went out the door at 4:40 in my old gray sweatshirt, the one with yellow paint on the cuff from when we did her room.
Every Sunday she came back at noon smelling like burnt sugar and bleach, her knuckles cracked from the sink.
When I asked how close she was, it was always the same two words.
“Getting there.”
I did the math in August.
Seventy-eight dollars a week. Six Sundays and she’d have it.
It was the middle of October.
Twenty-one Sundays.
No laptop.
I told myself it was none of my business. Maybe she’d found a better one online. Maybe she wanted a phone now. Maybe there was a boy at school, and God help me, I didn’t want to know about it.
Then I did laundry.
Her work jeans had a fold of twenties in the back pocket, damp from the wash.
I counted them on top of the dryer.
Three hundred and forty dollars.
She was on the basement stairs before I’d finished.
“That’s mine,” she said.
“I know it’s yours. Why is it in your jeans and not the bank?”
“Harvey pays cash. I was going to deposit it.”
“You’ve got almost enough right here, Em.”
She took the money out of my hand. Gently. Like it was something that could spill.
“Almost,” she said.
Something was off. But she was fourteen, and Lan would have told me to leave the kid alone. So I left her alone.
Two Sundays later she didn’t come home at noon.
Not at one.
Not at two.
Her phone went to the robot voice every time I called.
At 2:40 the side door opened and she came in without her coat. It was forty-one degrees out. Her sneakers were soaked through and there was gray slush on her jeans up to the knee.
“Where’s your COAT?”
“I left it at work.”
“Harvey’s is six blocks. You walked home in that?”
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“Where’s today’s pay?”
She looked at the floor.
“Somewhere safe.”
“Emery. Where.”
“Can I get warm first? Please?”
She went upstairs and the shower came on, and I stood in the kitchen and let my head do the worst thing a widower’s head can do.
The cash. The coat. “Getting there.” Twenty-one Sundays.
What if somebody older was taking it off her?
What if Harvey’s wasn’t the only place she went on Sunday mornings?
I decided we’d have it out that night, at the table, no phones.
I never got the chance.
Wednesday, at the parts counter, an Allentown number I didn’t know lit up my phone.
“Is this Emery’s dad?”
An older voice. Greek under the English.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Harvey Theodorou. From the bakery.”
I put the rotor down.
“Is she okay?”
He didn’t answer that.
“Mr. Fowler, what happens to your girl’s pay every Sunday?”
“She’s putting it toward a laptop.”
“What laptop?”
“The one she’s been working for since June.”
He let the line go quiet for a long moment, like a man who’d been arguing with himself all morning.
“Mr. Fowler, find a chair.”
“Why would I need a chair?”
“Because there’s no laptop. There never was. Not ONE dollar.”
The counter tipped a little under my hand.
“Then where is it going?”
He never got to the answer.
Somebody yelled behind him.
Then Emery.
“HARVEY, YOU SWORE YOU WOULDN’T CALL HIM.”
Something metal hit the floor. A lot of something. Trays.
“Emery?” I said it twice into the phone. “Emery.”
Harvey came back on breathing hard.
“Get over here. Now, please.”
“What happened?”
“She’s done it again. Right in front of my wife.”
“Done WHAT?”
“Just come.”
He hung up.
Dominick took the clipboard out of my other hand without a word, and I left my jacket on the stool.
It’s eleven minutes from the store to Harvey’s. I made it in seven, and every light I ran had a different answer in it. The register. Some older guy with a car. A debt. Pills. A thing I couldn’t put a word to.
The front of the bakery was empty. The bell on the door was still going when I pushed into the back.
Rosa Theodorou stood by the sink with flour on her forearms and her hand over her mouth.
Trays all over the tile.
Emery stood in the middle of them in my gray sweatshirt, with her backpack unzipped on the steel table.
Envelopes. A whole stack of them, rubber-banded.
Receipts folded in half.
And on top of the pile, a white pharmacy bag with a name stapled to the receipt.
It wasn’t mine.
It wasn’t hers.
I read it twice.
I knew that name. Everybody on our street knew that name.
And back in March, I had told my daughter it was none of our business.
Aronsen, Genevieve
The receipt said ARONSEN, GENEVIEVE, and under it the name of a heart pill I couldn’t pronounce, and a copay of $61.40.
Genevieve Aronsen lived in the corner house with the green awning, four doors down from ours. She was seventy-nine. She called the city on trash cans left out past Tuesday. She left notes on cars.
I picked the bag up. One bottle in it. It rattled.
“Put that down,” Emery said. “That’s hers.”
“I can see it’s hers.”
Rosa took her hand off her mouth. “She brings it to her, Mr. Fowler. Every Sunday after the shift. Since the summer.”
Harvey came through the swinging door from the front with the cordless phone still in his hand. He looked at the trays, then at me.
“I told you find a chair.”
“Em. How much of your pay went in this bag?”
She didn’t answer. She bent down and started picking up trays one at a time and stacking them against her hip, quick, the way she must have done it every Sunday since June.
Harvey answered for her.
“All of it,” he said. “And Monday the son was in here. Matthew. He wants her name for a police report.”
The note on my windshield
The week we buried Lan, I parked in front of the corner house three days running, because our side of the street was full of cars from people bringing food.
The third morning there was a note under my wiper. Lined paper, block capitals.
THIS IS NOT YOUR DRIVEWAY. G. ARONSEN.
I read it standing in the street in my funeral shoes. I didn’t throw it out. I put it in the glove box, and for a year and a half, every time I reached in there for the registration, there it was.
So that was Genevieve Aronsen to me. Half the street had a note from her. Mine just came the week of a funeral.
Her son was the other reason everybody knew the name. Matthew Aronsen ran Aronsen Auto Group out on Route 22, and his face was on a billboard by the on-ramp, arms folded, teeth. His service department bought brake parts from my counter, about four thousand dollars a month. When he came in himself he called me “my man.” He never once read the name on my shirt.
I should tell you about Lan’s Sundays too.
Every Sunday for as long as Emery could remember, Lan went out at nine “for coffee” and came back a little after ten. She never came back with coffee. I gave her a hard time about it once. She said she drank it in the car.
I believed her. Her purse still hangs on the hook in our hall closet. I haven’t moved it.
Then March. Emery and I were at the pharmacy across from the post office for her allergy spray. Mrs. Aronsen was ahead of us at the counter in a long tan coat, counting bills out of a change purse. The girl at the register said it again, louder, the way people talk to the old. “It’s sixty-one forty, ma’am.”
Mrs. Aronsen had forty-two. She counted it twice, out loud.
She left without the bag. She walked past us with her chin up and didn’t look at either of us.
In the car Emery said, “Dad. We could’ve.”
“She’s got a son with his face on a billboard, Em. That’s his job. It’s none of our business.”
She looked out her window the whole way home.
Now, in Harvey’s back room, she set the last tray on the rack and pulled the backpack off the table, against her chest.
Harvey’s office
Harvey’s office was a desk, a safe and a calendar from a Greek church still turned to August. He shut the door on Rosa and sat Emery in the only chair. I stood. So did he.
“In June she comes to me,” he said. “She asks, can I pay her in fives and tens, and can I not tell her father. I say why. She says for Mrs. Aronsen’s medicine. Genevieve bought her bread from me forty-one years. I think, good girl. I think, a few weeks.”
“It wasn’t a few weeks,” I said.
“No.”
He told me the rest standing up.
Monday at noon Matthew Aronsen came in the front in a quarter-zip with his dealership on it. He didn’t buy anything. He said the girl who works Sundays had been in his mother’s house, in her mail, in her kitchen drawers. He said there were envelopes missing. He said his mother had dementia and gave things away to anyone who smiled at her, and that he had power of attorney since her fall last winter. He wanted the girl’s full name and her address.
“I told him I don’t know her address,” Harvey said. “I know her address.”
Emery said, “He’s lying about her.”
“Which part?”
“All of it. She’s not confused. She can’t read the small print anymore, that’s all. She knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“Then she can tell the police herself.”
“She won’t. He’s all she’s got. Dad, if he calls them, he says she can’t live alone, and he puts her in that place across the river and sells the house. That’s what he wants.”
My first idea was a bad one. I didn’t know it yet.
“I’ll call him,” I said. “I know Matthew. He comes in the store. We’ll straighten it out.”
Emery looked at me like I’d said I was going to call the billboard.
“You don’t know him. You sell him brakes.”
I called the dealership from Harvey’s parking lot anyway and left my name with a girl who said “Aronsen Auto, where you’re family.” He called me back in nine minutes.
“My man,” he said. “Kwame. I didn’t put it together. Fowler. That’s your kid?”
“That’s my kid.”
“Okay. So I’m going to be straight with you, father to father.” He sounded easy, like he was selling me an extended warranty. “My mother has seventeen hundred a month coming in and no idea where it goes. Your daughter has been in and out of her house with cash and with her mail all summer. You see how that looks on paper.”
“She’s been buying your mother’s pills.”
“That’s sweet. That’s what she told you.” I heard a car door. “I come by my mother’s every Friday at six. If your daughter is in that house Friday, I make the call from the kitchen.”
The gas company envelope
At home I put the backpack on the kitchen table and Emery didn’t fight me for it. She sat across from me with her hands inside the sleeves of the gray sweatshirt.
I took the rubber band off the envelopes.
Pharmacy statements. A water bill. Two from the electric company with PAST DUE in red. Every one addressed to Genevieve Aronsen, opened neatly along the top with a knife.
“She can’t read them,” Emery said. “I read them to her. Then he says he paid them.”
The receipts were folded in half, every one. On the back of each, in Emery’s pencil, a date. Copays, every other Sunday. A payment window on Seventh Street, the kind with a check-cashing sign, $40 here, $60 there.
And one for $418.00. The Sunday she came home without her coat.
Under it was the gas company envelope. A shutoff notice. $518.60 past due. Service terminated the Saturday before.
I did the math again. That was the $340 from the dryer, plus one Sunday’s pay.
“You were a hundred short,” I said.
“A hundred and a reconnect fee. The lady said they don’t turn it back on for part.” She pulled her hands further up her sleeves. “I went back to the house to tell her. She was sitting in the kitchen in her coat. So I put mine over her knees. I didn’t want to take it back off her, Dad.”
“It’s been off since then? Ten days?”
“I bought her a thermometer at the dollar store. It said fifty-one this morning.”
I sat with that.
A man with power of attorney and seventeen hundred a month, and his mother’s kitchen at fifty-one degrees, and a fourteen-year-old with cracked knuckles covering what she could.
I put the gas notice down and squared the stack the way I square invoices at the counter.
The last envelope wasn’t a bill. It was blue, the cheap kind from a drugstore card aisle, and the front said one word.
Gen.
It was Lan’s handwriting.
Gen, Sundays
I know Lan’s handwriting the way I know my own. Every grocery list for nineteen years. The lowercase g with the tail that goes all the way back under itself.
Inside the envelope was an index card, both sides used, small writing to fit.
Across the top, Lan had written: Sundays. Don’t tell Matthew, she’d die first. Don’t tell K, he’ll worry about money.
Under that, dates. The first one was from the year Emery started kindergarten.
Pills 22.10. Paper in. Furnace pilot. Took her to 8:00 at St. Luke’s.
Pills 38.20. Bread from Harvey’s.
Pills 41.00. Changed bulb on the porch.
Down the card and around the back. Six years of Sunday mornings, nine to ten. Coffee.
The last line in Lan’s writing was dated the November before she died. Pills 54.60. Told her I might be in the hospital a while. She held my hand at the door.
Then nothing for most of a year and a half.
Then pencil. Emery’s printing.
June 8. Pills 61.40. She didn’t know who I was at first. Then she did.
I turned the card over and back. I couldn’t make my hands stop doing it.
“Where was this,” I said.
“Mom’s purse. In the closet.” Emery wasn’t crying. She’d done that already, on Harvey’s floor, I figured. “The night after the pharmacy, in March. I went and sat in the closet with her purse because you said it was none of our business and I didn’t believe you. And it was in the zip part.”
“You could’ve shown me.”
“It says don’t tell K.”
There wasn’t anything to say back to that. Lan wrote it. It was true.
“Mrs. Aronsen calls me Lan sometimes,” Emery said. “I don’t fix it.”
I looked at the line about the porch bulb. I’d have asked why the ladder was in the car. I never asked about the coffee.
“She drank it in the car,” I said.
“Dad. There wasn’t any coffee.”
Friday, six o’clock
Thursday on my lunch I drove to the window on Seventh Street with the gas notice and paid the hundred and forty-five sixty that was left, reconnect fee included, out of the account I keep for Lan’s headstone. The headstone’s been on order for a year. It can wait another month.
The gas company truck came Friday at ten. Emery had a thermometer reading of sixty-eight on my phone by lunch, texted from the girls’ bathroom at school.
At 5:45 we were in Mrs. Aronsen’s kitchen. Emery’s coat was folded over the back of a chair. Mrs. Aronsen sat at the head of the table in a cardigan with her hands around a cup of tea and watched me the whole time like I’d come about the car.
Matthew came in the back door at six with his own key and a bank envelope.
“Okay,” he said. He looked at Emery, then at me. “Okay. So we’re doing this. I told you, Kwame. I was clear. I was a gentleman about it.”
I put the receipts on the table. Then the gas notice. Then the index card, face up.
“What’s that, a confession?” He picked up the card, read the top line, and laughed through his nose. “Don’t tell Matthew. That’s great. So your wife was in on it too. This goes back years. You understand you just made it worse for yourself.”
“Read the numbers,” I said.
“I don’t have to read anything. I have a document from a lawyer that says I handle her affairs. A woman who can’t read her own mail, two strangers walking in and out with her cash…”
“Those are receipts for money going in.”
“It’s sixty-one dollars of pills, Kwame. You want a medal?” He tossed the card back down. “You know what this house costs to heat? Eleven rooms. She uses two. She can’t do the stairs. She’s going to fall again and lie on that floor for a day and a half like last time, and who gets the call? Me. Not you. Me.”
“So you let the gas go.”
“I let the gas go.” He spread his hands. “A cold house is a conversation, Kwame. It’s how you get an eighty-year-old woman to sign for a nice room across the river with a nurse and a bingo night. It’s not a crime. It’s what every family on this street is going to do eventually, and you know it.”
Nobody said anything.
“And I’ll tell you something else, my man. Monday morning my service department starts buying from the place on Union Boulevard. Four grand a month. You think about that while you’re in my mother’s kitchen.”
“File it,” I said. “The police thing. Tonight. I’ll bring the card.”
He looked at me a long time. Then he looked at his mother.
Mrs. Aronsen put her cup down.
“Matthew,” she said. “My bank card.”
“Mom, don’t do this in front of people.”
“I am seventy-nine. I can read my own name on a card. Give me my bank card.”
He didn’t. He put the bank envelope on the counter, forty dollars, the way he always did, and he went out the back door and left it open.
Mrs. Aronsen looked at me.
“The bank opens at nine on Monday,” she said. “You’ll drive. You park wherever you like.”
4:40
The Sunday after Halloween my alarm went at 4:20.
Emery came down at 4:38 in my gray sweatshirt with the yellow paint on the cuff and her coat over it, zipped to the chin. I had the car warm.
I don’t work Saturdays at the store anymore. Aronsen Auto took its account to Union Boulevard the Monday after, and my manager moved my hours around to cover it. That’s about three hundred a month I don’t have.
On the passenger seat was the history essay she finished at the library, printed on their machine at ten cents a page. She got a B.
I dropped her at Harvey’s at 4:52. Rosa had the light on in the back.
At eleven I was out front. We went to the pharmacy across from the post office, and Emery paid the copay out of her pay, and I didn’t argue, because the card in Lan’s purse says that’s how it’s done.
I parked right in front of the corner house.
There was a note under the wiper when we came back down the steps. Lined paper. Block capitals.
THIS IS YOUR SPOT. G. ARONSEN.
Emery read it out loud, and then she put it in the glove box on top of the other one.
If this one stayed with you, knock on the door of the house on your street whose porch light has been dark too long.
For more family secrets and emotional surprises, read the trainer who broke down over a plate of pierogi and the woman who came home from the eye doctor without her glasses. There’s also the daughter uncovering a painful truth about her parents.
