The Tally on My Sister’s Refrigerator

“She’s learning to be considerate,” my sister said. “That’s all it is. You don’t live here, so you wouldn’t know.”

I should tell you how Mom came to be in that spare room.

Daddy died two years ago in October. Mom stayed on in the house on the east side by herself, and she did fine, right up until the last week of February when she went out to get the mail in her house shoes and came down hard on the porch steps. She broke her wrist and cracked two ribs. She lay there on the concrete for forty minutes before the neighbor boy saw her.

After that the doctor said she should not be living alone.

I wanted her with us. I said so at the hospital. But my husband Jeff and I rent a two-bedroom place off Sixteenth Street, and the second bedroom belongs to our son Owen, and there is one bathroom with a tub Mom could not have stepped over with a broken wrist.

Tracy has the ranch house. Four bedrooms, eleven acres, on a county blacktop about nine miles north of town off Highway 65. Her husband left six years ago and her girls are grown and gone to Kansas City. She rattles around in it by herself.

So Tracy took her. And she did not do it quietly.

She did it at church, on a Sunday morning, during prayer requests. She stood up in the third pew in her good navy blazer and said that the Lord had laid it on her heart to open her home to her mother, and she asked the congregation to pray for her strength in this new season of sacrifice. People cried. The pastor’s wife hugged her in the aisle. Somebody brought a casserole to the ranch house that week, as if Tracy were the one who had fallen.

Mom’s house sold in April. Most of what it brought went to the hospital and to what was still owed from Daddy’s last year. Mom’s Social Security came to one thousand three hundred and forty dollars a month, and it went straight into an account Tracy managed, because Tracy said that was simpler.

I learned the rest that afternoon, standing in the kitchen with a sack of pills.

Tracy kept eleven hundred a month for room and board. She gave Mom the rest in cash, sixty dollars every Friday, in a white envelope with the date written on the front. That sixty was supposed to cover Mom’s offering at church, her wash and set every other week, her stamps, her peppermints, a birthday card for a great-grandbaby.

And every Friday, before she handed over the envelope, Tracy counted the marks on the refrigerator and took them out first.

“Four marks,” I said. “So this week she gets twenty dollars.”

“This week, yes.”

“Out of her own check.”

“Out of what is left after I feed her, house her, drive her to the doctor, and run the air conditioner all day because she’s cold-natured and then hot-natured and then cold again.” Tracy picked up her purse from the counter. “I have choir practice. Mom, there’s chicken salad in the blue bowl. Kim, if you want to take her, you just say the word. You’ve got that lovely bathtub.”

She went out through the garage. I heard her car start.

Mom and I sat in the kitchen. The light over the sink was on, and I watched my mother look at it, and then look at the switch, and then get up with her bad wrist held against her stomach and turn it off.