The Tally on My Sister’s Refrigerator

“To Betty,” he said. His voice was rough. “And to the best hired man I ever had.”

Carol stood. Then Brenda. Then Jeff, beside me, and I was up before I knew my legs were doing it. Pastor Dale got to his feet last, slowly, and he was not looking at Owen or at Mom. He was looking at Tracy.

Tracy was still standing where she had given her speech, with her hand on the back of Mom’s chair. She had not moved it. The balloons bobbed against her wrist.

“He’s ten,” she said. “He’s a child. He doesn’t understand household finances.”

Nobody answered.

Linda set her napkin beside her plate and walked into the kitchen. We could all see her through the doorway. She stood in front of the refrigerator with her reading glasses on and read that pad from top to bottom, every column, taking her time. Then she came back and sat down and folded her hands.

“Shower over ten minutes,” Linda said. “Five dollars.”

“It is a perfectly reasonable arrangement between two adults.” Tracy’s voice had not gone up at all. That was the thing about her. It went flatter instead. “The utility bill out here doubled. Somebody has to be the responsible one. I did not hear anybody else in this room offering to take her.”

“I’ve been reading my Bible with a flashlight, Dale.”

It was Mom.

She had taken her hand down from her mouth. She was not crying. She said it to the pastor in the same tone she would have used to tell him the church kitchen was out of coffee filters.

“Since about the first of June. I sit by the window as long as the daylight holds and then I use the flashlight. I walk to the bathroom with it at night. There’s a step in that hall.” She smoothed the tablecloth with her palm. “I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want my girls to quarrel. I see now that I let a little boy carry it for me instead. I’m sorry for that, Owen.”

“It’s okay, Grandma,” Owen said. “It wasn’t heavy.”

I think that was what did it for me. Not the forty-three marks. That.

I had spent three months not making a fuss. I found I still did not want to make one. I did not want to shout at my sister across a ham. I did not have one thing to say to her that my son had not already said better.

So I put my napkin on my chair and I walked out of the dining room.

I went down the hall, and I turned on the hall light.

Then I went into the spare room where my mother slept, and I turned on the overhead light, and the lamp by the bed, and the little lamp on the dresser. I opened the closet and turned on the closet light. I went into the hall bathroom and turned on the light over the mirror and the one over the tub.

I heard Tracy come to the end of the hall behind me.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Packing,” I said. “I need to see.”

Mom’s suitcase was on the closet shelf. It was the same hard blue one she had carried on her honeymoon to Branson in 1966. I lifted it down and opened it on the bed, and I started with the dresser.