The Door My Son Pointed Me To
I was fifty-seven and newly widowed, and my house was so quiet I ran the dishwasher half empty to have something to listen to. I said I would do it. I said it before anybody asked, which is how Brittany could tell me four years later, with a clear conscience, that nobody had.
I gave Kim my notice in the school parking lot, because I could not do it in the kitchen. She hugged me hard and said, “Your apron is going on the hook, not in the trash. You hear me?”
Molly came along a year later. Nobody sat me down about that either. It was simply understood that three was about the same as two.
It was not all hard. I want to be fair about that. Molly learned to walk between my two hands on their living room rug. Those days are mine to keep. Nobody can dock me for them.
But somewhere in the second year it stopped being a favor and turned into the weather. It was just what happened at six o’clock. When I came down with the flu, Brittany texted, “Are you contagious or just achy?” When my sister Brenda in North Platte had her hip replaced and I wanted to go sit with her for three days, Nathan sighed through his nose and said, “Can’t it be a weekend?”
And there was the list. Most mornings there was a list on the counter in Brittany’s round handwriting. Fold the darks. Jack needs poster board. Start the chicken at four. The list never once said please. Around the third year I noticed that I had started looking for the word, the way you look for a face in a crowd that you already know is not coming.
So when I say I was tired, I do not only mean my feet.
I got home that Sunday and changed out of my church clothes and sat down at my kitchen table with a glass of water I did not drink.
The phone did not ring. That told me something too. Nobody called to see if I had gotten home, or to say it had come out wrong. They were not worried. They assumed. Six o’clock would come around and so would I, the same as the sun and the paper.
I picked up the phone myself and scrolled back to a text from Kim that was eleven days old. I had answered it at the time with a laughing face and nothing else. It said:
“Donna quit. Walked out in the middle of a shift over the new dish machine. I am down two on the line and the sub list is nothing but ghosts. Don’t suppose you want your apron back. Ha ha. (Not ha ha.)”
Here is a thing I had never told my son. I had stayed on the district’s substitute list all four years. I paid to renew my food handler card every time it came due. I told myself it was just in case. I never finished the sentence and said in case of what.
I called her.
“Is that apron still on the hook?”
There was a long quiet on the line.
“Gail,” she said. “Don’t you tease me.”
“I’m not teasing.”
“What happened?”
“I was shown a door.”
Kim started to laugh and then stopped partway. She had known Nathan since he was nine years old and missing his front teeth. “Oh, hon,” she said. “Can you be there at a quarter to six? I’ll put you through as a sub in the morning and walk the paperwork over to the district office myself for Donna’s spot.”