The Four Words I Wrote Every Time

He pulled out his chair, the one at the end that had sat empty since March, and he sat down in it. He laid his phone flat on the table. He opened the app with his thumb.

He scrolled. It took a while to get back to March. I watched the little lines go by under his thumb, all the same length.

Then he stopped, and he read it out loud.

“March twenty-second. Fifty dollars. From Carol Ann.” His eyes moved. “To see my grandbabies.”

Tiffany closed her eyes.

“April fifth. Fifty dollars. From Carol Ann. To see my grandbabies.”

“April nineteenth. Fifty dollars.” He stopped. He cleared his throat. “To see my grandbabies.”

After that he did not read them aloud. He went down the list one at a time, and his lips moved a little on each one, the way they did when he was a first grader sounding out words. May. May. May. June. The refrigerator kicked on. Somewhere down the hall a child turned over in bed.

When he was done, he set his hands flat on either side of the phone.

“Fourteen,” he said.

Nobody answered.

“I’ve been sleeping in a camper with three other men since March so my kids could keep this house.” He said it quietly, looking at the table. “And my mother has been paying a cover charge at the front door of it.”

“Scott,” Tiffany whispered. “It was about their schedule. I was by myself, and I…”

“Tiff.” He lifted one finger off the table. Just one. “Don’t say schedule to me.”

She stopped.

“I’m going to ask you one thing, and I want the real answer. Seven hundred dollars. Where did it go?”

I thought she would lie. I could see her deciding.

Then she got up. She went to the drawer under the toaster, and she reached all the way to the back and brought out a stack of envelopes with a hair tie around it. She set it down in front of him and stood there with her arms wrapped around herself.

Two credit cards. I could see the statements upside down. Scott went through them slowly, and I watched him do the arithmetic.

“Eighty-six hundred dollars,” he said.

“Eight thousand six hundred and forty.” Her voice shook. “As of Tuesday.”

“Since when?”

“Last winter. When you were laid off.” The words started coming then, fast and low, like water through a culvert in spring. “The unemployment didn’t cover it, Scott. It didn’t come close. I put the propane on the first one in November, and then Christmas, and the kids’ boots, and the transmission on the Equinox. I thought I’d catch it up when you went back to work. Then you took Kansas, and I thought, good, now I can fix it before he ever has to know. And then in April they cut me to two days a week at the office.”

Scott’s head came up. “They what?”

“Two days. Since April. I didn’t tell you. You’d call on Sunday so tired you could hardly talk, and you’d say, just hold it together till I get home, Tiff. So I was holding it together.” She laughed, and it came out as a sob. “The minimum on the big one is fifty-one dollars.”