The Total My Mother in Law Handed Me

“You do not have to wait on me, Megan. Gene could have run me in before work.”

“He would have had to drop you at five and leave you standing outside, Judy.”

“I have stood outside before.”

By about the sixth week she was too tired to keep that up. Coming off the machine left her cold and gray and wrung out like a dishrag. I started keeping an old quilt in the back seat and a sleeve of saltines in the glove box. She would get in, and I would tuck the quilt around her, and before we got to the stoplight at Bridge Street her head would be against the window.

I used to take the long way home. Out past the fairgrounds and around. It added fifteen minutes. I never told her. She needed the sleep more than I needed the fifteen minutes, and I liked it, to tell the truth. I liked that she trusted me enough to go to sleep.

Once she woke up as we were pulling into her driveway and looked around, confused, and said, “Did we come by the fairgrounds?”

“Road work on Main,” I said.

“There is always road work on Main,” she said, and closed her eyes again.

The last nine of those Tuesdays I was expecting Owen and sick as a dog, and I drove with my own saltines in my lap. Some mornings we split the sleeve.

I never wrote one of them down, and I never kept them to hold over anybody. I want that understood. But I knew the number. Gene had Thursdays and Saturdays, and Tuesdays were mine, from the first one in February until the spring he retired and took all three mornings himself. Sixty-one. You do not need a notebook for a thing like that. You know it the way you know how many winters you have lived in a house.

That was the first line.

The second line I wrote was: Suppers, no salt. Potatoes boiled twice.

They give you a diet when you go on the machine, and it is a hard one. Hardly any salt. Hardly any potassium, which turns out to be in everything a country woman cooks. No tomatoes to speak of. If you want potatoes you have to peel them and cut them small and boil them, pour the water off, and boil them again to get the potassium down. Judy had cooked the same suppers for forty years and she stood in her kitchen with that list from the dietitian and cried.

So on Sunday afternoons I cooked. Chicken and noodles with no salt and plenty of pepper and onion. Meatloaf without the ketchup. Those twice-boiled potatoes, mashed. I put them up in foil pans with masking tape on the lids and filled the chest freezer on their back porch, and every Tuesday I carried in a few more when I carried her in.

The third line: Four nights at Adena.

That was the time her access clotted off and got infected, and they kept her at the hospital most of a week. Gene had already used his vacation days. He would have sat there all night and gone to the line at six with no sleep, and somebody would have lost a hand. So I sat. I slept in the recliner by the window with my shoes on. Around three in the morning on the second night she woke up and did not know where she was, and I held her hand and told her, and she said, “Megan. You have work in the morning.”