What Linda Ames Said at the Door

Why he did it

I learned some things that night I had not known.

I learned that the winter before, a family on Third Street had left one of Roger’s houses owing four months, and taken the furnace with them, and left a dog shut in the basement. I learned the insurance on the rentals had gone up thirty percent. I learned Roger had a heart stent put in during the summer and had not told anybody at church.

I learned that he did all the books himself in a ledger in the back bedroom, because his father had done them that way, and that the month he started letting things slide was the month he thought he would lose track of all of it.

“I see a number go red,” he said to the tabletop. “I fix it. That’s all I do. I see it go red and I fix it before it gets worse.”

“He doesn’t read the obituaries,” Linda said. “He doesn’t read anything but the markets and the ledger.”

“I knew Travis was hurt,” Roger said. “I knew it was bad. I heard it at the elevator.” He looked at me then, for the first time since the door. “I didn’t know he had died until Linda said, and I didn’t put the day together, and that is not an excuse, I know it’s not. I am telling you what happened.”

“I left you two messages,” I said again. I could not seem to stop saying it.

“I know you did.” He rubbed his face. “I listened to the first one. I didn’t listen to the second one. I thought it was going to be the same.”

It was not the same. The second one was from the twenty-ninth of October, the night Travis died. I had called him from the family room on the fourth floor because I did not know who else to tell about the rent, and I thought somebody ought to know, and it was the only thing in my whole life I could still do something about.

I did not say that. I just drank the tea.

Linda took my cup when it was empty and took my hand instead.

“You’ll stay here,” she said. “As long as it takes. We’ll sort the rest tomorrow.”

“I can’t, Mrs. Ames.”

“You were in my piano studio every Thursday for four years,” she said. “You played ‘Für Elise’ at your recital with your shoe untied. You’ll stay.”

The morning

I slept three hours. When I woke up, it was full light, and somebody was frying bacon, and June was standing in the doorway of my room in yesterday’s tights.

“Mama,” she said. “There’s a cat.”

There was a cat. Its name was Pickles and it was older than Kaylee. It let June carry it around the kitchen like a bag of flour while Linda made pancakes for three children and one widow who could not eat.

Roger was not at the table. His truck was gone from the drive.

“He left at six,” Linda said. “He didn’t say where. Eat.”

We were on the second stack when the doorbell rang.

It was Steve from the elevator. Steve was fifty and wide and red in the face, and he had on a co-op jacket and a seed cap, and he had come straight from the scale house because there was still milo dust on his sleeves.

Behind him on the sidewalk were four more men from the crew: Jeff and Dale and both Hoffman brothers, all of them in work clothes, all of them looking at their boots.

Steve took his cap off when he saw me.

“Jenna,” he said. “Kim from the bus barn called Jeff’s wife at six this morning. Somebody drove by your place last night and saw the table in the yard.”

So it was already all over town. Of course it was. It was a town of fourteen hundred people.

“We had the jar in the break room,” Steve said. “For flowers. We already sent the flowers. There was some left.” He held out a white envelope with Travis’s name on it in pencil. “Then the boys put in this morning. And the Hoffmans’ dad. And the guys on the night shift when they came off.”

I did not open it. I could not make my hands do it.

“It’s eleven hundred,” Steve said. “We heard that was the number.”