The Winter I Left My Brother the Bills

My husband, Chris, was at the kitchen table when I came in, doing the bills like he does every second Friday.

He is thirty-nine and drives a route for the propane company, and he is the steadiest man I have ever known.

He looked at my face and put his pen down. I told him all of it. The bag. The eleven days.

The $410. The 62 degrees upstairs and the space heaters downstairs. Dad’s ankles. Mom asking me not to make a fight of it.

Chris listened the whole way through without saying a word. When I was done, he got up and poured me a cup of coffee I did not want and sat back down across from me.

“We’ve got two empty rooms,” he said. “Your dad can have the recliner by the window. He likes to see the road.”

That was all he said. He did not say a word about Matt. He did not tell me what I ought to feel.

That is Chris. He finds the thing that can be done and he sets it on the table where you can see it.

We had bought our ranch house on the north side of Harmon nine years ago, thinking we would fill those two spare rooms with children.

That did not happen for us. It is an old sorrow now, and a quiet one, and we do not talk about it much.

“They won’t come,” I said. “Mom won’t leave Matt alone in that house.”

“Then ask them anyway,” Chris said. “And don’t make it about Matt. Make it about the pills. That part is true.”

I could not stand over my father’s pill bottles from across town. I could stand over them from my own kitchen counter.

On Saturday morning I went to the dollar store and bought one of those plastic pill boxes, the long kind with a lid for every day, Sunday to Saturday, morning and evening.

I asked them at the kitchen table. Mom poured coffee. Dad sat with his feet up on a chair because I made him.

I told them about the spare rooms and the recliner, and I told them it was only for the winter.

“I need to see his pills every day,” I said. “I need to see his ankles every night. I work six minutes from my house and twenty from here. That’s all this is. It’s not about anybody else.”

My mother shook her head before I finished. “We can’t leave Matty,” she said. “Who’s going to keep the house? Who’s going to watch the furnace? He doesn’t know anything about this house.”

“Then he’ll learn,” I said, and I said it softly. “Mom, he’s forty-one.”

She did not answer that. She got up and wiped a counter that was already clean.

My father sat there quiet for a long time, and then he looked down at his own feet, at those swollen ankles in his white socks.

“I’m tired, Erin,” he said. His voice was rough. “I’m tired of being cold in my own house. I’m tired of counting. Your mother is tired too, she just won’t say it.”

My mother turned around with the dish rag in her hands and looked at him, and something passed between the two of them that I was not part of. Fifty-one years of marriage passed between them. She sat back down.

It took her three more days to say yes. On Tuesday night she called me and said, “I’ll need my own pillow. I can’t sleep on anybody else’s.” I told her she could bring every pillow in the house.