The Timecards I Laid Down

The counting

For two weeks I did a second job on top of my job.

I brought the shoebox down from the closet. I spread eleven years of little printed slips across my kitchen table, and I matched them against Ronnie’s clipboard sheets for the years we had both, and against my own memory and my own calendar for the years we did not.

Kim came by one of those nights with the baby. She stood in the kitchen doorway looking at the table covered in paper, me in my reading glasses with a legal pad.

“Mom, what is all this,” she said. “You hoarding receipts now?”

“Timecards,” I said.

“From when.”

“From always.”

She picked one up. Read the top of it. “This is from before I had braces,” she said. “Why on earth do you still have this.”

“Because someday somebody tells you a thing didn’t happen,” I said, “and the only thing that argues back is paper with a date on it.”

She did not understand yet. She set it down and made herself coffee and we talked about the baby and she went home.

But she had seen the table.

I made a stack. Every night the system had moved off my number, I had a paper that said I was there. Some nights I had two: my own printed slip and Ronnie’s wet-ink sheet. I put them in order, oldest on the bottom, newest on top, eleven years deep. I squared the edges. I ran a rubber band around the middle and then a second one the other way, because a loose stack says mess and a banded stack says this is a thing you will deal with.

It came to a brick of paper near three inches thick.

Three inches is what eleven years of showing up looks like when you print it out.