The Stairlift She Rode to Her Cake

Nine Months of Nothing

The first month, nothing came, and I told myself they would catch up.

The second month, Danny dropped off a twenty-dollar bill when he came for a dresser of Lena’s. He made such a thing of pressing it into my hand that I was embarrassed for both of us.

Twenty dollars. I put it in the coffee can over the stove and did not say a word.

By the fourth month I had a little notebook. I am not proud of the notebook, but I kept it, the way my own mama kept the egg money in a jar.

A column for what Lena cost us, and a column for what came in. The second column stayed empty, and the first column grew.

Her pills were two hundred and sixty dollars some months even with her card. She ate like a bird, but she ate three times a day. The heat bill went up with another body in the house wanting it warm.

I had cut my work hours from thirty-two a week down to about eighteen so I could be home with her. That was four hundred dollars a month gone off my own check that nobody was counting but me.

I called Roy once. I made myself do it. I kept my voice as light as I could and said we were running a little short on Mama’s medicine that month, and could he send his part.

Roy got quiet, and then he got busy. “Things are real tight right now, Carol,” he said. “I thought Danny was handling all that. Did you talk to Danny?”

I called Danny. Danny thought Roy had set it up, so Roy ought to be collecting it. Danny thought Kenny was the one hurting, so nobody wanted to lean on Kenny.

Everybody thought somebody else had it. So not one of them had it. The whole thing just sat there in the air like smoke.

That is the part I want people to understand. It was not that four men decided to cheat their mother. It is almost worse than that.

Each one looked at the other three and decided it was not his to carry. They all did it at once. The sum of four men each doing a little bit of nothing was nine months and not one honest dollar.

I stopped calling after that. I could not stand the sound of my own voice asking.

Russ was ashamed of them, and that made it hard between us for a while. A man does not like to look at his own blood and see something small.

He picked up overtime at the quarry, running the loader twelve hours some days, coming home with rock dust in the creases of his neck. He never once said we should send his mother anywhere else.

“They gave their word,” he said one night, and that was all. “They gave their word at your table.”