The Day Rate My Sister Charged

The First Morning

It was Krista. Of course it was. She had on the same black vest and jeans, and she had a travel mug in her hand, and her hair was still wet.

Luke let her in on his way out to the truck. They nodded at each other like two men at a sale barn. He said, “Morning, Krista.” She said, “Morning.” That was all.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark. I had not been able to get up on my own. The physical therapist at the hospital had shown Luke how to help me, but Luke was gone.

Krista stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at me for a second.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell me what to do.”

So I told her. How to get behind me and lift under my good arm. How to steady the walker. How the shower chair went in the tub, and how to keep the sling dry with a trash bag and tape.

It was the strangest hour I have ever spent with my sister. She had changed my diapers when I was a baby. She had held my hair back the night of her own wedding when I had too much punch. But we were grown women now.

I sat on that plastic chair in the tub in my own bathroom with my sister holding the shower wand, and neither of us said a single word for about ten minutes.

She was careful. I will say that. She was careful around the bruises, and there were a lot of them, yellow and green down my whole right side where the seat belt had held me in the truck.

“Does that hurt?” she asked once, very low.

“Everything hurts,” I said.

Getting dressed was worse. She had to put my underwear on me, and my socks, and work my sweatpants up over the walker. She had to thread my arm out of the sling and into a big button shirt of Luke’s and back into the sling.

When we were done I was shaking and she was sweating, and we were both sitting on the edge of my bed breathing hard.

“Every day?” she said.

“Every day,” I said. “Until I can do it myself.”

Then she got up and went and woke Paisley and made her a peanut butter sandwich and did her hair in two ponytails and walked her to the end of the lane for the bus.

Money on the Table

That evening at five, when Luke pulled in, Krista came into the kitchen with her purse on her shoulder. I had the money ready. Luke had gotten more twenties.

I counted out seven twenties and a ten onto the table. Right where the others had been the day before.

“One fifty,” I said. “Thank you, Krista.”

She looked at it. She looked at me. She picked it up and put it in her vest pocket and zipped it and left.

Luke watched her go out the back door. Then he looked at me and did not say anything at all, and I loved him for that.

The second morning was the same. Knock at 5:58. Shower, socks, sling, sandwich, ponytails, bus. Then she drove me to Lafayette for therapy, forty minutes each way, with the radio on the farm report so neither of us had to talk.

The therapist was a young man named Tyler with a ponytail of his own. He had me stand between two bars and shift my weight from one foot to the other while my pelvis told me exactly what it thought of that.

On the way home, about halfway, past the grain bins at the county line, she turned the radio off.