The Day Rate My Sister Charged

Maddie

That afternoon, about three thirty, there was another knock at the back door. Not Krista’s knock. Lighter.

It was Maddie. Fifteen years old, in her marching band hoodie with her backpack hanging off one shoulder. She had walked over from the high school, which is not far from anywhere in our town.

“Hey, Aunt Whit,” she said. “Mom said you can’t wash your own hair yet.”

“I can’t,” I said. “Not with this arm.”

“Can I do it?”

I just looked at her. She stood there in my kitchen doorway, so tall now, all elbows, with my mother’s chin. I had not noticed until then how much she had my mother’s chin.

“Your mom’s already been here today, honey,” I said.

“I know. I’m not Mom.” She dropped her backpack by the door. “Do you have a big cup or something? Grandma used to use a measuring cup.”

I had forgotten that. Our mother used to wash our hair in the kitchen sink with the big glass measuring cup from the cupboard. Four cups, with the red lines. I still had it. I told her where.

She pulled a chair over to the sink and tipped me back on it with a folded towel under my neck, and she washed my hair with the measuring cup, slow, pouring warm water over my head.

She used too much shampoo. She got water in my ear. It was the best thing anyone had done for me since the wreck.

When she was done she combed it out with my wide comb, working the knots out from the bottom the way you are supposed to, the way nobody ever teaches you, the way my mother did.

“Who showed you that?” I asked.

“Grandma,” she said. “When I was little and I slept over. You’re supposed to start at the bottom.”

I went to my purse after and took out a twenty. She looked at it like it was a snake.

“No,” she said.

“Maddie, take it. Buy yourself something.”

“Aunt Whit, no.” She shouldered her backpack. “Mom’s getting paid enough for both of us.”

Then her face went red and she looked at the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was mean. I didn’t mean it mean.”

“I know you didn’t, sweetheart,” I said. “Will you come back tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll come every day.”

Thursday

Thursday morning Krista knocked at 5:58, the same as always. She helped me shower. She got Paisley on the bus. She fed Rhett oatmeal with brown sugar and let him stir it himself.

Then, about ten, while Rhett was watching a cartoon and I was doing the arm exercises the therapist gave me at the kitchen table, she came and stood across from me.

Right where she had stood on Monday. In the same black vest.

She unzipped the pocket. She took out a fold of twenties, and she laid them on the table in front of me, and she kept laying them down, one after another, until they were all there.

Thirteen fifty, and the three hundred from Tuesday and Wednesday on top.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

Her voice broke on it.

“I can’t take your money, Whitney. I can’t come in here every morning and wash my little sister and then hold my hand out at five o’clock. I can’t look at Maddie. She won’t even talk to me. She thinks I’m the worst person she knows.”

“She doesn’t think that,” I said.

“She should,” Krista said. “I would.”

She pushed the money toward me with both hands.

“Take it back,” she said. “Please. All of it. I’ll come every day for free. Just please, I can’t stand here anymore and be this person.”

I looked at the money for a long while. Then I looked at my sister.

“No,” I said.

She flinched like I had hit her.

“The nine days were real,” I said. “You kept my babies alive while I was hooked up to a machine. Paisley says you made spaghetti. Rhett says you sang to him. You earned that money, Krista. I’m not taking it back.”

“Then what do you want from me?” she said.

I did not have an answer ready. I had thought I would. I had imagined this moment while I lay in that hospital bed, and every time I imagined it, I said something wise and grand.

What came out was just the truth.

“I wanted my sister,” I said. “That’s all. I didn’t want a babysitter. I wanted my sister.”

She put her hand over her mouth. Then she turned and went out the back door, and left the money on the table, and I heard her car start and back down the lane.

I folded the money up with one hand and put it in the envelope and put the envelope in the drawer by the phone where we keep the rubber bands and the church directory. I did not want to look at it.