Part 10
Part 10 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
I went back the next Thursday and the Thursday after that.
He let me in a little faster each time. That was the only thing that changed, in the beginning. The first time I heard four steps and a pause and the chain. The third time there was no pause.
What I did in those weeks was learn the apartment, because Danny didn’t answer questions, and the apartment did.
There was a calendar on the wall by the refrigerator, the free kind from a heating and cooling company, and every Thursday had a circle around it in pencil. Not a mark on any other day. Nineteen circles ahead of the current week, because he did them in advance, a year at a time, and when I looked at the bottom of the stack of old ones in the drawer there were ten more calendars from ten more years and every Thursday of every one of them had a circle around it.
There were seven shirts, and he wore them in an order.
There was a shelf with about forty paperbacks on it, and eleven of them were the same book. Same title, same author, different editions, different cover art, bought in whatever condition he could find. I asked him about it once. He said he liked to see how they did it different. I asked what he meant and he said the paper, the type, how wide they set the margins, and I understood that my brother had spent eleven years studying the small physical differences between eleven copies of one book because that was a thing a person could do that cost nothing and never ran out.
He wouldn’t sit with his back to the window. He made me take that chair every time, and he did it so smoothly that it took me a month to notice he was doing it.
He had a job. That one knocked me over. Three nights a week he cleaned the offices above the hair place next door, cash, for a man named Dennis who had never asked him anything, and the money went in a coffee can and the coffee can paid for groceries, and when I said something about it he got a look on his face that I recognized from our father.
“I’m not a charity case,” he said. “She does the rent. I do the rest.”
It was the first time he’d been sharp with me and I backed off so fast I almost knocked the chair.
The last Thursday in September he asked me to get him a clean undershirt out of the dresser while he was dealing with something on the stove, and I opened the second drawer, and it was in there.
It was a photograph, four by six, folded in eighths.
I knew what it was before I opened it, because I knew the back of it. Our mother wrote on the backs of photographs with a ballpoint, pressing too hard, and you could read her handwriting from behind like braille.
It was from my wedding. June of 2016. Me and Mom on the steps of St. Albert’s, her holding my elbow, both of us laughing at something my father had said from behind the camera, eight weeks before he got the diagnosis.
The folds had gone white and soft. You do not get folds like that from putting a picture in a drawer. You get them from a photograph being opened and closed several thousand times by somebody’s hands.
And my brother, who was not at my wedding, who was eleven minutes away from my wedding, had been given a picture of it and had folded it back up into eighths every single time.
I got the undershirt. I closed the drawer. I have never told him I saw it.