Part 19
Part 19 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
I told him on the nineteenth of December, sitting on the floor with my back against the bed next to him, because he would not get up and I was not going to stand over him.
“Mom died,” I said. “July fourteenth. It was her heart. It was very fast.”
The refrigerator ran.
Then my brother said, “Okay,” and I understood that our mother had gotten that word from him and not the other way around, and that she had been carrying it home from that apartment for eleven years without knowing.
He was quiet for a long time. Down in the street a car door.
Then he said, “Who’s paying the rent.”
I had braced for almost everything except that, and I made a sound that was not laughing.
“Danny.”
“It’s a real question.”
“I know it is. I’ve been paying it. Since September.”
“Out of what?”
“Out of my account.”
“Does your husband know?”
“He does now.”
He nodded slowly. He was working, I could see him working, going through it in order, the way he did the trash and the shirts and the circles on the calendar.
“The doctor,” he said. “Somebody has to do the first Tuesday.”
“I did it. December second. I met her.”
“You met Feld.”
“I met Feld.”
And then, still looking at the wall opposite, he said, “So you knew in September.”
I want to be clear that he did not say it as an accusation. There was no heat in it at all. He said it the way you’d verify a date on a form, and that was so much worse than anger that I would have taken him throwing something.
“Yes,” I said.
“You said tests.”
“I know what I said.”
“Fourteen Thursdays,” my brother said.
He had counted them. Of course he had counted them. He had counted every single thing in that apartment for eleven years, that was the whole architecture of how he stayed alive in it, and I had sat at that card table fourteen times and eaten his cookies and let him ask me when she was coming.
“Danny, I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to.”
“No, I get it.” He rubbed his palms on his knees. “That’s what everybody does. That’s the family thing. We do that.”
That is the most devastating sentence anyone has ever said to me.
We sat there a while. At some point I got up and turned off the closet light and the bathroom light because they were making my eyes hurt, and I left the kitchen one on, and he didn’t object.
“Was she alone?” he said.
“In the parking lot at work. There was a hygienist with her, and the woman did CPR the whole time until the squad came. Eleven minutes.”
“Eleven minutes is a long time.”
“It is.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad somebody stayed.”
And then, after a long time, in a completely ordinary voice, my brother said the thing I have not been able to put down since.
“I always figured I’d go first,” he said. “That was sort of the plan. I thought if I just stayed out of the way long enough, she’d get to the end without it ever being a thing that happened to her.”