Epilogue
Part 27 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
Three years.
It is a Thursday in October and there is a bike on its side in the driveway that somebody is going to run over. There is a handrail on the garage stairs with two coats of the wrong white on it because my uncle used what he had in his truck. There is a second refrigerator up in that room that I said would be temporary and there is a crack in the driveway that has opened another half inch and a roof on Kenwood that we finally fixed in order to sell the house, which took nine months and a great deal of arguing, and the money from it is in an account that pays for a psychiatrist on Wayne Avenue on the first Tuesday of every month.
Nora is ten. She has braces on the top only, which she regards as a personal injustice, and she has a mean streak at euchre that she did not get from me.
This is not a happy ending. I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds when it gets told in a church basement, and I have heard people tell it about us, and I have stood there while a woman I hardly know explained my own family to me as a miracle.
Here is what it is instead.
Danny had a bad stretch in the spring of last year that lasted eleven weeks and put him in the hospital in Springfield for nine days. It was nobody’s fault. It was not a failure of love or vigilance or the right apartment. It came the way weather comes. We got through it because there was a doctor and a hospital and a husband who took nine days of his own vacation without ever once framing it as a sacrifice, and because it did not depend on one person being perfect.
He works three afternoons a week at a hardware store on Smithville where a man named Curt hired him off a paper application and has never asked a question that was not about inventory.
He has a state ID with the wrong middle initial. He has a wallet. He has a library card, which took its own separate fight.
He eats downstairs now, most nights. Not all. When he doesn’t, nobody says anything about it, and the plate goes on the bottom step, and that is not a tragedy, that is a Tuesday.
He and Tom have a thing about a specific sports radio host that I do not understand and am not invited into.
And on Thursday evenings, the four of us play cards at the kitchen table, and my brother is unbearable about it.
“You led trump,” he says.
“I had trump.”
“Nora. Nora, tell your mother.”
“You have to think about what he has,” says my daughter, who is ten, and who has been coached, and who is going to be insufferable in about four years.
He still circles the Thursdays.
The calendar from the heating and cooling company is on the wall over the little refrigerator in the room over the garage, and every Thursday of every month has a pencil circle around it, done a year at a time, in advance. Nobody has ever asked him to stop. I have thought about what it would cost him to stop, and I have decided it is not mine.
Last month I was up there putting away laundry, which I am not supposed to do and do anyway, and I looked at the wall by his window.
The photograph is framed now.
He did it himself, at some point, without telling anybody. A four by six in a black frame from the drugstore, my mother and me on the steps of St. Albert’s in June of 2016, laughing at something our father said from behind the camera.
He had flattened it out as best he could. You can still see the folds. Two lines down and one across, gone white and soft from eleven years of a man’s hands, and under glass now they catch the light so you cannot look at that picture from any angle without seeing exactly what was done to it.
I stood there with a stack of his undershirts and I did not say anything about it, and I came downstairs, and I have never said anything about it, and I am not going to.
He was on the back steps. It was getting dark early already. He had a cup of tea going cold beside him and he was doing the thing he does with his left hand when he is thinking, turning it over, looking at the two fingers that do not close, which our father used to say made him look like he was blessing people.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s Thursday.”
And my brother said, “You’re late.”