Part 5
Part 5 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
I don’t remember the stairs.
I remember being in the car with the door still open and one foot on the pavement, and I remember Ray Kozak was not on the steps anymore, which meant time had happened.
I drove to the Speedway on the corner and parked at the air pump and sat there.
Here is the thing I was doing, and I knew I was doing it even while I did it. I was working very hard to have not heard what I heard. I was assembling reasons. The door was thick. I was upset. Grief does things to people, everyone says so, there are pamphlets. A man’s voice is a man’s voice. My brother had been nineteen years old and my brother had been dead for twelve years and the voice on the other side of that door belonged to a grown man of thirty one, and there is no world in which a person can recognize a voice across twelve years and a door.
Except that I hadn’t recognized the voice.
I’d recognized the joke.
You’re late. That was Danny’s. It was what he said when you were early, when you were on time, when he himself was the one who had kept you waiting in the driveway for twenty minutes. He said it to our father once at four in the morning on the way to a fishing trip. He said it to me at my own graduation.
I sat at that air pump until the light went orange and then blue, and then I drove to my mother’s house.
The house smelled the way it had smelled for three weeks, which is to say like a closed up place that used to have a person in it. I didn’t turn on the front lights. I went straight to her bedroom and I opened her closet and I started taking it apart.
I found it in nineteen minutes, which I know because Tom called at 8:14 and I let it go and then the next thing I looked at a clock it was 8:33 and I had it in my hands.
It was inside a plastic grocery bag inside a hatbox with a wedding hat in it that she wore exactly once, to her own sister’s wedding in 1988.
A rubber banded brick of receipts. Kozak, R. Six hundred. Six hundred. Four fifty, going back.
A pharmacy printout, folded into eighths.
And a spiral notebook, the fifty cent kind, the kind she bought a stack of every August when the school supplies went on sale even after she stopped working at a school.
The first page said 3/12/15 at the top.
Then a date, and a line. A date, and a line. Thursday after Thursday after Thursday, in her tight little hand, eleven years deep, and the lines were nothing. That’s what got me. The lines were nothing at all.
4/2/15. Ate half. Wouldn’t look at me.
4/9/15. Better. Wants the green blanket from the basement.
5/14/15. Bad day. Left the bag in the hall.
8/6/15. Laughed at something. First time.
She had written down eleven years of Thursdays the way you’d write down a grocery list. There was no feeling in any of it. My mother, who cried at long distance commercials, had sat somewhere every Thursday for eleven years and then come home and written ate half in a fifty cent notebook and put it in a hatbox.
I went to the back.
The last page had three entries on it.
6/26/26. Fine. Cut his hair myself, made a mess of it.
7/3/26. Chest thing again. Told him it was heartburn.
And then, in handwriting that had gotten worse in the way hers did when she was tired:
7/10/26. He asked when Claire is coming.