Part 6
Part 6 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
My aunt Patty lives in a condo in Kettering with a screened porch she paid extra for and uses two months a year. She is my mother’s younger sister by four years and she has been, my whole life, the one who tells you things. Who’s sick, who’s divorcing, what the church actually paid for the parking lot.
She had me sit on the porch. It was fifty five degrees. She brought out coffee in the good cups, which was the first sign, because the good cups meant she had decided something before I arrived.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“Aunt Patty, what was on Brandt Street?”
She didn’t spill the coffee. I’ve thought about that. A person who is genuinely blindsided does something with their hands, and she did nothing at all with hers. She set the cup down on the little glass table and lined the handle up parallel to the edge.
“Where did you hear that name,” she said.
It wasn’t a question. There was no question in it anywhere.
“The landlord called me. Mom’s three months behind.”
“Three months.” Patty looked out at the yard. “Well. That’s right, isn’t it. July, August, September.”
And there it was. She hadn’t asked what building. She hadn’t asked what landlord. She’d done the arithmetic on my dead mother’s rent like a woman checking a figure she already knew.
“You knew,” I said.
“Claire.”
“How long have you known?”
“Don’t do it like this.”
“How long.”
She turned her cup a quarter turn, which put the handle out of line, and she noticed and she left it.
“Since 2016,” she said. “Since a little before your wedding.”
There’s a sound the inside of your head makes. Nobody ever describes it right.
“I stood next to you,” I said. “At Dad’s funeral. You held my arm the whole time.”
“I know what I did.”
“Does anybody else know? Uncle Rich? Does Rich know?”
“No.”
“Then say it.” My voice came out of me from a long way off. “Whatever it is you swore about, whatever she made you promise, she is dead, Aunt Patty, she is dead and she left me eleven thousand dollars and a notebook and I am asking you to say it out loud.”
Patty Kolar, who told me about my cousin’s DUI before his own mother knew, who told me my father was sick two days before he let anyone tell me, who has never once in seventy years let a piece of information sit still, sat on her four season porch with her hands in her lap and started to cry without making any noise.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I’ve had eleven years to figure out how to say it and there’s no way that doesn’t ruin you.” She wiped under both eyes with her thumb, once each, efficient. “Go on Thursday. Go in the afternoon, she always went at two. And take the key.”
“How do you know I have a key?”
“Because she told me she left you one,” Patty said, “and I’ve been waiting three weeks for you to find out you had it.”