Part 8
Part 8 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
The apartment was one room and a kitchenette and a bathroom with the door off.
It was clean. That’s what I couldn’t get past, standing there. It was cleaner than my house. The bed was made with hospital corners. There was a card table with two chairs, and on the table, squared to the edge, a deck of cards, a folded newspaper, and two mugs.
Two mugs. Set out. Waiting.
“Sit down,” he said. “You’re making me nervous standing.”
I sat, because my legs had stopped being reliable, and because I had heard that exact sentence eight days earlier from a seventy year old landlord on a concrete step, and I understood that my brother had said it to Ray Kozak’s face at some point in the last eleven years, and that Ray Kozak had lied to me about never seeing him.
Everybody had lied to me. It was going to turn out that everybody had lied to me.
Danny filled a kettle. He moved around that kitchenette the way you move in a place you have been for a very long time, without looking at anything.
“She’s late,” he said, with his back to me. “Three weeks.”
I opened my mouth.
“She’s been late before,” he said. “Once. The blizzard, the big one. She came Friday instead.” He set the kettle down and turned the burner on and checked that it caught, and then checked again. “Friday’s not Thursday. I told her that.”
“Danny.”
“She sent you.”
It wasn’t a question, and there was something underneath it that I didn’t understand for weeks, and when I did understand it, it took my legs again. He wasn’t asking whether she sent me. He was telling himself she had. He was holding the only version of the last three weeks that a person could hold and keep standing up in a kitchenette.
I had about four seconds.
I have gone back to those four seconds more times than I have gone back to anything else in my life, including my wedding, including the room where my father died, including the parking lot of a dental office on Far Hills where a woman in scrubs did compressions on my mother for eleven minutes.
Four seconds, a kettle ticking, and my brother’s back.
“She’s sick,” I said.
The lie came out smooth and whole and fully formed, like it had been sitting in me my entire life waiting for its turn.
“How sick.”
“They’re running tests.”
He nodded at the stove. Just nodded, once, and I watched his shoulders come down half an inch, and I understood that I had given him something, and that I had made everything that was coming worse, and that I was going to do it again next Thursday.
“That’s why you’re here,” he said.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Okay.” He got the mugs. He poured. He put mine down in front of me and it was the right mug, the one with the chip, because the unchipped one was hers, and he did all of it without a word because it was a system and he’d had eleven years to build it.
Then he sat down across the card table from me, my brother, who drowned in Caesar Creek Lake on the ninth of August in 2014 and whose name is on a stone in Calvary Cemetery next to our father’s, and he said:
“Did she send the cookies?”