All stories › Family Drama › The Letter Opener › Episode 2
Plastic Knife
Episode 2 of 3 of The Letter Opener by Doug Ostrowski · free to read
Mark Kowalczyk’s truck went in February.
“The transmission. Then the shop lease came due in March, the whole year up front, because the landlord’s new and wanted it that way. Two men on payroll. I could keep the men or keep the truck, and without the truck the men don’t work.”
He had the statement flat on the table under his hand. I had put it there at six in the morning and gone to make coffee. He had come down and found it, and we had both stood there a while before either of us sat.
“She offered,” he said. “I did not ask. She said the house is paid off and sitting there doing nothing. She went to the appointment herself. She signed first.”
“And you paid it,” I said.
“Every month through July. August I paid the crew. September I paid the crew.”
“And you didn’t tell me because.”
“Because you’d have wanted it on paper between me and my mother,” he said. “And you’d have been right, and I didn’t want to hear it.”
“And the mail?”
“I told you she wanted it left. She never said that. I said it.”
“And the house.”
“I put a lien on my mother’s house,” he said. “I can’t stand in it.”
“There’s eleven thousand in the savings,” I said.
“That’s the roof.”
“The roof isn’t past due.”
“It’s a loan, Lisa,” he said. “It’s not a repo. They send that letter to everybody.”
“It says further action.”
“The Baptiste job pays on the fifteenth,” he said. “Eight thousand. I bring it current, I pay October, we’re square by the holidays.”
“And if the Baptiste job doesn’t pay?”
“Then the men wait a week. They’ve waited before.”
“I’ll go to the branch tomorrow,” I said, “and pay it from savings.”
“Don’t.” He said it quietly, which is how I knew he meant it. “Let me fix the one thing I did. You’ve done everything else.”
I let him. I put the checkbook back in the drawer because he wanted me to, and because he had taken his key off his ring for me the night before without a fight, and I thought that meant something about the kind of week he was having.
On Thursday she had the grocery bag open on the bed table before I sat down. The rehab place put a whiteboard in every room with the date, the nurse’s name and a goal. Irene’s said WALK TO DAYROOM, and under that, in her own hand, AND BACK.
“Where’s my letter opener?” she said.
“At your house.”
“So it is.” She took the plastic knife off her dinner tray and went in with that. “This is not a letter opener. This is an insult.”
She did the electric first, then the gas, then the water. She read every line of every one, which is a thing I have never done in my life. She held the property tax reminder up to the window as if it might be counterfeit.
“You set it at sixty-two,” she said.
“Sixty-four now.”
“Sixty-eight, or you’re not my daughter-in-law.”
“How’s the hip?” I said.
“The hip is the best part of me. It has hardware now. It’s the rest of me that’s forty years older than the hip.”
A nurse named Kendra came in, checked the scar, went through the pain scale, wrote down the four Irene gave her, and updated the whiteboard. It was all very calm and ordinary, which I had not expected of a rehab place and had stopped noticing by the second week.
“Your husband comes Sundays at two,” Irene said, “and leaves at two-forty. He watches the clock over the nurses’ station the whole time.”
“He’s not good at hospitals,” I said.
“This isn’t a hospital. It’s a hallway with a gym on the end.”
Then, with the bag empty, she said, “Anything from a bank?”
“Which bank?”
“Any bank.”
“No,” I said.
I said no with the statement folded in the inside pocket of my purse, eleven inches from her hand.
“They’re letting me out early,” she said. “The ninth. A week from Friday. Tina’s driving me home, with a sheet cake nobody wanted.”
The next Tuesday was mine again, because the quarter close had moved a week. One week of mail is a thinner thing than three. It fit in one hand. Two catalogs, the bulletin, the gas bill, and another envelope from the credit union, thinner than the first, with SECOND NOTICE showing through the window.
I did not open that one. I did not need to. I put the rubber band around the stack once and it hung there loose.
I watered the violets from the bottom and the fern from the top. I set the thermostat to sixty-eight, because she was coming home in three days and would check. I ran the tub.
My phone rang while the tub was running. Mark.
“Anything in the mail?” he said.
“Gas bill.”
“That’s it?”
“Two catalogs,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “The fifteenth’s a Thursday. I checked.”
So now I had two envelopes in my purse and had lied to both of them, and both of them had believed me.
She comes home Friday. Which of us tells her?