All stories › Family Drama › The Letter Opener › Episode 3
Butter Knife
Episode 3 of 3 of The Letter Opener by Doug Ostrowski · free to read
The envelope told her. Neither of us did. Irene came home Friday at two, and I had her mail waiting on the hall table, with the credit union’s envelope on top, opened, under a fresh rubber band with everything else.
I had been in the house since eight. There was a raised toilet seat to fit in the downstairs bathroom. There was the hall runner to roll up, because a walker and a loose rug are a bad pair, and the home health nurse had said so. There was the thermostat, which I set to sixty-eight and then, because I know her, seventy.
I watered the violets from the bottom and the fern from the top. I looked at the jade and left it alone.
Then I ran the taps, kitchen, bathroom, tub, and I cried at the tub for about as long as the water took to run clear.
Mark’s key was on my ring beside hers. I had not decided what to do about that.
At ten past two Tina’s sedan pulled into the drive with Irene in the front seat, and the truck behind it. Mark got the walker out of the trunk before Tina got her mother out of the car, which was the right order.
Irene took the front step in two moves and the threshold in one. The back step, the one that had put her in the hospital, she did not look at.
“He followed us the whole way,” Tina said, coming up behind with a sheet cake. “Forty minutes at my bumper. But he won’t come water a fern.”
“That’s about the shape of it.”
“Thermostat,” Irene said.
“Seventy.”
“Then why am I cold?”
“Because you’ve been in a building set at seventy-four for five weeks,” I said.
“Four and a half. I got out early for good behavior.” She went down the hall on the walker without looking at either of us and stopped in the kitchen doorway. “You watered the jade.”
“I did not.”
“Good. Don’t.”
Mark stopped on the mat inside the front door and stayed there. He looked at the chair by the window, and then at the runner that was not there.
Tina had found the mail. She had the stack in one hand and the drawer by the phone open with the other.
“That’s the letter opener,” Irene said.
“I know what it is. I grew up here.” Tina did not need it. The top one was already open. She took it out and read the top of the page. She read the bottom.
“Mom,” Tina said. “What is this.”
“Who opened it?”
“I did,” I said. “Week before last.”
“Was it a check?”
“No,” I said.
“Then we’ll talk about that later,” she said. “Give it here.”
“Eighty thousand dollars?” Tina said.
Irene got herself to the kitchen table, which took a minute, and nobody helped her, because she would have said something. She sat. She held her hand out and Tina put the statement in it.
Irene read it the way she read the gas bill, every line. She got to the box at the bottom and her mouth changed. That was all. Then she looked down the hall to the mat.
“Two payments, Mark,” she said.
“The fifteenth,” Mark said. “The Baptiste job.”
“Come in the house.”
He came all the way down the hall and stood at the end of the table like a man waiting for his number to be called.
Irene put the statement flat on the table and her hand on it, the way he had put his hand on it at mine.
“Here is how it goes now,” she said. “The statement comes here. Nobody carries it anywhere. First Sunday of the month you sit in that chair and you open it with the butter knife and you read me the number.”
“Mom.”
“And then you hand me the check. In my hand. I don’t care if the Baptiste job pays or the crew is late. I want to see your face when you hand it over.”
“And the fifteenth?” he said.
“Tina’s staying the week. She drives me to the branch and you meet us there. I sign, you sign, we get a sandwich.”
Tina said, “Why did nobody call me?”
“What would you have done from three hours away?”
“Known,” Tina said.
“Well. Now you know. Sit down, you’re making the fern nervous.”
Tina sat. Mark did not, yet. He looked at me, and I knew what was coming, and it was still the wrong thing.
“I’m sorry about the Tuesdays,” he said.
I let it go past. He held his hand out, palm up, the way his mother had, and I worked his key off my ring, which took a while, and put it in his hand. He put it on his ring while she watched.
“Rubber band,” Irene said. “Drawer by the phone.”
Mark got it. He squared the stack, the bills and the card with the cat on it, and put the statement on top. He wrapped the band around twice and set it on the hall table under the mirror, where she could see it from her chair.
The rubber band held.