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Speakerphone
Episode 2 of 3 of The Thursday Lid by Linda Marchetti · free to read
He was the ride, tire gauge in hand, and he said so, and said it was nobody’s business.
“Rita asked me not to tell you girls.” He put the gauge down on the counter next to the organizer. “She doesn’t want the street knowing. Your mother was the only one on this street who ever knew anything about Rita, and your mother’s gone, so now it’s me.”
“You could have told me.”
“You’d have told Carol.” He said it flat, not mean. “And Carol would have taken the keys.”
I did not say anything, because he was right, and we both knew it.
“It’s twelve of them,” he said. “She’s done seven. It’s an hour there and she’s got a port in her chest and she can’t be sitting in a car while I run into every gas station between here and there. The first month I took the pill and stopped twice each way. She timed me. So I quit taking it Thursdays. That’s the whole thing. That’s the big secret.”
“The cardiologist said every day.”
“The cardiologist doesn’t drive Rita Sheffield.”
He went to bed. I sat at the counter with the organizer and moved nothing.
Next Wednesday.
Carol was on speakerphone, propped against the coffee maker, while I filled the lids. She had ordered a dispenser. She described it while I counted out the aspirin. It locked. It beeped at the right time and opened one door at a time and it sent her a text if a door did not open.
“It comes Saturday,” she said. “I’ll come down and set it up.”
“He doesn’t need a robot, Carol.”
“He needs something. You said all good. You said it three weeks running.”
Dad came in from the garage and stopped when he saw the phone.
“And I want the keys on the hook while I’m there,” Carol said. “Just the highway, Dad. You can do the store. You can do church. I’m not asking about the store.”
“Who said anything about the highway,” Dad said.
“Nobody has to say anything. You’re seventy-six and you put air in the tires every Wednesday night. Jo told me.” She had not heard it from me. She had heard it from me not denying it, which with Carol is the same. “I’m two hours away. My name is on the form at the hospital. When the call comes, it comes to my phone, not Jo’s. So I get to ask.”
Dad picked up his jacket off the chair.
“Dad.”
“I’m going to the garage,” he said, and went, and did not slam anything.
Carol breathed on the speaker for a while. “Is he mad.”
“He’s in the garage.” Carol knows what the garage means. She grew up with it too.
“Saturday,” she said, and hung up.
I told you I would not be the honest one. I still did not tell her about Rita. Rita had asked, and Dad had promised, and I was not the one who got to break it.
I drove to the pharmacy after, for the refill. The pharmacist is a woman about my age who has never once asked me why I count. I asked her a question without any names in it. If somebody had to drive an hour in the morning, could they take the water pill when they got back.
“Sure,” she said. “When they get home. Before two, so they’re not up all night. Just not at bedtime.”
“Every day, though.”
“Every day. Later is fine. Skipping is not fine.” She said it to the register, the way she says everything.
Dad was at the counter with the organizer open when I got back, looking at Thursday.
I took the water pill out of the Thursday morning lid. I put it in one of the little snap cases Mom used to keep in her purse, and I wrote on the top with a marker, WHEN YOU GET HOME. BEFORE 2. I went out to the garage and put it in the driver’s door pocket of the car, with the tire gauge.
“Pharmacist says later’s fine,” I said when I came back. “Not skipped. Later.”
He looked at the empty Thursday lid a long time.
“And I’m coming Thursday,” I said. “In the back.”
“Fine,” Dad said. “Rita’s another matter.”