PART 3
Monday, I went to work.
That surprised the neighbors, who had seen two squad cars on Sunday and expected, I think, curtains drawn.
I’m a charge nurse.
Twenty-one years on a cardiac floor.
I have stood at the beds of a great many people on the worst day of their lives, and I have learned that the worst day is survivable if you do the next ordinary thing, and the next ordinary thing was a 7 a.m. shift.
Nobody on the floor asked.
A nurse named Bernadette, who has known me since I was twenty-nine and came back to school, brought me coffee at ten and said, “Whatever it is, you look like you’ve already handled it.”
“I have.”
“Then I won’t ask.
But I’ll say — you look better than you did in March.”
“What was March?”
“You don’t remember?
You came in with a look.
Like someone had moved something in your house and put it back wrong.”
I remembered.
March.
The week Trina “checked in” on Ida.
Earl came back Tuesday.
Not for the locks.
He’d forgotten a bit in the drill case, he said, which I have since decided was not true, and he stood on the porch and looked at the bucket of old brass cylinders I’d left by the door and said, “Decided which one you are?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s all right.
I’ve had folks keep a bucket on the porch for a year.”
He looked at the two squad cars that had been in the neighborhood twice since Sunday.
“That the reason?”
“Part of it.”
“The other part?”
“The other part is a woman named Trina, who had a key to this house since 2004.”
Earl nodded slowly.
“That’s the one that keeps you up.
Not the husband.
The key.”
“Yes.”
“Thirty-five years,” he said.
“I’ve rekeyed maybe four thousand houses.
It’s never the husband.
It’s always the one who had a key and didn’t have to.”
The pressure came Wednesday.
It came the way it always does.
Glenn’s mother.
Ida Bradshaw.
Seventy-eight.
A woman who had lived in my guest room for three years, since her stroke, and whom I had bathed and driven and fed and whose medications I had sorted into a Monday-through-Sunday box every Sunday night for thirty-six months.
She sat in my kitchen with the box in front of her and said, “Yvonne.
The police were here.”
“Yes.”
“For Glenn.”
“Yes.”
“He’s my son.”
“I know, Ida.”
“Whatever he did — the money, the — that woman — he’s my son.
And you’ve locked him out of his own house.
Can’t you just — let him come home and let the lawyers handle — ”
“Ida.
If a stranger had taken six hundred thousand dollars from a company and run off with my best friend on my credit card, would you tell me to unlock the door and let him sleep in my bed?”
A long silence.
“That’s — that’s not the same, he’s — ”
“Whose house is this, Ida?”
She looked at the medication box.
“Yours,” she said, finally.
“Your mother’s insurance.
Glenn told me it was a little cold.
At the closing.”
“He told everyone that.”
“I told him,” Ida said, very quietly, “that your mother had been married twice and probably knew something.
He laughed at me.
That was the last time I said anything to my son about money.”
Then she said the thing that changed my week.
“Yvonne.
The woman.
Trina.
She came to see me.
In March.
When you were at work.”
I set down my coffee.
“She said she was ‘checking in.’
She asked about my medications.
She asked what time you got home.
And she asked — she asked whether I’d ‘be all right on my own for a few weeks in the summer.’
I didn’t know what she meant.
I thought she was being kind.”
“March.”
“March.”
Eight months before the beach.
“She was planning it,” I said.
“She was asking whether you’d be a problem.”
Ida’s hands were shaking on the box.
“I sat right here and I answered her.
I said I’d be fine.
I said you’d take care of me.”
“You would have been fine, Ida.”
“That’s not what I’m — Yvonne.
I told a woman who was st*aling my son that you’d take care of me.
And she smiled, and she ate a cookie, and she asked what time you got home.”
I called Sergeant Okafor.
“March,” I said.
“Trina came to my house in March and asked my mother-in-law what time I got home from work.
That’s not a hygienist who fell in love in September.
That’s a woman who scouted the house.”
“Mrs. Bradshaw — ”
“The P.O. box was opened in — ”
“February.”
“There’s your timeline, Sergeant.”
“Ma’am, I’d like you to know I’m going to put you in for a job.”
Thursday, Trina called.
Not Glenn.
Trina.
From a number I didn’t know, which meant a borrowed phone, which meant they were down to borrowing.
“Yvonne.
It’s me.”
“I know.”
“Yvonne, I — okay.
I know how this looks.
I know.
But you have to turn the cards back on.
Just for the flight.
Glenn’s — he’s not well, he’s not sleeping, and the hotel’s holding our passports until the bill’s — Yvonne, we’re stuck.
Turn them on, we’ll fly home, and we’ll — I’ll explain everything, I swear, there’s a — ”
“Trina.”
“What.”
“What time do I get home from work?”
Silence.
“…What?”
“You asked Ida.
In March.
What time I get home.”
A long silence.
“That’s — I was checking on her, I — ”
“You had a key to this house for twenty-two years.
You never once needed to ask what time I got home.
You knew.
You asked so she’d tell you whether she’d be alone.”
“Yvonne, please — ”
“Trina, the police have the P.O. box.
Your name’s on it.
They have the account.
Your signature.
And now they have March.”
“I didn’t — Glenn said it was a consulting — ”
“Then say that to Sergeant Okafor.
He’s very patient.
He’s the one who told me not to pick up the phone.
I picked up anyway.
I wanted to hear you say you were stuck.”
I hung up.
Then I did the thing my mother would have done, which was sit down at the kitchen table and make a list.
Not of what I’d lost.
Of what I’d kept.
The house.
The locks.
The bucket.
Ida, who had sat at that table and told the truth about March.
And a voicemail that said “I can’t get HOME,” from a man who had never once, in twenty-four years, asked whose home it was.
