My splint went on Tuesday and the note went up on the fridge Thursday and in between I said thank you about four hundred times.
The ceiling in our kitchen came down at two in the morning with nineteen days of rain sitting on top of it.
I got the dog out. That is how the wrist went.
Five weeks, the landlord said. Maybe six.
So we slept in my husband’s parents’ back bedroom in Nokesville with our clothes in trash bags and a nine-year-old who asked every night if this was still temporary.
“You’re in our house, you cook what WE eat,” Arlette said, first morning.
“And a hot breakfast on the table by six wouldn’t kill anybody.”
I kept small. I kept quiet.
The splint went gray at the edges from dish soap.
“A little longer,” Ellis said. “Please.”
Thursday I came down at 4:40 and Marisol was already sitting on the kitchen floor in her socks with a piece of green paper in both hands.
She read it out loud in that flat voice kids use for signs.
“To our daughter-in-law.”
“We hid 84 screws around the house.”
“So we know you’re cleaning EVERY corner.”
“Put all of them back in this jar.”
“Show us how grateful you are.”
“P.S. Gone fishing till Sunday.”
There was the jar. Gold lid. Empty. Right there on the counter where the note had been.
Eighty-four drywall screws.
In a house where a kid walks around in socks.
And my hand in a splint.
I sat down on that floor next to her and I could not make my face do anything.
Marisol put her hand flat on my back, the way you do with a dog that’s scared of thunder.
“Are we in trouble,” she said.
Ellis read it standing up. He read it twice.
He did not say a little longer.
He looked at the splint, and then at his daughter’s bare socks on that floor, and he said, “That’s my mother. And she has GONE TOO FAR.”
He picked up the jar.
“Get your shoes, Colleen.”
“Odell taught me this trick when I was eleven.”
He held the truck keys out to me and he was almost smiling.
“Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Ten past five
He carried the jar out to the truck and came back in with a magnet.
It’s the telescoping kind, off the parts truck, for when you drop a bolt down behind a manifold and you’re forty minutes from the shop. Sixteen inches closed. Three feet open. He put it in Marisol’s hand and set the jar back on the floor in front of me.
“We’re not going to look for them,” he said. “We’re going to make them come to us.”
She got it before I did. She’s nine and she’s had four addresses and she is very good at understanding a plan fast.
“Floors first,” Ellis said. “Then vents. Then under everything.”
She went down the hall on her knees with the magnet out flat in front of her like she was sweeping a mine field, and the sound it makes when it takes one off a floorboard is a tick, a little dry tick, and then a second one when it pulls the screw up against the steel.
I couldn’t pick them off the wand. Two fingers taped into fiberglass and a wrist that wouldn’t turn. So I held the jar and Ellis stripped the magnet with his thumb and dropped them in and Marisol counted out loud, and that is how the three of us cleaned that woman’s house in the dark before the sun came up.
Four in the hall runner. Two under the couch, one in the couch. Six along the baseboard in the front room, spaced out even, like seed.
One in the dog’s water bowl. Skillet’s deaf and he’d have drunk right around it.
Ellis stopped when he saw that one. He held it up between two fingers and didn’t say anything about it and neither did I, because Marisol was two feet away with her chin on the rim of the bowl.
Under the fridge, eleven at once, and the magnet went down like it hit a road.
At ten past five she hit eighty-four in the kitchen doorway and she sat back on her heels and blew her hair out of her face.
Then she went four more feet and the magnet ticked again at the threshold of the room where she slept.
“That’s eighty-five,” Marisol said.
The trash bags
We had been in that house twelve days.
The apartment is over a shop on Route 28 and the pipe went in the ceiling void above the kitchen, and by the time I got the dog out from under the table the drywall was in the sink and the light fixture was hanging by its wires. The landlord’s a decent man. Five weeks, he said, and he meant it, and he still had our deposit and our October rent because that is how a deposit works.
Ellis has a truck payment and a transmission that started slipping in August. There was no money for a motel for five weeks. There was money for gas and for Marisol’s school lunch account and that was the whole list.
So we packed in trash bags because boxes cost money and we already had trash bags.
Arlette met us at the door with her arms out. She hugged me. She’s sixty-nine and she smells like the inside of a purse, and she said, of course, of course, that’s what family’s for, and then she stood in the hallway and took a picture of our bags on her floor with her phone.
For the prayer chain, she said. So they know what to pray about.
By Sunday she’d told the whole church she’d taken in her son’s family. She said it to me too, at the sink, the way you’d hand somebody a bill.
Marisol came to us fourteen months ago. She takes her shoes off inside because she likes to and I have never once made her put them back on. We filed in July. There’s a hearing, and before the hearing there are visits, and Denise Kowalski from the county comes and sits at whatever table we have and asks Marisol where she sleeps and whether she can get to the bathroom at night without asking anybody.
The date was on Arlette’s kitchen calendar in her own hand. Denise, 10. She wrote everything down. Groceries, gas, who called, in a spiral notebook she kept in the drawer under the wall phone, and when she added something to it she clicked the pen twice first.
Odell wasn’t much in the house. He was in the garage with his bench and his coffee cans, and he’d say hey and go back to what he was doing, and he’d been saying hey to me for eleven years.
Thursday morning when we finished the count I turned the jar over to shake the last one loose off the glass.
There was a strip of masking tape on the bottom in ballpoint capitals. DRYWALL 1-1/4. So I’d know what I was hunting, and nothing about how many.
Denise
Denise called Friday at nine while I was hanging Arlette’s blouses.
She said she was sorry to do it on a Friday. She said the visit was moving up to Monday morning and it would be at the Nokesville address, and she said the word unannounced and then she took it back and said moved up again.
I said that was fine. I said, is something wrong.
She said the hotline took a call about the home.
I sat down on the end of the bed with a hanger in my good hand.
She wouldn’t tell me who. She’s not allowed and I know she’s not allowed. She said it was a general concern about the safety of the environment where the child is sleeping, and that she’d be looking at the environment, and I should just have the environment be what it is.
I told her we were between places. I told her about the ceiling and the five weeks.
Then I did the thing I have gone over about six hundred times since.
I asked her what would happen if we moved into the motel on 28 for the last three weeks.
There was a pause on her end that I could hear the office through.
She said a second move inside a month is something she’d have to write up as a stability question. She said she wasn’t telling me not to. She said she was telling me what the file would say.
The deposit was gone anyway. I had done the arithmetic on that in the shower already and I did it again on the bed with the hanger.
Downstairs, Arlette was on the phone with Pam. Pam is Ellis’s sister, forty-six, lives in Manassas, calls every morning at ten and never on Sundays.
I came down for the vacuum and Arlette put her hand over the receiver.
“You’ll want to be honest about the hand, Monday,” she said. “They ask how you got hurt.”
I said I got hurt getting the dog out.
She looked at the splint. She took her hand off the receiver.
“Pam, she says the dog.”
The spiral notebook
Saturday she had me do her room.
Baseboards, closet floor, under the bed, and the nightstand drawer, because she said the drawer smelled like a nickel.
I got the drawer out onto the carpet with my knee under it. Church envelopes. A rain bonnet. A tube of hand cream with the cap missing.
A box of drywall screws, one hundred count, coarse thread, one and a quarter inch. Hoyt’s price sticker on the lid.
I shook it. Four in it.
Ninety-six by then. That’s what we had in the jar. Eighty-five Thursday and three more Friday from the bathroom and eight Saturday morning out of the front room she had already watched us clean.
I sat on her carpet with a box of four screws in my hand and I could not make it be anything but what it was, so I put the drawer back and I went down to the kitchen and I opened the drawer under the wall phone.
The notebook goes back to spring. It is very neat. Milk 3.19. Ellis truck noise. Pam – dentist.
Twelve days back, the day after our trash bags came through her door, in that same ballpoint:
Called D.S.S. 11:20. Woman took it all down. She was very interested.
Then the day after that, No one came yet.
Then Wednesday, in the same hand, above Hoyt’s 6.19:
O. to write it out tonight. Fishing Fri.
The hallway, Saturday night
I got up at one because Skillet was scratching at the back door.
Deaf dogs don’t hear themselves do it. He’ll scratch for twenty minutes at a door that isn’t locked.
I let him out and stood on the step with him and came back through the kitchen with my hand up in the air the way you do when the splint starts to throb, and I stopped in the hallway because I heard the tick.
That dry little sound. The same one, without the magnet.
Arlette was on her knees at the threshold of the back bedroom in her housecoat with her back to me. The four screws were on the floorboard in front of her in a row and she was moving them with one finger, spacing them, the way you’d set the table.
Her phone was face up on the carpet beside her knee with the light on.
She lifted it and took the picture. The flash filled up the whole hallway, the door frame, the strip of floor, my daughter’s bare feet hanging off the end of the mattress six feet behind her.
She heard the splint hit the door frame and she turned around.
She didn’t get up. That’s the part I keep. A sixty-nine-year-old woman on her knees on a carpet at one in the morning, caught, and she didn’t get up.
“Go back to bed, Colleen.”
I said the visit is Monday.
“It is,” she said.
I said, you called them the day after we came.
She put the phone in her housecoat pocket and she gathered the four screws up in her palm.
“You leave that light off,” she said.
Sunday supper
Odell got back at five with a cooler and two catfish and he came in through the garage the way he always does.
I’d already called Denise. Two o’clock, from the truck in the church lot down the street, with the windows up.
I told her about the screws and the count and the hallway. I told her I was the adult who let my kid sleep twelve days in a house where somebody was putting hardware on the floor at night, and I told her the file should say that too, because it should.
She was quiet and then she said, Colleen, I have to record all of it. I said I know.
The hearing was set for December. It is not in December now.
Supper was on the table at six because supper is on the table at six. Pam came. Odell washed up to the elbow at the kitchen sink and didn’t look at anybody.
I put the jar in the middle of the table on the trivet.
Ninety-six screws, and I set the Hoyt’s box down next to it with the four still in it, and the spiral notebook under my splint where I could keep it flat.
Arlette looked at the jar and she started talking and she did not stop for a long time.
She said this was her house. She said she had opened her house. She said she’d fed us and washed for us and put up with a dog that goes on her carpet, and had anybody said thank you, one time, one single time, and Ellis said, Mom.
She said the note was a joke and we had no sense of humor, any of us.
She said, “You went in my drawers.”
She said the county had a right to know how a woman breaks her wrist in a house where a child is living.
Then she said the thing. She said it to Ellis and not to me.
“She’s not blood. She was never going to be blood. And you’d let her have this family’s name.”
Pam looked at her plate.
Odell put both hands on the table and pushed himself up and went to the drawer under the wall phone, and then he stopped, because the notebook was already out. So he came back and sat down.
“I wrote it,” he said.
He said she stood behind him at the bench Wednesday night and told him the words and he wrote them because it was faster than not writing them. He said she handed him the box she’d bought at Hoyt’s that afternoon and he counted eighty-four out of it and put them where he could, and he taped the size on the jar so I’d know what I was hunting, and he put the box back in her nightstand with what was left. He said he left Friday because he did not want to be in the house.
Ellis said, “That’s eighty-four.”
Odell looked at the jar with ninety-six in it and did not say anything for a second.
“Then she wasn’t done,” he said.
Ellis said, “You went fishing.”
Odell said yes. He said it plain. He didn’t ask anybody for anything after that and he didn’t touch the fish.
Pam got her keys off the counter. Arlette said her name twice.
Ellis went upstairs and came down with the first two bags and held the storm door open with his boot.
The chipped edge
We got back into our own kitchen five weeks later, near enough to the day the landlord said.
The new ceiling is whiter than the walls. You can see the seam.
The counter is the same scuffed laminate with the chip out of the front edge that catches your sweater, and the jar sits on it by the toaster with the gold lid on and a rubber band around it, and it holds Marisol’s hair elastics now, and a spare house key, and one screw that we did not throw out and I could not tell you why.
The magnet lives on the side of the fridge. She uses it to get the fork out from behind the stove.
Ellis hasn’t called his mother. Odell’s truck came up the block once in November and slowed and kept going, and Ellis stood at the window with a dish towel until it was past.
The hearing is in March. Denise wrote all of it down, the call I made and why I made it, and she says March is a date and dates hold.
The deposit is gone. The transmission is not fixed.
Thursday morning I came down at ten to five for the coffee and Marisol was on the kitchen floor in her socks with her back against the dishwasher and the dog’s head on her leg.
I asked her what she was doing down there.
“Nothing’s on the floor,” she said. She ran her hand flat across the boards, out and back. “See.”
If this one sat wrong in your chest, send it to somebody who’s ever had to sleep twelve days in a house that wasn’t theirs.
For more tales of unexpected twists and turns, you might like to read about The Deposit on Fell Street and a Car That Lasted Till I Was Four or perhaps I Signed for Nothing the Day My Grandmother Died, and Three Mornings Later a Van Came Anyway. And for another story that delves into pivotal childhood moments, check out I Was Five When She Knelt on That Kitchen Floor, and Nineteen Men Knew Better.
