The Don's Wife Has Thirty Days to Disappear · Nadia Voss

Chapter 2: Forty-One Dollars and Twenty Cents

Day two was a Friday, and Friday is how I learned that the money had never been mine to spend. It had been mine to be handed.

There is a difference and I had six years to notice it and I did not notice it once.

* * *

The house was still full of trays at nine in the morning. Foil over everything, ham going grey at the edges, four sheet cakes nobody had cut.

Vida came at seven like always. She didn't ask me anything. She started at the far end of the kitchen and worked toward the door and by ten there was no evidence that seventy people had ever been in that house except a ring on the piano lid.

I called Howard Pell's office at 9:15. Pell has done the company's legal work since before I met Milos. He came to our wedding and he gave a toast about barges.

His girl put me on hold for four minutes and came back and said Mr. Pell was very sorry, he was tied up with the estate, and could I do the second of December at eleven.

The second of December was day fourteen.

I said that would be fine.

I have gone back to that phone call more than any other thing in this story. Not the graveside. Not the study. That. That would be fine. A woman with thirty days accepting an appointment on day fourteen, and thanking a stranger for it.

* * *

At noon I drove into Ardmore for two things.

Ivy's lotion, the thick unscented kind in the white jar, because her skin cracks at the elbows in winter and Cranmore uses something cheaper. And a phone charger, because mine had been in Milos's car and Milos's car was wherever they had put it.

The pharmacy on Delphi. Forty-one dollars and twenty cents.

The card came back declined.

I said what everybody says. Try it again. The girl tried it again. She was maybe nineteen and she turned the screen a little toward me so I could see it wasn't her.

DO NOT HONOR.

Behind me a man with a basket said take your time, ma'am, no rush, and that made it worse in a way I couldn't have explained.

I paid with the twenty-two dollars in my coat and I put the charger back on the hook and I carried out one white jar of lotion for my sister.

* * *

Then I did the thing you do, which is drive to the bank and be reasonable about it.

Rivermark Savings, the branch on Ardmore and Ninth. A young man named Curtis Nahm took me to a desk with two chairs at it and a bowl of butterscotch candy, and he was kind to me the entire time, and he took eleven minutes to explain that I did not have any money.

The household account was in the company's name. Danek Reclamation Holdings. I was an authorized user on a card issued against it, and authorization on a corporate card is not ownership, and the company had pulled the card on the twentieth at 8:04 in the morning.

That's four hours after Vida came in the door. Somebody made that call before nine on the day after the funeral.

"And the joint account," I said.

Curtis turned his monitor a little the way the pharmacy girl had.

"Ma'am, there isn't a joint account. There's a personal account in Mr. Danek's name with your name listed for correspondence. That's an address, not a signature."

"For six years."

"I'm looking at six years," he said. "I'm sorry."

He asked if I wanted to open an account of my own, and I said yes, and he asked for two forms of identification and proof of address and an opening deposit.

I put two hundred and twelve dollars on the desk in front of him and watched my hands do it and thought, very calmly, that's everything I have in the world, and then I thought, no, it isn't, there's the ring, and then I felt sick and told him I'd come back Monday.

Day two. Two hundred and twelve dollars. Twenty-eight days left.

* * *

Day three was Saturday and Saturday was the cars.

Nine of them in the yard by ten in the morning, parked the way they park when nobody's expecting to leave soon. Sarno in Milos's study with a legal pad and a man I didn't know pulling drawers.

Nobody had told me. Nobody told me anything the whole day. I went down at eleven for coffee and there were four men in my kitchen and one of them was eating out of a takeout container standing at the counter, and when I came in he moved over to make room for me at my own sink.

That was all he did. He moved over politely.

I made the coffee and took it upstairs.

At two I went out to go to the store and Gavril was in the gate house.

Gavril has worked that gate eleven years. He has a daughter at Sacred Heart and I know her name and I have written a check for her band trip. He used to come out into the rain and put a hand on the roof of the car and say Mrs. Danek with the k soft at the end and I used to roll the window down for it.

The gate went up when I came to it. That's all. It went up, and I went through, and he was standing at the window with his back half turned, and behind me a black Suburban came off Ardmore and he came out into the road for it and put his hand on the roof.

I watched it in the mirror the whole way down the hill.

* * *

Sunday was day four and Sunday is Ivy.

I drove out to Delphi Road with a quarter tank and the white jar in my bag. Cranmore House sits back behind pines and looks like a good hotel that gave up in 1994. Room 214, second window from the end, and if you park on the north side you can see her curtain.

She was propped on her left. They'd done the one side braid.

I did her elbows and her hands and the backs of her arms with the lotion and I told her about the funeral, all of it, sixty-one cars and the man eating out of a container in our kitchen, because there is nothing you can say in that room that costs anything.

Her eyes went to the window twice. A truck both times.

At ten to four I was packing up and Denise put her head in and said Mr. Whitby was hoping to catch me before I left.

Paul Whitby runs the business office. In two years he had never once hoped to catch me.

* * *

His office is off the lobby and has a plastic tray of mints on the desk and a picture of a boat.

He asked me to sit down. He said he was sorry for my loss. He said it twice, actually, once at the door and once after I was sitting, and the second one is how I knew.

"I want to be straightforward with you," he said. "The December vendor payment for Ivy's placement was flagged Friday. Not returned. Flagged. Which usually means somebody's reviewing it on their end."

"Reviewing it."

"That's the word I have."

I said the company would sort it out. I said it the way you say a thing you have no power to make true.

Whitby moved the tray of mints an inch to the left.

"There's also — and I'd rather you hear it from me sitting down than from a letter. We've had contact from a law office regarding the responsible party on Ivy's file. Nothing's changed. I want to be clear nothing's changed. But we've been asked to send copies of her care plan and her transport assessment to a firm downtown, and I'm required to log that."

"Since when?"

He looked at his screen.

"The request came Friday. But the family's been engaged with us longer than that." He said it almost warmly, the way you'd say something reassuring. "Mr. Danek was out here on the twelfth. He sat with her a good forty minutes. It's in the visitors log."

The twelfth of November.

My husband died on the fifteenth. So for one whole second, sitting in that plastic chair, I felt something soft go through me, because it meant that three days before he died Milos had driven forty minutes out Delphi Road to sit with my sister, and he had never told me, and that was the kind of thing he did.

I must have said something. I don't remember what.

Whitby turned the monitor toward me, the third screen that week somebody turned toward me, and there it was in the visitor log with the time in and the time out.

R. DANEK.

"Not that Mr. Danek," he said.