Chapter 6 - The Two-Hundred-Dollar Transfers
I did not move from the table.
The weight of the walnut box was still in my forearms, though my hands were empty now, resting against the cold linen.
Every month on the seventeenth.
For sixty-one consecutive months, beginning in March of 2021, when the snow was still banked against the foundation of our duplex on Fourth Street and I was working fifty-four hours a week at the dental clinic while Dr. Ashby recovered from her gallbladder surgery.
The notification would pop up on my phone at nine in the morning, right after the morning huddle with the hygienists:
Cheryl Stark: “Esther, honey, the pharmacy in Hastings says Grandma’s co-pay for her Namenda went up twenty-two dollars. Your father is short until the supply check clears on Friday. Can you send the two hundred through the phone like last month? Don't make your father feel bad about asking.”
And I would open the bank application with my thumb.
Transfer: $200.00.
From: Esther Stark Checking (...4812)
To: Cheryl Stark (...0931)
Memo: For Grandma.
Twelve thousand two hundred dollars.
It had not been an abstraction. It had been the dental crown I put off until the tooth cracked down to the pulp chamber in September of twenty-two, requiring an emergency extraction and an eighteen-hundred-dollar bridge that I paid for over twelve months on an employee discount. It had been the set of four winter tires that Ellis and I didn't buy in twenty-three, choosing instead to drive his front-wheel-drive Civic through sixty miles of lake-effect slush with the steel belts showing through the tread on the right rear tire.
It had been the house six minutes from my parents’ kitchen.
The house with the white pine cupboards and the deep cast-iron sink overlooking the garden where the listing agent had stood in the driveway, holding the disclosure papers, saying: “It’s a solid house, Esther. The foundation is poured concrete. The furnace has ten years left. But they have another offer from an investor in Ada for two hundred and twelve thousand. If you can’t get your down payment up to fifteen percent by Friday, the seller is going to take the cash.”
I had called my mother from that gravel driveway.
I had stood beside the forsythia bush, the yellow flowers just beginning to drop their petals in the April wind, my phone pressed to my ear, listening to the dishwasher running in her house on Amberley.
“Mom,” I had said, my voice shaking with that small, childish excitement I had never quite managed to kill. “We found it. It’s on Tremont. It’s six minutes from you. If Dad could just return five thousand of the money I’ve sent for Grandma’s care since twenty-one—just the emergency loans from the winter—Ellis and I can make the fifteen percent. We can close before Memorial Day.”
And my mother had sighed.
That long, wet, suffering exhalation that sounded like an old radiator cooling down in an empty room.
“Esther Jane,” she had said, and her voice had been so gentle, so full of that heavy, maternal pity that made you feel as though your very existence was an unpaid bill on her kitchen counter. “How can you even ask that? Your grandmother had to have her wheelchair ramp rebuilt three weeks ago. The carpenter charged twelve hundred dollars for the treated lumber alone. Your sister Bridget is working twenty hours a week at the boutique and can barely afford her insulin. You are thirty years old. You have a good job. You have a man who loves you. Why are you always reaching back into this family’s pockets the minute you see something you want?”
I had apologized.
I had stood in that driveway by the forsythia bush and I had told my mother that I was sorry for being selfish. I had told her that Ellis and I would keep looking. I had told her not to tell Dad I had asked, because I didn't want him to feel embarrassed about his commercial supply business.
Now, I looked across the head table at my sister Bridget.
Bridget was still holding her throat. The three-stone diamond pendant had slipped down into the green satin of her neckline, the platinum chain tangled in the cheap gold-plated chain she had worn since high school.
“The boutique,” I said.
My voice was not loud. It was the voice I used when a patient had a dry socket and I had to explain that packing the bone with eugenol gauze was going to hurt for four seconds before the numbness set in.
Bridget’s eyes darted toward the kitchen doors where Trish Donnelly and the two retired troopers stood.
“Esther, don't,” Bridget whispered.
“The boutique on twenty-eighth street,” I repeated. “Bridget’s Bridal Loft. The one that opened in September of twenty-three. The one with the white velvet settee in the front window and the champagne chiller by the dressing rooms.”
“Dad helped me with the incorporation,” Bridget said, her words tumbling out of her in a high, ragged rush that sounded like gravel sliding down a galvanized chute. “Lots of fathers help their daughters with their businesses! You had the dental clinic! You had Dr. Ashby! Nobody ever helped me with anything!”
“You had eighteen thousand dollars in inventory from a wholesaler in Atlanta, Bridget,” Ivy Kesler said, her finger tracing a line on the photostatic bank ledger. “The draft cleared on August fourteenth, twenty twenty-three. Check number four-four-one-two. The memo line says: ‘Medical equipment and adaptive devices for Marin Stark.’”
Grandma Marin took one hand off her walker.
She reached down, took Great-Aunt Loretta’s cane by the polished cherry shaft, and laid the rubber tip directly against the toe of my father’s blue oxford shoe.
“Vaughn,” she said.
My father did not move his foot. He stood there like an ox in a cattle chute, his head low, his breathing loud and wet in the silent lodge.
“Where did you tell them I was, Vaughn?” Grandma asked.
Dad didn't answer.
“Tell them,” the old woman said, and her voice cracked like an oak branch in an ice storm. “Tell your daughter where you told the pastor I was when he came by with the communion bread on Easter Sunday.”
Dad’s mouth worked. His tongue came out, dry and gray, and touched his top lip.
“I told him you were sleeping, Ma,” he whispered.
“You told him I was in the locked wing at Pine Rest, Vaughn,” Grandma Marin said. “You told him I had bit a nurse on the wrist and couldn't have visitors because the sight of a clerical collar made me throw my bedpan at the wall.”
May you like
A woman at table four—Mrs. Knoester, who had taught Sunday school at Trinity for forty years—dropped her water glass.
The heavy tumbler hit the hardwood floor with a dull, flat crash. The glass did not shatter; it rolled three feet across the white oak, leaving a dark, wet trail of ice water and lemon seeds across the grain until it bumped against the toe of Ellis’s left boot.
