The green ledger from the pharmacy counter had a smudge of ballpoint ink on the corner that never quite washed off my thumb, no matter how many times I scrubbed with the pumice soap at the kitchen sink. For fourteen months, that smudge was the color of my life. Arthur lost his job at the grain elevator right when the winter heating bills started climbing toward three hundred dollars a month, and the manager down at St. Jude’s Apothecary needed someone who could run the register and count pills without complaining about the Saturday shifts.
I took every hour they handed me. I took the doubles when Clara went down with bronchitis, and I took the inventories that kept me under the fluorescent lights until midnight with my ankles swollen inside my orthotic shoes. Arthur told me every night while we ate cold soup at the formica table that he was hitting the pavement. He told me the mill was taking applications on Tuesday and the county roads department was calling back by Friday. I believed him because I needed to believe him, because the alternative meant admitting we were sixty-one years old and standing on the edge of nothing.
The key was taped to the underside of the kneehole in his walnut desk with two strips of gray duct tape that had yellowed around the edges. I only found it because the cordless phone had slipped out of my hand while I was sitting down to check the electric bill, and the receiver bounced hard enough to knock the plastic tray loose.
When I reached under the wood to fish out the pen that rolled down there, my knuckle scraped against something flat and cold. I pulled it out into the light. It was an old brass Yale key with a little green paper tag tied to the bow by a fraying bit of string. The number written on the tag in Arthur’s neat, slanted hand was four digits long, and it didn’t match our house, our garage, or the padlock on the garden shed. I sat there on the braided rug for a long time with that little brass bit resting in my palm, listening to the refrigerator motor click on and hum against the quiet of an empty house. Arthur had gone out early to pick up a new belt for the lawnmower, or at least that was what he told me when he kissed the top of my head while I was drinking my second cup of coffee.
He hadn’t used the lawnmower in three summers, but I didn’t say anything then.
I didn’t call him. Instead, I took my car keys off the hook by the back door and drove four miles down to the strip mall behind the car wash where the blue sign said Postal Annex and More. The girl behind the counter looked like she was nineteen and had a silver ring through her nostril that made her nose look sore every time she blinked. When I put the key down on the glass counter and asked her what box it opened, she didn’t even blink twice before she reached for the master ring. “Box 114,” she said, her voice flat like she was reading off a menu. “You need the matching signature card, though.” I told her I was Arthur’s wife and that he had sent me to clear out the junk mail because he threw his back out moving a water heater, which was a lie that came out of my mouth before I even knew I was capable of telling it.
She sighed, looked at my gray hair and my sensible coat, and handed over a bundle of yellow envelopes held together with a rubber band without asking for identification.
I sat out in the parking lot with the motor running and the heater blowing lukewarm air against my shins because my knees were shaking so hard I couldn’t trust them on the pedals. The rubber band snapped the second I pulled it off. Inside were twelve white rent receipts from a place called Oak Creek Apartments over on the north side of town, right past the interstate overpass where the highway department stores their gravel. The rent was $820 a month, and every single stub showed the money coming out of our joint checking account at the First National Bank through an automatic withdrawal code I had never authorized. The tenant’s name listed on the carbon copy was Arthur M. Miller, exactly like my husband, but down in the bottom corner where they ask for next of kin in case of an emergency, the name written in that same slanted handwriting was our daughter Chloe’s. Chloe, who lived forty miles away in the brick apartment complex near the community college and hadn’t come home for Sunday pot roast since Thanksgiving because she was so swamped with her nursing clinicals she couldn’t breathe.
My thumb dragged across the signature line on the most recent receipt, dated just four days ago, before I punched her number into the dash screen. It rang three times before she picked up, and the first thing I heard was the sound of a television playing some daytime game show at low volume in the background. “Mom?” she said, and her voice sounded thin and tight like she had been holding her breath since dawn. I didn’t give her a chance to ask why I was calling in the middle of a workday. “Chloe, what is Oak Creek Apartments?” I asked her, and the line went dead quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator on her end. She didn’t pretend not to know what I meant. She didn’t ask me to repeat myself. “Mom, please don’t go there alone,” she whispered, and the terror in her voice was so sharp it cut right through the glass of the windshield. Before I could ask her another thing, a man’s voice cleared its throat close to the receiver, rough and low, and said, “Who is that on the phone, Chloe? Give me that.” Then the line went click with a hard, metallic snap that left me staring at my own reflection in the dark glass of the radio display.
The drive across town took fourteen minutes because the freight train was stopped right across the tracks on Maple Street, blocking the crossing while the engineer sat up in the cab drinking coffee out of a red thermos. I sat behind a rusted pickup truck with a bumper sticker about the union, watching the red caboose sit there in the gray morning mist, and I felt something cold and hard settle right behind my ribs where my lungs were trying to work. Arthur hadn’t lost his job at the elevator because they downsized. He had been let go after the manager caught him dipping into the drawer to cover a weekend at the greyhound track down in Dubuque, and I spent eighteen months working double shifts at the pharmacy to pay off debts I didn’t even know existed while he sat in a rented room watching daytime television and waiting for me to leave the house. The train finally jerked backward with a long, screeching groan of iron, and I pulled around it without waiting for the arms to go all the way up, my tires throwing wet gravel against the side of the door.
Oak Creek Apartments looked like a row of gray concrete blocks that someone had dropped in the middle of a muddy gravel lot behind the lumberyard. Number 14 was on the ground floor around the back, right under an outside metal staircase that had salt stains on the treads from the winter road crews. The little square window beside the green front door was covered by a piece of cheap brown paper taped up with masking tape at the corners, but a thin strip of yellow light showed along the bottom sill. I didn’t knock. I didn’t even think about the key in my pocket until my hand was already reaching for the brass knob. It turned without a sound, the latch slipping back into the wood like it had been oiled that very morning.
The room smelled like stale cigarette smoke and instant coffee, a thick, greasy odor that didn’t belong to any part of the life we had built together over thirty-eight years. Arthur was sitting at a folding card table in the middle of the room with a stack of green scratch-off lottery tickets spread out around a half-empty paper cup of lukewarm water. He was wearing his old flannel shirt with the elbows worn through, the one I had thrown into the rag bag three weeks ago after I mended the wool on his Sunday coat. Chloe was sitting on the edge of a narrow cot against the back wall with her coat still zipped up to her chin and her hands balled up inside her pockets like she was trying to hide something she had broken. When the door creaked open, Arthur looked up from the table with his mouth half open, and the red plastic pen he was holding rolled off the edge and hit the linoleum with a small, sharp clatter. “Helen,” he said, and his voice sounded like dry leaves sliding across a concrete porch. “Helen, let me explain how the interest got away from us.”
Chloe didn’t say anything at all. She just stood up from the cot, her face pale and her eyes wide with that same terrible look I had seen on her when she was six years old and fell off the back porch swing, the look that meant she knew the fall was coming and couldn’t do a single thing to stop it. She walked across the linoleum past her father without looking at him, her boots making a heavy, flat sound against the floorboards, and stopped right in front of where I was standing in the doorway. “He said he was going to pay it back before you found out,” she whispered, and her voice shook so hard she could barely get the words out between her teeth. “He called me six months ago when they shut off the lights at the house for three days, Mom. He told me if I didn’t sign as the contact, he was going to walk out on the bridge by the interstate. What was I supposed to do?”
Arthur stayed sitting at that little card table with the green lottery tickets scattered around his hands like dead leaves, his shoulders rounded under the flannel shirt that smelled like tobacco he wasn’t supposed to be smoking. He didn’t look like the man who used to carry me across the threshold of our first rented house on Elm Street, and he didn’t look like the man who sat across from me at the kitchen table every night promising that we were going to get through the winter together. He just looked small, like someone had taken a pencil eraser and rubbed away the parts of him that made him real. I didn’t scream at him. I didn’t throw the bundle of rent receipts in his face the way I had practiced doing all the way across town while the car heater was blowing against my shins. I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out the First National Bank debit card that had my name printed on the front in raised silver letters, and laid it down on the corner of the card table right on top of a pile of unpaid gas bills.
“You can stay here as long as the rent is paid through the joint account,” I told him, and my voice didn’t sound like mine at all; it sounded like the pharmacist down at St. Jude’s reading out an inventory list to an empty stockroom. “But the account is closed as of ten o’clock this morning. I already called the manager from the car.” Arthur opened his mouth to say something, some excuse about the truck or the taxes or the mill down on the river, but I didn’t wait to hear the rest of it. I turned around and took Chloe by the elbow, her sleeve feeling cold and damp against my palm from the wet wind outside. We walked back to my car without looking back at the gray concrete wall or the metal staircase where the salt was eating the iron. We drove back to the house in silence, the windshield wipers clicking back and forth across the glass in a steady, rhythmic beat that sounded like a clock running down in an empty room.
The kitchen was still warm from the stove pilot light when we walked through the back door, the smell of coffee grounds from breakfast still hanging in the air around the flour canister. I didn’t take off my coat. I walked straight to the utility drawer by the pantry, pulled out my house keys and the brass ring with the garage key on it, and laid them down on the white laminate table right beside the stack of printed bank statements I had pulled off the printer before I left for work. I reached for my wedding band, the plain gold band Arthur had bought me at the jewelry store in Baraboo when we were twenty-one years old, and slipped it off my finger because my hands had finally stopped swelling enough for it to slide free without soap. I set it down right in the middle of the papers, where the gold caught the light from the overhead fixture and threw one small, bright circle against the white formica.
Chloe didn’t go inside. She walked out through the screen door to the front porch and sat down on the wooden swing that Arthur had hung from the rafters the summer she graduated from high school. I followed her out a minute later with a woolen blanket over my arm and sat down beside her on the narrow pine slats, watching the sun drop down behind the grain elevator across the tracks until the sky turned the color of old pewter and the first evening chill settled into the empty spaces between our houses.
