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Joanne does her best to clean up the vestibule bathroom.
“Be careful if you use the toilet in the middle of the night,” she says when she comes out. “One false move and you’ll end up on your back in the basement.”
“I’ll stay away from that bathroom until we get it repaired.”
“It’s gonna cost us, Brad,” she says.
“We have the money,” I say.
“And the drugs,” she says.
“But what we need is a plan, Jo.”
She nods. “Why don’t we get cleaned up? You can head back to the Lowe’s, grab us some concrete for the basement. Then head straight to an auto parts store for a brake light for the van. Meanwhile, I’ll do a little brainstorming about what to do about the drugs and the money.”
“I’m gonna need some cash if I’m gonna get what I need at Lowe’s and the auto parts store.”
She makes a smirk.
“Follow me,” she says.
She leads me into our bedroom. Opening the closet door, she takes a knee and starts moving some of the many pairs of shoes she’s collected over the years out onto the bedroom floor.
“Cleaning the closet at a time like this?” I ask.
“You’ll see what I’m up to,” she says.
While she’s toiling away, my eyes scan the master bedroom as if I’m seeing it for the first time and not the one millionth time. The walls have been painted baby blue for as long as I can remember. The color has faded over the years to an almost white with a blue tinge. The brown curtains that cover the two slider windows over the queen bed are the same ones we’ve had for years. Decades even. Come to think of it, so is the bed.
Centered on the wall, in between the two windows, is the wood crucifix that hung on my wall as a boy. Back when we went to church more regularly, Joanne would slide fresh palms under it after Palm Sunday mass. But like I said, we haven’t been going to church much lately. Collection plates are passed around at church, and it can get pretty expensive when you think about it.
I eye the framed portrait of our son that sits on an old dresser of drawers. It’s of his high school graduation. He looks so handsome and young in his black cap and gown. A big mirror is attached to the dresser. I eye myself in the mirror and see the tired old face. The unruly, receding gray hair and the way my belly presses against my polyester short sleeve button down. I swear to God, I’m not seeing me, but instead I’m seeing my grandfather. Where the hell did my youth go? Our youth?
Realization kicks in. We’ve been in this house for way too long. We’ve been struggling for way too long. Our son can’t get married or have kids, because he’s strapped with student loans. Loans I can’t possibly pay off on his behalf. Maybe Joanne’s encounter with the gangsters, no matter how violent and potentially lethal for her, was the Godsend we’d been praying for. Maybe the money and the drugs would be the ticket to a future away from this place once and for all. The money won’t get us our youth back, but it can give us a good life, even if we are rapidly approaching our golden years.
“Got it,” Joanne says, breaking me out of my spell.
“Got what?” I say.
She stands. In her hands she’s holding a Maxwell House coffee can.
“Come with me,” she says.
She heads back into the kitchen. Before I follow, I steal a glance at the closet floor, and the floorboards she’s pulled up. When was she planning on telling me about her secret hiding spot? But then, I suppose she just did. What else do I not know about my wife of three decades plus?
I head into the kitchen, sit down across from her at the round white Formica table we got at Sears back in the late 70s. She opens the can, and pulls out a wad of cash, lays it out on the table.
“Jesus, Jo,” I say, “how long have you been hording cash?”
“I don’t consider it hording, Bradley,” she says. “I’ve been saving it for a rainy day, and by the looks of things, today has been a fucking deluge.”
She’s dropping the F-bomb again. I’ve never seen her this intense, this wired up, this focused on what she wants.
She sets her hand on top of the coffee can, taps it with her fingers like it’s a drum.
She says, “There’s five-hundred dollars in here, give or take.”
“How were you able to save it all up?” I ask. “We never have any extra money at the end of the week.”
“You’d be surprised how a dollar there, a five here, even a ten-spot there will add up. Took me a couple years to accumulate all this cash. I just felt like there was going to come a time when we’d need some fast cash. I guess that time has most definitely come.”
“We need more supplies,” I say.
“Yes, and we need them quick.”
She pops the plastic lid, pulls out the cash wad, begins shaving off some of the money. She slaps it onto the tabletop.
“That should be enough,” she says. “Now go.”
Grabbing the cash, I push out my chair and stand.
“What about returning the big tub. That thing was expensive.”
“You and that tub. Let’s keep it for now. Besides, it just might come in handy. What if we have to...” Her voice trails off.
“Don’t say it,” I say, knowing exactly where she’s going, but can’t get herself to say it. “I hope we’re good and retired from the killing and the body disappearing act business.”
“You just never know,” she says.
For a long beat or two, I can’t help but feel a little dizzy. Like the world has somehow shifted on its axis. Our world has, anyway.
“What are you going to do?” I ask.
“I’m going to get started on figuring out a safe way to launder that cash and to distribute the product.”
I shake my head.
“What the hell is product?”
“It’s what we say instead of drugs,” she says. “Drugs sounds...how shall I say this? It sounds so crude.”
“Looks like illegal drugs to me,” I say.
“We are not drug dealers, Bradley,” she says. “We are businesspeople.”
I can’t help but laugh.
“Is that what we are?” I say. “Last I looked, I work for the postal department. And you are, or were anyway, a stay-at-home mom who sometimes volunteers at the Albany Public Library when they get short staffed.”
She smiles almost smugly, crosses her arms over her chest, and sits back in her chair.
“And now we’re about to enter into a new phase of our lives together thanks to an unfortunate accident. We’re about to become businesspeople. That’s why from this point on, we refer to the drugs as product.”
“Because that’s what they call it on the crime cable television shows you’re always watching.”
“There’s that too,” she says. “Anything else you need to know, Brad?”
“That’s it for now, Jo,” I say.
I go to the vestibule and grab my keys off the small table. As I make my way to the garage door off the family room, I realize what I’m witnessing is a total transformation. My gentle wife is rapidly becoming someone I do not recognize. To be honest, I can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.