Tuesday, in the still middle of the afternoon, as he was paying the bills, the phone rang in the living room, making him look up from his blotter. Emily, who’d been knitting, needed a second ring to answer. From her tone he knew it was Margaret.
“Oh honey,” she said, soothing. “I’m sorry.”
He assumed it was bad news, but what form that might take and to what degree was a mystery. Margaret seemed to be doing all the talking. Emily had gotten up with the cordless and was pacing around the dinner table, her end of the conversation waxing and waning as she passed the door of his office, and rather than eavesdrop and torture himself with scraps, he gently closed it, sealing himself in.
He tried not to speculate, but, bent over the ledger of his checkbook, he expected it had to do with money. He didn’t mean to be cynical, but usually when she called out of the blue like this, she needed help. It was the end of the month, everything coming due at once. She couldn’t rightly petition him on his birthday. Emily would lecture her about living within her means before giving in and asking how much, then write the check herself, since he refused to anymore, a pointless moral stance that engendered some bitterness between them. At dinner she would divulge the amount grudgingly, as if it were his fault, and the rest of the evening he would dote on her, overly solicitous, offering her a glass of port or warming a cookie for her in the microwave, so that by bedtime they would be made up, a team again.
Jeff was the other possibility, the whole nursing home soap opera blowing up. Whatever had happened had been sudden. They’d just talked with them the other day, and while Jeff hadn’t said much, he never did. Henry remembered his foghorn bass when they were singing, so he’d been there. At his most faithless, Henry believed he would leave her, not because of another woman but because she was such a mess. That Jeff was more patient than either he or Emily, he didn’t doubt, but even a saint’s patience had an end. Then what would she do, middle-aged with two children and no marketable skills?
Why wasn’t she at work? It was the middle of the day. Among her catastrophes over the years she’d lost so many jobs that he couldn’t keep track of them all, though she seemed to like this new one, at a dentist’s office, even if it paid little. The children had their teeth fixed for free. He didn’t think she’d risk that by drinking, but by nature she was habitually late and quick to take offense. Once she’d been fired from a dollar store for going five minutes over on break, cursing out the manager as she tore off her vest, a story she told as if it were a joke—as if she were still a teenager.
It wasn’t something with the children, an accident or broken bone. Emily would have let him know immediately if that was the case.
A relapse, perhaps, though Margaret talked about her addiction only when she was clean, framing her behavior in the psychobabble of rehab, her poor decision-making miraculously relegated to the past. Clean slate. Attitude of gratitude. Let go, let God. Most likely it was another setback anyone who knew her could have predicted but that she would chalk up to her chronic bad luck. A bounced check. A towed car. A lost phone. She was forty-seven and still thought the world was against her, as if the world cared. Whatever the news was, it would be expensive, and ultimately he’d foot the bill.
He shouldn’t let her distract him. He stuck a leftover snowman stamp from last Christmas and a free address label from the SPCA featuring a beagle on the water bill, paid it and logged the check in the ledger before sealing the envelope and adding it to the stack. The gas, the electric, the phone and internet and cable—each had its own color-coded folder with this year’s records in the right-hand pocket and last year’s in the left for comparison. He took a miser’s pleasure in his bookkeeping, alert for the smallest overcharge. His system seemed so self-evident to him that while he’d never explained it to Emily (she wasn’t interested, didn’t want to know), he was comforted by the idea that she’d be able to pick up right where he’d left off.
As he was vetting their American Express statement, from the living room came the stately bong bong bong of the grandfather clock. In its wake, he strained to hear Emily, thinking with relief that maybe they were done, and then seconds later she passed his door, still commiserating. She ran the tap in the kitchen until he recognized the burble of her filling the brass watering can. It stopped, and he pictured her going around the downstairs, the phone to one ear, topping off her plants. Her disinterest reassured him. The news couldn’t be that serious if she was only half listening. Like Arlene, Margaret could ramble.
He didn’t pay all the bills. The cable wasn’t due till the twentieth, and Duquesne Light gave him till the fifteenth before they charged a late fee. Otherwise he was done, and though he wanted to put the stack out with a clothespin for the mailman to take, he stalled, winnowing his email, deleting a bunch of old junk, aware of Emily orbiting beyond his door. Normally he liked the quiet of his office, an orderly hiding place from the chaos of the world, yet now he felt trapped, barricaded against impending disaster, hoping that by ignoring it, it might magically go away.
Holding his breath, he tracked Emily’s footsteps, and wasn’t surprised when they finally stopped outside his office.
She knocked as if she needed permission to enter.
“It’s open.”
She didn’t come in, just poked her head through the crack.
“That was Margaret on the phone.”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s got some kind of bug. She can’t keep anything down. She sounds miserable.”
“It’s too early for the flu,” he said, daring to hope that was the extent of it. “How’s everyone else?”
“Good, so far. Of course she’s convinced they’re all going to get it. I guess Jeff is doing the cooking.”
“Can Jeff cook?”
“I think he cooks like you cook. Anyway, she sounded pretty down. I’m going to send her some flowers.”
“I think that’s a good idea.” They’d be expensive, but in a larger sense, he figured they’d gotten off easy.
She looked at him as if there were something else, both of them uncertain, waiting for the other to speak, and for a moment all the awful possibilities he’d conjured for Margaret rose up like ghosts.
“That’s all,” she said, cheery, as if she didn’t mean to intrude, and backed out, closing the door so he wouldn’t be disturbed.