What She Kept

I

The alarm went off at five forty-five. Susan turned it off before it finished its second ring. She lay there for a moment with her eyes closed and listened to the house settle around her. The furnace kicked on. The pipes banged. Charlie was in the next room, asleep in his bed with the dinosaur blanket his teacher had given him at the day program because he kept drawing the same picture of a green thing with big teeth and everyone said oh how lovely and Charlie didn't correct them.

She got up. She put on her slippers. She went to Charlie's room. He was still sleeping. His mouth was open. His breathing was shallow. She pulled the blanket up to his chin and he stirred but didn't wake.

In the kitchen she made coffee. The coffee maker was old and it made a grinding sound that sounded like something being crushed. She stood at the counter and watched the dark liquid drip into the carafe and thought about the shift at Walmart. Eight to four. Checkout lane three. People always forgot their coupons. People always wanted to return things without receipts. People always asked if she had a minute to fill out a survey for a free gift card.

She drank her coffee standing up. She didn't sit down at the table. She hadn't sat down at the table in maybe three years. Not since Mark stopped sitting down at the table. Not since Mark stopped being in the house most days.

II

Charlie was six now. Six years old and still not in school because the enrollment forms needed proof of residency and proof of vaccination and Susan didn't have the paperwork and the woman at the district office said maybe next semester and Susan said okay and walked back to her car and drove to Walmart and clocked in and stood in lane three and scanned things and said have a nice day and people said thanks or didn't say anything and it was fine.

Every morning the routine was the same. Get Charlie dressed. He put on his own clothes most days—jeans and a t-shirt, the jeans always too short at the ankles. Make him toast. He ate two pieces. Always two. Pack his backpack even though he didn't go to school anymore because his teacher Mrs. Gunderson said he should keep it "for consistency" and Susan said fine and put the books in anyway.

Walk him to Elder Mary's house. It was three blocks away. Elder Mary was seventy-eight and lived alone in a small brick house with a garden that was more weeds than vegetables most years but she always had cookies and she always asked Charlie how he was and he always said fine and she always said that's wonderful sweetie and he would sit at her kitchen table and do his worksheet while Elder Mary watched a game show and nodded along at the parts she thought were funny.

"See you at five," Susan would say.

"Have a good day," Elder Mary would say. It was always the same. It was always fine.

III

The超市 was on a Tuesday. Susan had switched to the early shift—six to two—because two was better for picking Charlie up from Elder Mary's, even though he didn't really need picking up because he could walk the three blocks home by himself and he had done it once when she was running late and she was angry but not in the way that people get angry, in the way that you feel the wind change direction and you pull your jacket tighter and keep walking.

Charlie came into the store with her this time. Elder Mary had a dentist appointment. It was the first time in two years that Charlie had been inside a超市 while Susan was working. He stood by her cart and watched her scan. He was quiet. He always was.

At one point he wandered off. Just a few feet. To the aisle with the canned goods. He picked up a can of green beans. The label was blue and white and the beans looked small and uniform and perfect, the way beans looked on television and didn't look in real life because in real life beans were different sizes and some were split and some were too big and they didn't fit in a can the way they did in the picture but nobody told the people who picked them to make them the same size.

Charlie held the can for a long time. He was looking at it the way he looked at everything—carefully, the way a dog looks at a door that's been closed too long. He turned it over in his hands. He read the label. He couldn't really read but he knew some of the letters now—G, R, E, E, N—and he traced them with his thumb and the can slipped.

It fell. It hit the floor with a sound that was louder than it should have been for a small can of green beans but not in the store, in a store where people dropped things and cart wheels hit display towers and babies screamed and the intercom crackled with announcements that nobody could understand, a sound that should have been nothing.

But Susan heard it. She turned and saw the can on the floor and Charlie standing over it with his hands at his sides like he hadn't meant to do it even though he had because everything he did was intentional, even the things that looked like accidents, because a child who has learned to move carefully in a world that doesn't have room for him learns to make every movement count and when the movement is too big it just falls.

She bent down and picked up the can. She checked the label. It was dented but not broken. She put it back on the shelf. She put her hand on Charlie's shoulder. He didn't flinch. He never flinched anymore. Flinching was for children who expected things to happen to them unexpectedly. Charlie expected nothing.

"Let's go," she said.

"Okay," he said.

They walked to the checkout. She loaded the groceries into the cart. She scanned them. She said have a nice day. The woman in lane four said thanks. The woman in lane two didn't say anything. Susan drove home. She unloaded the groceries. She made toast for Charlie. He ate two pieces.

IV

That night, after Charlie was asleep, Susan sat in the kitchen with her coffee and looked at the empty chair where Mark used to sit. He hadn't sat in it in over a year. He hadn't slept in the house in over a year. He didn't leave. He just stopped being there the way a radio stops being there when you change the station. You don't hear the music anymore and you don't hear the voice of the person who used to sit in that chair and tell jokes and drink beer and complain about the price of gas. You just hear the house.

She had found one of his shirts in the back of the closet three months ago. He'd left it there. She held it for a moment. It still smelled like him. Not the good smell—the beer smell, the work smell, the smell of a man who worked at a warehouse and came home and sat in front of the television and drank a six-pack and didn't say much because when you talk to people all day at a warehouse there's nothing left to say at home.

She put the shirt back. She didn't throw it away. She just put it back.

On the counter, next to the coffee maker, was a piece of paper. It was the enrollment form for Charlie's school district. She had filled it out partially—her name, Charlie's name, his date of birth, his address. She had left the vaccination section blank because she didn't have the records and the clinic on 4th Street was closed on Tuesdays and she worked Tuesdays and she couldn't get time off and besides it was probably nothing anyway, just another form that went into another drawer and nobody looked at it and it didn't change anything.

She folded the paper. She put it in the drawer. She turned off the kitchen light. She walked down the hall and stood in Charlie's doorway for a moment and watched him sleep. His mouth was open. His breathing was shallow. His fingers were curled into a fist around the edge of the dinosaur blanket.

She closed the door softly. She went to her room. She turned off the lamp. She lay in bed and listened to the furnace kick on and the pipes bang and the car drive past on the street outside and she thought about tomorrow—the alarm at five forty-five, the coffee, the walk to Elder Mary's, the shift at Walmart, the canned green beans on the floor—and she thought about nothing else, because that was what her life had become: not a tragedy, not a comedy, not a drama, just a series of small things that happened in order and then happened again the next day and then the day after that, and she would be there for all of them, she would always be there, because that was what she kept. Not a husband. Not a life. Just the small things, in order, again and again.

The house was quiet. The furnace stopped. The pipes settled. Charlie breathed. And somewhere in the walls, a mouse ran, quick and small and alive, the way small things always are, moving from one room to another, looking for something to eat, making their way through the dark the way everyone does, one step at a time.

: OTMES-v2-1E8C-270deg-M3-270R30B070F3] Variant: V-05 | E_total: 6.8 | Dominant Mode: M3 (existential) Dominant Angle: 270deg | Irreversibility: 0.6 | Redemption: 0.3 M-Vector: [4, 1, 5, 2, 2, 1, 1, 0, 1, 2] | N-Vector: [0.1, 0.9] | K-Vector: [0.9, 0.1]

Author Note & Copyright: