Chapter 5 - One Slip of Yellow Paper
Darlene Fenwick pled to two counts fourteen months later. Wire fraud and a false statement to obtain a federal benefit, on the routing form. She got probation, restitution of forty-one thousand dollars at three hundred a month, and a felony record at sixty-two years old.
The thing that actually broke her wasn't the sentence. It was that Hartwell is a town of nine thousand people, and every single person who'd stood on that lawn found out what was in the folders.
Shayla's truck went back to the dealer inside of five weeks. She lives in Delmar Bay now and works in a call center. About eight months on, she sent Renata a long message. Renata read it once and didn't answer. I asked her about it exactly one time, and she said, "It was four pages about how hard all of this has been for her." That's all she said, and we've never brought it up again.
They were out of the house in twenty-nine days.
I sold it. I couldn't make myself walk into that backyard. It went in a week, because it was, honestly, a gorgeous house — my mother had wonderful taste with my money. We bought a small place with a bad roof at the end of Kestrel Road, and I've been fixing it myself for two years.
Renata finished six cycles.
I'm not going to turn that into a montage. There were four months in the middle when she couldn't keep water down, when I learned to change a dressing, and we didn't talk about the future at all, on purpose, because the future was a subject that could hurt her.
Fourteen months after that dinner, Dr. Nwosu used the word remission.
Twenty-six months out now, still clear. She goes back every three months. We don't celebrate the scans anymore. We just drive home and I make eggs.
Her hair grew back curly. It had been straight her entire life. Nobody warned us about that, and the first time she caught sight of it in the bathroom mirror she shouted my name so loud I came in holding a hammer.
I did one more thing, and I want to end on it.
About a month after the dinner I drove down to Delano Street and found the shop. Little place, hand-lettered sign in the window, run by a woman named Callahan — no relation to Maureen, I checked, Hartwell is just that kind of town.
I asked if she still had thirty-one inches of dark brown hair she'd bought about six months back.
She'd sold it. Of course she had. That's the business. But she remembered my wife, and she went in the back and came out with the carbon copy of the receipt, and she said, "I gave her one fifty. You should know I could have offered her a hundred and she'd have taken it."
That receipt is in a frame in the hallway of the house on Kestrel Road now. Just a slip of yellow carbon paper — a date, a short description, a number.
$150.00.
People come over and see it on the wall and don't ask about it, because it looks like nothing at all.
May you like
It's the most expensive thing anyone in my family has ever bought. It cost my mother her house, her name in the town she'd lived in for forty years, and every day she had left to spend with her son.
And all it bought my wife was the right to find out she was dying — in a house with a two-thousand-dollar gate on the driveway, twelve feet from a tote in the garage where the card that would have paid for every bit of it sat under a string of Christmas lights, waiting.
