Page 9 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

By the time the rest come out, I have sweat in my eyes. My hip is loose. My head is quiet. That’s what the ninety minutes buys.

Beau finds me in the tunnel afterward, with his helmet off and steam coming off his head.

“Hey. Your brother okay? He was supposed to come look at my basement in November. He never called back. Now my wife thinks I made him up.”

“He broke his hand. Truck door.”

Beau winces the whole way down his body, then whistles. “How many fingers?”

“Three.”

“Jeez.” He shakes his head. “How’s a guy shut a hand in a truck door? I’ve been getting in and out of trucks my whole life.”

“He shut it in a truck door,” I say again. Same sentence. Same order. I hear myself repeat it.

Beau nods, lets it go. He asks a question and takes whatever answer he gets. It’s a mercy. It’s also why he’s known almost nothing true about me in six years.

“Tell him my basement’s still wet,” he says. He thumps my shoulder, then goes.

I get home at two.

The mail is open.

It’s on the kitchen table, opened with a proper blade instead of a thumb. Nine days of it, slit along the top edge, each envelope with its contents pulled halfway out so the first line shows. There’s a stack. Beside it sits a smaller stack: three overdue notices. On the front of each, in pencil and small square handwriting, is paid plus a date.

The fruit bowl has been moved to the counter. The table is clear otherwise.

I stand and look at it with my keys in my hand. Then I put the keys down and sit.

My phone has fourteen notifications on it from this morning, and none of them are from the bank. There’s one email, sent at 6:04, subject line alerts. Three lines.

Every account alert now routes to my phone and not yours. You’ll stop getting the four a.m. ones. If you want any of them back, tell me which and I’ll turn them on. MB

I read it more than once.

Four in the morning is when the automated ones arrive: direct deposit, statement ready, low balance on the operating account Fin uses, which isn’t my account and which I have alerts on anyway because I put them there in March.

They’re gone.

My chest loosens before I can stop it. I don’t know what to do with that, so I make coffee and drink it at the counter. The harbor is flat and gray, a container ship coming in slow behind the tugs.

Three overdue notices, marked paid in pencil. Not in ink, which would be a claim. In pencil, which is a note to himself, which means he didn’t open my mail in order to show me he’d opened my mail.

The pencil is the part I keep coming back to.

A man broke into my apartment on Tuesday. That’s a fact. He sat at this table with four years of my accounts in date order. He told me he now owns my visibility. I said all right. Now it’s Thursday. My kitchen is tidier than it has been since September. The notices are marked in pencil. Nobody is going to call me at four in the morning about my brother’s operating account.

I’m not stupid. I know what this is. I’ve seen the shape of it before from the other side, on a folding table in a shipping office in March with two men being extremely reasonable with me.

I drink the coffee. It’s too hot, and I drink it anyway.

Then I sit back down and do the work.

I take the receipts out of the stack one at a time—the pharmacy, the hand surgeon’s deposit, the emergency room, the parking, the second parking, the pharmacy again. I lay them out and photograph each one. Then I add them up.

Eleven thousand four hundred and six dollars, in nine days.

It’s not a large number. That’s the joke of it. Against one point four million, it’s nothing. I could write a check for it this afternoon and not open a statement about it.