I sent almost a hundred thousand dollars home in four years so my wife would never have to worry about anything. She sold her own hair for a hundred and fifty dollars to find out if she was dying, and the treatment she was begging for had been free the entire time.
THE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS
PART ONE
Two thousand dollars a month for forty-seven months.
That was the allotment. It went out of my pay automatically on the first, into a household account my mother offered to manage in the second week after I shipped out, because Marisol had never balanced anything bigger than a grocery list and my mother said, in that voice she has, that she’d hate for my wife to be overwhelmed while I was away.
I said yes to that in a phone booth on a base I’m not going to name, with a line of guys behind me, in about four seconds.
Everything that follows came out of those four seconds.
We’d been married two years when I deployed. Marisol was twenty-eight then, worked at a plant nursery outside Marrowfield, had a laugh you could hear through a closed door. She was going to stay in the house with my mother and my sister Tessa while I was gone. My mother’s idea. Why pay rent, Dane. Family’s family.
I got emergency leave with the unit at the end of the fourth year and I decided not to call ahead. I wanted the door to open and her face to do what it does. I had the whole thing built in my head on the flight — the porch, the run, the arms.
Instead I came up the road and stopped walking.
Two stories where there used to be one and a half. A wrought-iron gate that hadn’t existed. A truck in the driveway with a dealer plate still taped in the window. And twenty-some people on the front lawn with drinks in their hands, a party, women in good dresses, one of those catered afternoon things my mother had been putting on since I was a kid but never once with catering.
For about ten seconds I stood on that road and felt something close to pride. A hundred thousand dollars, four years, and look what they built with it.
Then I went around the side of the house instead of up the front walk, because my duffel was heavy and the side door was closer, and that is the only piece of luck in this entire story.
Marisol was on her knees in the dirt by the back steps.
There was an old galvanized washtub on the ground with gray water in it. A plate had broken and she was picking the pieces out of the dirt with her bare fingers.
She had been a hundred and forty pounds. She was not a hundred. Her dress hung on her the way clothes hang on a chair. And she was wearing a dark knitted cap pulled down over her head in eighty-degree heat.
I did not recognize my wife until she turned her head.
Then Tessa’s voice came from the back step, not even raised, the way you’d tell a dog to get off the couch: that the shaved one needed to stay out of sight while there were guests in the yard.
Marisol froze.
Then she saw me, and here is the thing I will carry to the end of my life. She did not come to me. She took a step backward and put both her hands on top of her head.
She was protecting the cap.
I set the duffel down and walked over and took it off, and she let me, and she closed her eyes while I did it.
Her scalp was shaved to the skin.
My mother, Glenda Kirkwood, sixty-one years old, came around the corner of the house in a cream silk blouse with a glass in her hand and enough gold on her to make noise when she moved. Half the party came with her, the way people do.
She looked at my wife standing there bald in the dirt with me holding her cap and she said it flat, no heat in it at all, like reading a label:
“She did this to herself.”
She said Marisol had wrecked her own hair with drugstore chemicals and then gotten fixated on losing weight, that it was a sickness of the mind, that they had all tried.
Tessa laughed, twenty-eight years old with a phone in a case that cost more than my boots, and said she spends your money and still wants the whole world to feel sorry for her.
Then my mother told Marisol to get back in that kitchen and finish, or she could sleep outside tonight, and asked her which it was going to be.
And twenty adults stood on that lawn with drinks in their hands and watched.
Nobody said one word. Not one. There were people out there who had known me since I was seven years old.
Marisol didn’t answer. She just looked at me, and when her arm came down her sleeve slid back, and there was a hospital band cut off at the wrist and above it the fading bruise where a needle had been.
I want to be honest about the next sixty seconds, because they’re the only thing I did right that whole first day.
Everything in me wanted to take that house apart at the studs.
