After graduation, Connor got a job working under an experienced dentist in town while Nick went into private practice. For a couple years it went on this way, until Connor’s ever-increasing dissatisfaction with his job got the best of him, and he quit to come work for Nick.
“I haven’t even begun to think how I’m going to support myself,” I admit to Connor. Since Nick’s death, I haven’t yet sorted through the mail, too terrified to see what awaits me there. The envelopes I pull every few days from the mailbox get tossed to a pile on the floor just inside the front door. Bereavement cards, mostly, those bearing their With heartfelt sympathy and May you find peace and solace sentiments, but also bills. Estimates of Benefits from the insurance company already telling me which of Nick’s hospital expenses they will and will not pay. A notice from the library of fourteen picture books that are a week overdue, each costing me five cents a day so that every day I tally up another seventy cents for the library, and still I can’t get myself to return the books. I haven’t the energy for it. Bills, bills and more bills. Catalogs for items I can no longer buy.
I had a savings account once, nothing extravagant, but an adequate savings account, money set aside for a rainy day, but we ended up putting each and every penny into Nick’s practice. We’d see the money back, he said, and promised me it was worth it. Had I told my father this he would have said no, but I took Nick’s word and invested every cent. The practice was Nick’s dream. Who could refuse a man his dream? Not I, said the fly. And so I said okay, and handed over all my money so that Nick could fulfill his dream while I set mine aside. My own photography studio. That was my dream.
Even our home is a money pit, constantly in need of repairs or renovation. The only thing left I have of value is the dental practice.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I confess to Connor, “about the bills. The mortgage. The hospital payments. Car payments. Saving for college, Maisie’s wedding. How will I afford health insurance?” I ask, thinking of Felix and his well-baby checks every two months, all running over with pricey vaccines. Without waiting for an answer, I say to him, “I can look for a job, but if I work, who will watch Maisie and Felix? How will I ever afford child care?” knowing my father is out of the question. He’s too busy caring for my mom, and an in-home nanny or a day care would cost me nearly five hundred dollars a week. “The dental practice,” I say to Connor, “it’s the only thing I have left.” But a dental practice is nothing without a dentist. Without Nick here, the practice is meaningless.
A look of confusion crosses Connor’s face. “You don’t know?” he asks, and I implore, “Know what?”
But he doesn’t answer right away. He drinks his beer, three long, slow swigs while I wait for him to reply. “Know what?” I ask again as he sets his finished beer on the countertop, and I reach into the refrigerator for another one.
“There have been some layoffs,” he says in a tight-lipped way, as if he doesn’t want to say the words aloud, as if he wants to sugarcoat them like he’s speaking to a child. “Nick had to let some people go.”
But I shake my head and tell him that I didn’t know. “Who?” I ask and, “When? Why?”
“A month ago, maybe more,” he says and my heart sinks. It slides from my chest and plummets somewhere down to my stomach, where for a single moment I think that I will be sick. I grip the countertop, my knuckles turning white. Why didn’t Nick tell me about the layoffs? I imagine the ladies who work at the front desk, Nancy, with her predilection for hot cocoa with mini marshmallows, and Stacy, a math wiz, matter-of-fact and thorough; she’s a crackerjack with the bills. Are they gone? Have they been fired? And what about the hygienist, Jan?
“Financial trouble,” he tells me, and I sharply inhale, my fears overwhelming me as I wonder desperately about all the things I don’t know. Nick paid the bills; he handled the finances. I handed them over willingly and without question when we were married and turned a blind eye to all fiscal matters. I could barely compute simple math; I wasn’t good with numbers. The last thing we needed was me paying the bills.
“Why wouldn’t Nick tell me?” I wonder aloud, and Connor shrugs his shoulders and says that he doesn’t know. He thought for sure Nick would have told me. And now, standing in the weak glow of the kitchen’s dimmed recessed lighting, I wonder: If Nick could keep this secret from me—if he could go weeks without alluding to financial trouble, if he could lay off employees and not mention it to me—then what else wasn’t he telling me?
What else don’t I know?
That night Maisie asks to sleep with me. She treads lightly into my bedroom as I tuck Felix into the bassinet, seven and a half minutes after tucking Maisie into her own chambray sheets and pulling the quilt up clear to her neck that way that Daddy does it. Snug as a bug in a rug.
“I can’t sleep,” she tells me, crossing the room where I’ve recently swept the broken picture frame glass, and I ask, “Did you try?” to which she nods her little head so vigorously that hair falls in her eyes. She clutches the teddy bear by a single leg, the deplorable thing hanging upside down. He’s nearly gone blind thanks to Maisie’s unending chewing, the plastic brown eyes about to fall from their place, hanging on now by a single brown thread. I pull back the sheets and welcome her in, grateful that someone is here and I don’t have to spend the night alone. Maisie happily obliges, rushing to the bed and hopping inside, right where Nick should be. She sets her head on his pillow, her body failing to fill the space where his body once lay, his warm arms wrapping me in a cocoon while I slept, a leg tossed across mine, growing heavier in time. The air is imbued with the fresh scent of Johnson & Johnson Baby Wash and the sweltering summer air that eases itself uninvited into the open window and again makes us sweat.
It’s the middle of the night when Maisie wakes up screaming.
“The bad man!” she yowls in a piercing voice, and then, straight on the heels of the first desperate declaration, “The bad man is after us!” she shrieks as my heart begins to dash. She’s crying beside me, sitting upright in bed, clutching the bed pillow as if she believes it is Nick. The tears fall from her eyes like the rushing water of Niagara Falls, urgent, the kind that can’t be slowed down.