Butter Pecan

At three in the morning I was standing at the heavy door in my nightgown and my white sneakers, punching Dale's birthday into the keypad.

Zero four one one. The little light stayed red.

I tried Wade's birthday. Poppy's. The last four of my own phone number, which is the code Wade uses for everything because he says he can never remember anything else. Red, red, red. On the fourth try the keypad let out a long flat buzz, and a night nurse came padding down the hall in pink clogs with a face that had seen every version of this.

"Can't sleep, hon?"

"I'm not confused," I told her. "You should know that. What year it is, who the president is, all of it. You're wearing pink shoes, your badge says Renee, and there's a coffee stain on your left cuff."

Renee looked down at her cuff. Then she looked back at me with something I didn't care for, which was pity mixed with a little respect.

"Most of them don't notice the cuff," she said. "Come on. I'll get you some cocoa."

She walked me back to my room and I let her, because there was nowhere else to go.

I didn't drink the cocoa. I sat in the green vinyl chair with the blinds making stripes on my knees and I made myself do the thing I'd been too scared to do since June.

I made myself remember the freezer.

Not the way Wade told it. The way it was.

It was a Wednesday. I know because Poppy had been with me the night before, the same as every Tuesday that summer. Wade and Brynn both worked late Tuesdays, and I picked Poppy up from day camp at the rec center and we ate hot dogs on the dock and she fell asleep on my couch watching the cooking channel. My keys went missing sometime that week. I looked for two days. Pockets, purse, couch cushions, the bowl by the door where they have lived for thirty-eight years.

Wade called on the Wednesday at noon. Said he'd stopped by to drop off a gallon of paint for the porch rail and let himself in with the key under the frog, and Mom, you're not going to believe where I found your keys.

When I got home from the church bake sale, he was standing in my kitchen holding them up. Frost on the brass. And the freezer door was open behind him, and on the bottom shelf, where the keys had been, sat a half-gallon carton of butter pecan ice cream.

I remember staring at that carton.

I hadn't bought butter pecan in three years. Butter pecan was Dale's. Every Saturday night for forty-one years of marriage, Dale ate one bowl of butter pecan in front of the ballgame, two scoops, and every Saturday I told him it tasted like a candle, and every Saturday he said that was why he didn't have to share it. After the funeral I found a carton half-gone in the back of the freezer and I sat down on the kitchen floor with it and cried till the linoleum was wet. I threw it out. I never bought another one.

"Where did that come from?" I'd said to Wade in June.

And Wade had put a hand on my shoulder and said, very quietly, "Mom. I think you bought Dad's ice cream."

It went through me cold. Because it made sense, didn't it. A grieving widow, three years out, drifting through the Lakeside Market on autopilot, reaching for her dead husband's flavor without knowing it. Putting her keys away with it, in the cold, where she kept him. It was the kind of sad, tender story that sounds exactly right. I believed it. I stood in my own kitchen and believed I had done something I had no memory of doing, because my son said it softly and the story was so sad it had to be true.

I sat in that Birchwood chair four months later and said it out loud to the empty room.

"I didn't buy it."

I didn't. I'd have remembered. I'd have remembered that carton in my cart the way you remember a snake in your garden. And there was something else, something I'd walked right past in June because I was too busy being afraid of myself.

Wade eats butter pecan.

He always has. Same as his father. Two scoops, after supper, and he's been doing it since he was tall enough to reach the freezer. When he was fifteen he ate a whole half-gallon of it the night the Tully Lakers lost the district final, and Dale sat up with him on the back steps and neither of them said a word.

And that week in June, Wade told me he hadn't been out to the lake at all. He'd been in Springfield at a marine dealer show, Thursday to Tuesday, and only got back in time to swing by with the paint. He told me that. He told me because I'd asked if he'd moved anything, and he said, "Mom, I haven't been in your house in a week."

So who put his ice cream in my freezer?

I held that question in my lap until the window went gray. I held it very carefully, because I knew what happens to that kind of question in this kind of place. You say one out loud to the wrong person, and it goes in your chart as something else.

Breakfast at Birchwood is at seven-thirty in a dining room with tablecloths that are really plastic. They put me at a table with a woman named Opal Arbogast, who asked me four times where my bus was.

I don't know how she knew about the bus. Maybe Wade told the staff and they told her. Maybe she used to ride one. Each time she asked, I told her it was parked, and each time she nodded, relieved, and each time she forgot.

I watched her butter a piece of toast for eleven minutes.

That's what they think I am, I thought. That's what my son stood up in a courtroom and told a judge I am. And I felt something rise up in me that wasn't fear anymore, or not only fear. It was the thing I used to feel when a big eighth-grader shoved a little one on my bus. It started low in my gut and it came up hot.

I went back to my room and I unpacked the suitcase.

I hadn't packed it. Brynn had, Friday night, while I sat in my kitchen with the court order on the table in front of me, reading the same paragraph over and over. She'd gone into my bedroom without asking and come out forty minutes later with the bag zipped and said, "It's done," and left.

I expected her to have thrown things in. Instead every blouse was folded in thirds with tissue paper between them. My slacks were rolled. My toothbrush was in a zip bag with my denture cream and my good hand lotion, the expensive one I only use on Sundays. Three crossword books. Two blue pens. My reading glasses on their cord. My blood pressure pills in a labeled organizer, the days of the week spelled out in black marker in a small square hand.

Wade would never have remembered the lotion. Wade doesn't know I own lotion.

I was sliding my hand into the zipper pocket in the lid, looking for my phone charger, when my fingers touched folded paper.

It was a sheet torn off one of those dental-office notepads, the kind with a cartoon tooth in the corner. The handwriting was the same small square hand from the pill organizer.

Don't fight them yet. Eat. Sleep. Wait. -B

I read it three times. Then I sat down hard on the flowered quilt.

Don't fight. The words of somebody who knew there'd be something to fight. Eat, sleep, wait: the orders you give a dog you've put in a kennel.

And them. She'd written them. As if Brynn Haskett, who Wade said had signed some statement for the judge about me, who had set brochures for this very place beside my fruit bowl in July, who my granddaughter had looked at yesterday before she went silent, were not one of them at all.