“How many is all?”
Gail finally looked at me. My sister is fifty-seven, five years older than I am, and that morning she looked seventy. Her hair was pulled back in a rubber band. She had on Dad’s canvas chore coat with the cuffs rolled twice.
“Forty-seven,” she said. “I counted when I carried them up his basement stairs. Four trips with a laundry basket. Is that what you want to know?”
Forty-seven less nineteen. Twenty-eight of them were already gone down the street.
“Two dollars,” I said.
“They’re dusty wooden ducks, Patty. Half of them have shot holes in them. Two dollars is generous.”
“A man offered Dad a hundred for one once. A plain mallard. That was twenty years ago.”
“Then that man can come give me a hundred.” She handed somebody a quarter back. “I’m not running an auction. I’m emptying a house. I have been emptying that house since Tuesday night, by myself, and I want it done.”
“I’d have come.”
“You did come.” She said it flat and even, with no meanness in it at all, which was worse. “You came for the visitation and the funeral and you went home Wednesday, same as always. Which is fine. You’ve got a job and a girl in school. But you don’t get to drive in at ten o’clock and tell me what Dad’s things are worth. You want a say in a Saturday, you should have been here for a Tuesday.”
Nobody at that table pretended not to hear it. It’s a small town.
And here is the thing I have to tell you, because it’s the reason I did what I did instead of what you might have done in my shoes.
She was right.
Dad’s kidneys quit two years ago in March. After that, three days a week, Monday and Wednesday and Friday, somebody had to drive him across the river bridge and up through Lewistown to the dialysis center in Canton. Twenty-five miles. Then sit four hours while the machine did its work, and drive him home gray and shaking and too tired to eat. That somebody was Gail. She lives two streets from Dad’s house. I live in Mount Vernon, three hours south. She cut back to two days a week at the elevator office to do it, and she has been on her own since her divorce, so there was nobody to spell her.
I called every Sunday. I came up when I could, which was not often. I sent a check at Christmas for gas, and she never cashed it.
So I stood in her driveway with my purse on my shoulder, looking at nineteen ducks, and I knew exactly what I could do. I could open my wallet and buy the table. Thirty-eight dollars. Gail would have taken it, too. She’d have counted it into the cigar box in front of the whole neighborhood and never forgiven me for it.
And I’d have had nineteen birds, a sister who was through with me, and twenty-eight still gone.
Money wasn’t going to fix it. And I had not earned a scene.
Dad logged every boat that ever came through his lock. That was as much the job as the gates were. Name of the towboat, number of barges, loaded or empty, time in, time out, in a green ledger with a pencil on a string. He used to say that as far as the government was concerned, a thing that isn’t written down never happened.
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