For 11 Years I Blamed His Brother for Our Missing $26,750

The plastic chair next to Ansel’s bed squeaks every time I shift my weight. It’s a little after two in the morning, the room smells like hand sanitizer and burnt coffee, and the monitor above his head beeps in a rhythm I don’t trust. He has the thin oxygen tube under his nose and a blood pressure cuff that squeezes his arm every fifteen minutes like it’s mad at him. His beard needs a trim. His phone sits on my knee, 11% battery, because the nurse gave me his things in a plastic bag and I didn’t knew where else to put it.

Ansel and me have been married twenty-six years. He’s fifty-four, runs the parts counter at a tractor dealership, and tonight he fainted between two shelves holding a box of hydraulic filters. Eleven years ago we had $26,750 saved for our first house, cash, in a blue zippered bank bag on the top shelf of our closet. One Sunday the bag was empty. Ansel sat me down at the kitchen table and told me his older brother, Garrick, took it. Garrick never denied it. He just stopped coming around.

I hated that man for eleven years. I’m not proud of it, but I did. We rented for nine more years because of him, and I kept that empty bag on the closet shelf like evidence. Every Christmas Ansel’s mother, Verna, set a plate for Garrick anyway, and every Christmas I walked out of the room. Ansel never said his brother’s name again. The only thing he kept for himself was Thursday nights. Bowling with the guys from work at Strike Zone Lanes, home by ten, smelling like fries.

At 2:14 the phone buzzes against my knee. A text from a contact saved only as G. “Thursday, chair 9, don’t be late.” His passcode is still our anniversary. I shouldn’t scroll up. I scroll up. There are hundreds of messages, every Thursday for almost two years. “Chair 9 again.” “You forgot the pen.” “Thanks for today. Couldn’t do this without you.”

My hands go cold. Behind me the monitor speeds up, and when I turn around Ansel’s eyes are open. He looks at the phone, then at me. “Glenna,” he whispers. “Please. Let me tell you who that is before you see the last one.”

But I’ve already seen it. The last message in the thread is a photo of a man in a recliner, tubes running from his arm into a humming machine, giving a thumbs-up. Thinner. Grayer. It’s Garrick. And under it Ansel typed: “I’m going to tell her the truth about the bag. I promise…”

I put the phone face down on the blanket. For a minute neither of us says anything, and the only sound is the cuff on his arm filling up again.

“He didn’t take it,” Ansel says. “I did.”

He tells it to the ceiling, not to me. In the spring of 2015 his buddy Dale Ruskin wanted to open a barbecue truck, and Ansel gave him the whole bag. He was going to be half owner. He was going to surprise me with double the money by Christmas. The truck’s engine died in August, Dale moved to Arizona, and the money was gone. Ansel sat in his pickup outside Garrick’s apartment and cried so hard he couldn’t drive home. Garrick came out, listened, and said, “Tell her it was me. She already thinks I’m trouble. She can’t hate you, but she can hate me.”

“And Verna?” I ask.

“Mom always knew.”

That’s why the plate. Eleven Christmases of a plate for a man I called a thief, and I walked out every single time.

I want to scream at him. I want to hold his hand. I do neither for a while. A nurse named Paulette comes in with a cup of lime Jell-O he won’t eat and a phone charger with a cord so short I have to sit on the floor to plug it in. I sit there, back against the wall, the battery down to 4%, and let him finish.

Two years ago Garrick’s kidneys gave out. Polycystic kidney disease, the same thing that took their father. Three times a week he goes to the Wabash Valley Kidney Center on 3rd Street, and on Thursdays Ansel drives him, sits beside chair 9 for four hours, and they do the crossword out of a newspaper Garrick still pays for. The fries are from the drive-thru on the way home. There is no bowling league. There never was.

“Last spring I got tested to give him a kidney,” Ansel says. “On my lunch breaks, two towns over. We match. But they found something on my heart. A flutter. My pulse was 162 sitting still. They told me to get it fixed before anything else. I didn’t tell you, because then I’d have to tell you why I got tested.”

So that’s why we’re at St. Brendan Medical Center in Terre Haute at three in the morning. Not a heart attack. A secret he carried until it knocked him down in aisle six.

The doctor who comes in at seven is calm about it. The rhythm can be fixed with a procedure called an ablation, a few hours, probably home the same day. But no kidney donation, not after this, not for a long time. Ansel turns his face to the wall when she says it. That hurts me more than the eleven years.

Thursday, I drive to 3rd Street myself. I bring a pen and that morning’s paper. Chair 9 is by the window. Garrick sees me coming and his whole body goes stiff, like I’m there to hit him. He’s fifty-seven and he looks seventy. There’s a gray fleece blanket over his knees and a sticker on the machine that says GO COLTS.

“Is he okay?” is the first thing he says. Not hello. Is he okay.

“He’s okay,” I say. “He told me about the bag.”

He closes his eyes. “I asked him not to.”

I sit down. I tell him I’m sorry, and it comes out wrong, way too small for eleven years. He shrugs and says I was only angry at who I was told to be angry at. Then he hands me the crossword. Seven across, five letters, to make amends. Atone. I write it in and my hand is shaking so bad the E looks like a 3.

Ansel and I have a lot of hard nights after that. I sleep in the guest room for eight of them. I’m still mad that we rented for nine years while I blamed the wrong man. I’m still mad he let me. But I watch him on the couch after his procedure, pulse steady at 71, calling Garrick on speaker just to argue about a clue, and the anger finds somewhere softer to land.

In November I ask the transplant coordinator, a woman named Imelda, to test me. I’m O positive, same as Garrick. I don’t tell either brother until I know.

Thanksgiving is at our house this year. Verna brings her pecan pie, and for the first time in eleven years the extra plate isn’t empty. Garrick sits in front of it, eating my sweet potato casserole with the little marshmallows. After pie I go to the closet and take down the blue bank bag. Ansel goes pale. Garrick laughs, nervous, and asks if I’m about to accuse him again.

I put it in his lap and tell him to unzip it. Inside is one folded letter from Imelda with a surgery date on it, January 21st.

“It’s not empty anymore,” I tell him.

Verna cries into her napkin. Garrick just holds the letter and doesn’t say anything at all. Ansel squeezes my hand under the table so hard it hurts, and I let him.