Chapter 17: The Debt

The listeners found Joan's address before I did.

By Thursday the producer in Fremont had a fund open under Joan's name, and it had passed the number I needed.

Strangers had written notes with their gifts.

Someone wrote: She sounded like she knew my mother.

Someone else wrote: For the coffee she never got to drink hot.

I sat with the producer's laptop in my lap, and I did not manage to read the rest.

On Friday, at five to nine in the evening, I stood on a landing outside Joan's apartment with a cashier's check in my coat.

Calvin waited on the stairs below, where he could see the door.

Joan's husband opened it in a stained undershirt.

He had not shaved since the funeral, and the apartment behind him smelled like a place nobody had opened a window in.

"I don't want anything from you," he said.

"I know."

"You told them about her phone. They came here asking."

"I told them the truth about the calls." I held his eyes. "Do you know who comes at nine?"

His hand tightened on the door.

"Every Tuesday and Thursday," he said. "Since June. She'd stand at the window and watch for the car. She wouldn't let me answer the door."

"It's Friday."

"They said they'd come Friday for the rest."

A car door slammed in the street below.

The husband flinched, and I saw how many nights he had flinched at that sound.

"Let me in," I said. "I'm not here to make you feel worse."

He stepped back.

I walked into Joan's kitchen for the first time, and I saw her thermos on the drying rack, and her second mug beside it.

Keep reading free with an account. Start While I Couldn't Breathe, He Was With Her from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.