Everyone Thinks I Stopped Caring

Chapter 2 The Receipts

I started keeping a notebook. Not a dramatic one. A cheap spiral from the drugstore, the kind I used for job sites. Date. Item. Cost. Where it went. Where it ended up.

January: turmeric, omega-3, magnesium, bone broth, vitamin D. Three hundred forty-two dollars. Delivered to Corinne Saturday. Sunday: turmeric on Patricia's counter.

February: same order. Delivered myself. Graham asked where the bag was. I said I had already taken it. He looked annoyed, which I filed under interesting.

March: same order. Graham took the bag from the kitchen table before I left for work. I found the bone broth at Patricia's on Thursday, dropping off a book Corinne had asked me to return.

April: I paid Dana in cash and asked her not to print a receipt with my name on it. She looked at me over her glasses and said, "Emma, I've been filling this order for three years. I know whose money it is." She printed it anyway and handed it to me folded twice, the way I liked it. "For your records."

I loved Dana a little for that.

In May, Corinne called me on a Wednesday afternoon. Her voice was thinner than usual.

"Emma, honey. I can't find the magnesium. I looked everywhere."

"I brought it Saturday."

"I know you did. I put it next to the tea. And then Graham came by, and now I can't find it."

"I'll bring another bottle tonight."

"You don't have to--"

"I want to."

I left work early. I bought a single bottle of magnesium at Everett's, not the standing order, just the one thing, and I drove to the bluff. Corinne was in the garden, sitting on the bench she could not stand up from without help. I sat with her. I put the bottle in her hand.

"Graham says I don't need all of this," she said. "He says I'm wasting your money."

"It's not wasted if you take it."

"I do take it. When it's here." She turned the bottle in her fingers. "Patricia says her doctor is very impressed with her inflammation numbers. She says it's the turmeric."

I looked at the roses along the fence. They were going wild, the way they always did in May, and nobody had pruned them because pruning was the kind of work Graham said he would do and then did not.

"Corinne," I said. "If something is missing from your shelf, you can call me. You don't have to wait."

She nodded. She did not look at me. "I don't like to make trouble between you and Graham."

"You're not making trouble. He is."

She patted my knee, the way she had the night my mother died. "You're a good girl, Emma. Don't let this house make you hard."

I drove home with that sentence in my mouth. Don't let this house make you hard. I was not hard. I was counting bottles. There is a difference, though from the outside they can look the same.