I sent almost a hundred thousand dollars home in four years so my wife would never have to worry about anything. She sold her own hair for a hundred and fifty dollars to find out if she was dying, and the treatment she was begging for had been free the entire time.
THE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS
PART ONE
Two thousand dollars a month for forty-seven months.
That was the allotment. It went out of my pay automatically on the first, into a household account my mother offered to manage in the second week after I shipped out, because Marisol had never balanced anything bigger than a grocery list and my mother said, in that voice she has, that she’d hate for my wife to be overwhelmed while I was away.
I said yes to that in a phone booth on a base I’m not going to name, with a line of guys behind me, in about four seconds.
Everything that follows came out of those four seconds.
We’d been married two years when I deployed. Marisol was twenty-eight then, worked at a plant nursery outside Marrowfield, had a laugh you could hear through a closed door. She was going to stay in the house with my mother and my sister Tessa while I was gone. My mother’s idea. Why pay rent, Dane. Family’s family.
I got emergency leave with the unit at the end of the fourth year and I decided not to call ahead. I wanted the door to open and her face to do what it does. I had the whole thing built in my head on the flight — the porch, the run, the arms.
Instead I came up the road and stopped walking.
Two stories where there used to be one and a half. A wrought-iron gate that hadn’t existed. A truck in the driveway with a dealer plate still taped in the window. And twenty-some people on the front lawn with drinks in their hands, a party, women in good dresses, one of those catered afternoon things my mother had been putting on since I was a kid but never once with catering.
For about ten seconds I stood on that road and felt something close to pride. A hundred thousand dollars, four years, and look what they built with it.
Then I went around the side of the house instead of up the front walk, because my duffel was heavy and the side door was closer, and that is the only piece of luck in this entire story.
Marisol was on her knees in the dirt by the back steps.
There was an old galvanized washtub on the ground with gray water in it. A plate had broken and she was picking the pieces out of the dirt with her bare fingers.
She had been a hundred and forty pounds. She was not a hundred. Her dress hung on her the way clothes hang on a chair. And she was wearing a dark knitted cap pulled down over her head in eighty-degree heat.
I did not recognize my wife until she turned her head.
Then Tessa’s voice came from the back step, not even raised, the way you’d tell a dog to get off the couch: that the shaved one needed to stay out of sight while there were guests in the yard.
Marisol froze.
Then she saw me, and here is the thing I will carry to the end of my life. She did not come to me. She took a step backward and put both her hands on top of her head.
She was protecting the cap.
I set the duffel down and walked over and took it off, and she let me, and she closed her eyes while I did it.
Her scalp was shaved to the skin.
My mother, Glenda Kirkwood, sixty-one years old, came around the corner of the house in a cream silk blouse with a glass in her hand and enough gold on her to make noise when she moved. Half the party came with her, the way people do.
She looked at my wife standing there bald in the dirt with me holding her cap and she said it flat, no heat in it at all, like reading a label:
“She did this to herself.”
She said Marisol had wrecked her own hair with drugstore chemicals and then gotten fixated on losing weight, that it was a sickness of the mind, that they had all tried.
Tessa laughed, twenty-eight years old with a phone in a case that cost more than my boots, and said she spends your money and still wants the whole world to feel sorry for her.
Then my mother told Marisol to get back in that kitchen and finish, or she could sleep outside tonight, and asked her which it was going to be.
And twenty adults stood on that lawn with drinks in their hands and watched.
Nobody said one word. Not one. There were people out there who had known me since I was seven years old.
Marisol didn’t answer. She just looked at me, and when her arm came down her sleeve slid back, and there was a hospital band cut off at the wrist and above it the fading bruise where a needle had been.
I want to be honest about the next sixty seconds, because they’re the only thing I did right that whole first day.
Everything in me wanted to take that house apart at the studs.
But four years in uniform teaches you exactly one thing that matters in a room where people are lying to you: don’t show them what you know until you’re ready to use it.
So I smiled.
I said it was good to be home, and that I’d come with news of my own. That my service compensation had finally come through.
Nearly four hundred thousand dollars.
I made the number up standing in my own back yard, and I watched it land.
My mother’s face opened like a window. Inside of five minutes she was talking about tearing out the kitchen. Tessa was talking about trading up the truck and a week somewhere with a beach.
Not one person in that yard asked why my wife could barely stand.
I found Marisol that night in the back room off the garage. Concrete floor, a camp mattress, a smell of damp. Not a bedroom. A storage room, in a five-bedroom house that I paid for.
She sat down next to me and unbuttoned the top of her blouse with hands that wouldn’t hold still and showed me the scar under her collarbone.
“I have cancer,” she said. “They found the mass five months ago.”
Five months.
She had asked my mother for three hundred dollars to see a specialist. My mother said no. My mother told the family Marisol was inventing it to get at my service pay, and Tessa listened in on her phone calls to make sure she wasn’t “working an angle.”
Every dollar I sent home for four years, and my wife could not get three hundred of it.
So she’d cut off her own hair — thirty-one inches of it, she’d been growing it since we got engaged — and sold it to a wig buyer on Ivory Street for one hundred and fifty dollars, and used the money for the bus and the copay on the tissue test that told her what was growing in her chest.
I held onto her on that concrete floor and told her to hold on a little longer.
She fell asleep against me around two.
I did not sleep at all, and by four in the morning I had decided exactly what I was going to do.
PART TWO
The first thing I did was at 4:15 a.m., and it took eleven seconds.
I opened my wallet and took out the dependent ID card.
I had gotten that card issued to Marisol before I deployed. I had watched a clerk laminate it. I’d carried the spare paperwork in my wallet the whole four years the way you carry a picture.
My wife had full military family health coverage. She had had it every single day of the five months.
I sat on the floor of that storage room with the card in my hand and I could not make the two facts fit inside my head at the same time.
“Mari. Wake up. Where’s your ID card?”
She was still half under. “I don’t have one.”
“You do. I set it up.”
“Your mother said it didn’t cover me.” She was fully awake now, and her voice went smaller, which is what four years in that house had done to her. “She said it only covers you and blood family. She said I could apply for the county program and there was a waiting list.”
There is no waiting list. There is no county program. There is a card, and a phone number on the back of it, and a hospital forty minutes away.
At 6:10 that morning I put my wife in the passenger seat of the truck with the dealer plate still in the window and drove her to Marrowfield Regional, and we sat in an intake office with a very calm woman who typed for ninety seconds and said, “Yes, sir, she’s active. She’s been active since March four years ago. There’s no lapse.”
Marisol made a sound I have never heard another person make.
We saw Dr. Camille Oduya at eleven, because a hospital that sees an unexplained five-month delay on a chest mass does not make you take an appointment in three weeks.
I’m not going to put the whole consultation down here. The short version is that it was Hodgkin lymphoma, that the tissue test my wife had bought with her own hair had been correct, that it was Stage II, that five months of delay was very bad and not necessarily fatal, and that Dr. Oduya wanted her started inside of ten days.
At one point she asked, carefully, why the delay had happened.
Marisol looked at the floor.
I said, “She was told she wasn’t covered.”
Dr. Oduya put down her pen. “Told by whom?”
FULL STORY on the next page.