Chapter 2: The Calculator App
“Mama might come down for a few nights,” Tom said, before I could ask. “Her knees. The stairs at her place.” He closed the laptop and kissed the top of my head, right where the hair was thinnest. “You worry too much, babe. It’s the pills.”
It’s always the pills.
Kelsey left at nine without finishing her pie. In the driveway she hugged me too long and whispered, “Are you okay?” I said I was tired. That’s the other thing I always say.
I want to explain how a woman ends up handing over her credit card at her own kitchen table, because I know how it looks.
The day I was diagnosed, I sat in the car outside the breast center and told Tom. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “This is going to be really hard on me.”
I remember thinking that was sweet. That he meant he was scared for me.
During chemo, he moved into the guest room “so I don’t bump your port.” He drove me to treatment, yes, every time, and he told everyone at church, at the dealership, at the grocery store. People brought casseroles and told him what a saint he was. He’d sit in the infusion center scrolling his phone while the nurses took my vitals, and on the way home he’d tell me how tired he was.
When I finished treatment, he never moved back into our room.
I didn’t ask him to. I was ashamed of my body. Of the scar, the weight from the steroids, the way the medicine made intimacy hurt, the way I’d stopped wanting it at all. I thought I didn’t have the right to ask for anything else. He’d stayed. Gary hadn’t even stayed for a baby with colic. Tom had stayed for cancer.
So when he started sulking in June, then shouting in July, then sleeping in his recliner in August with Georgia football on mute, I told myself it was my fault. I was a burden. If he needed fifteen days away from me, maybe I’d earned that too.
Kelsey was the one who never let me feel like a burden. The morning my hair started coming out in the shower, she drove over before work with her clippers and shaved her own head first, laughing, so I wouldn’t have to go first. She’s twenty-six and works IT for the hospital system. She carries a phone charger for everyone she’s ever met.
Two days after the dinner, Tom called her.
He’d bought a new phone for the trip. On my card, naturally. He wanted Kelsey to move everything over from the old one, photos, contacts, the whole thing, because he “doesn’t do technology.”
She came on her lunch break. They sat at the kitchen island while I folded towels in the next room and listened to Tom tell her about the fishing boat his brother just bought.
Then his own phone rang, a customer from the old dealership, and he took it out on the deck.
The kitchen went very quiet.
After a while I heard Kelsey say, softly, “Huh.”
She finished the transfer. She handed Tom both phones and kissed his cheek and said, “All set, Dad.” She hugged me at the door and didn’t look me in the eye.
That night, at 10:40, she texted me. Come outside. Don’t tell him.
Her car was parked at the curb with the engine off. I went out in my slippers and my lavender cardigan and got into the passenger seat. She had her laptop open on the steering wheel.
“There’s an app on his old phone,” she said. “It’s called Calculator. It looks like a calculator. It isn’t. It’s a vault. People use them to hide photos and messages.”
“How do you know the password?”
“It’s his old football number. Twenty-two twenty-two. It’s the password to everything he owns, Mom.”
She turned the laptop toward me. A message thread. A contact saved only as C.
“Mom,” Kelsey said. “There’s no Mama in that beach house.”
The newest message was from Tom, sent the night he booked it with my card.
Fifteen days, Crissy. No wife, no husband, no chemo talk. Just us, like 1989.
