Chapter 11: The Fall
The winter James Bell died began with a cough that would not leave him. It was January in Detroit, cold that found every crack in the old house, and Odessa heard it first at night, a dry sound from the other side of the bed. James laughed it off in the morning. He made coffee, buttoned his coat, and went out to the bus stop with his lunch pail, as he had for twenty-three years at the auto plant. He did not complain, which was why it took so long to understand what was happening.
By March, the cough had weight to it. By April, he was sleeping propped up on pillows, and the doctor used words Odessa had to write on the back of a grocery receipt. Treatment. Options. Costs. She nodded as if she understood, then went home and sat at the piano with her hands flat on the closed lid.
The bills arrived one envelope at a time, and then all at once. The hospital wanted payment. The pharmacy wanted payment. The insurance company wanted forms, then more forms. Odessa taught her students in the afternoons, neighbourhood children filing through her front room, and she took the money in cash and put it in a tin on top of the refrigerator. It was never enough. Still she kept teaching.
James tried to keep working until the summer. He came home paler each evening, his appetite gone. One night he sat at the kitchen table and could not lift his fork. Odessa helped him to bed without a fuss, and lay awake listening to his breathing until it evened out. In the morning she called the hospital, and a nurse with a kind, tired voice told her to bring him in.
He died in September, on a Tuesday, in a room with a window looking out over a parking lot. Odessa was holding his hand. She remembered the thin grey light, and that James had asked, the day before, whether she would play something for him when he got home. She had said yes, of course, anything you like. He had smiled and said he liked the one she wrote for their wedding, the one with the slow middle part that always made Danielle cry when she was small. She had not played it for him. There had been no getting home.
After the funeral, the house felt too large and too quiet. Danielle came from Milwaukee, already a nurse by then, and stayed for a week. They cleaned together and sorted James's clothes into bags. They did not talk about money, because Odessa would not, and Danielle did not press her, because she had learned long ago that her mother answered questions about need with a joke and a change of subject. On the last morning, Danielle stood in the doorway with her suitcase and said, "Mama, if you need anything, you call me. I mean it." Odessa hugged her hard and said, "I know, baby." She meant it. Pride does not announce itself as pride. It feels like love, like not wanting to be a burden.
The wrist went next, though not all at once. Odessa slipped on the icy steps outside the grocery store in December and felt something pull deep inside her right wrist. The doctor called it a sprain, then later, when the ache did not fade, something more complicated, something that needed rest she could not afford. She could still play, but not for hours. The long passages tired her. She cancelled students one by one, telling parents she would be back in the spring. Some waited. Most found someone else.
Rent rose. The tin on the refrigerator emptied. A letter came from the landlord, polite at first, then less so. Odessa sold the good piano, the upright she had owned since conservatory, to a dealer who loaded it into a van without looking at her face. She kept only her sheet music, folded into a plastic bag, and the wedding piece, copied out by hand, because she could not bear to sell paper with James's handwriting in the margin.
The eviction notice was taped to the door on a morning when the heat had already been cut off. She read it twice, standing in the cold hallway, then packed two bags and called no one. Not Danielle. Not her old teacher. Not the church ladies who would have taken her in and asked questions she did not want to answer. She took a bus to Chicago because a woman at the clinic had said there were shelters there, and because Detroit had begun to feel like rooms she could no longer enter. On the bus, she held the plastic bag on her lap and watched snow come down over the highway, and she thought about the last time she had played for James, years before, in their living room, with Danielle asleep on the couch and the whole ordinary evening ahead of them. She had not known then that ordinary evenings were the thing you lost first.