Troy pressed his thumb on the crack of the door frame, and then he asked the question that I had not expected, the question that rearranged the whole afternoon. “Did you find the second card?” he said. “The one about Naomi?” I stood in the bathroom of the farmhouse in Lancaster, with the loose trim in my hand and thirty nine thousand, five hundred dollars in bank envelopes on the sink, sixty two years old, and I realized that my husband had known about the money all along. And he was not afraid of what I had found. He was afraid of what I had not.
He reached into the gap in the wall, past the hollow where the envelopes had lain, and drew out a second index card, curled and yellow, that had been tucked up behind the plaster where my rag had not reached. He handed it to me. It was in the neat hand of Edna. “Naomi, your brother has chosen the long road. If Troy finishes ninety days of honest treatment, the money is for both of you, to begin again. If he does not, it belongs to Charlene. She will know which. Pray for him as I have.”
Troy sat down on the edge of the tub. “Mom caught me at the end of March,” he said. “She had found six bottles in the truck. She took every pill, and she sat me down at the kitchen table, and she did not shout. She said, I will keep these safe, and when you are ready, you will tell Charlene yourself. I told her I was ready. I was not. I have been taking pills from the clinic and telling you they were for my back, and flushing some, and I have been lying to you for nine years.” His voice broke. “I did not know how to stop.”
A cracked door frame pried open in a farmhouse bathroom gave one wife the afternoon to bring her husband back to the prayers of his mother in Lancaster.
I gave my terms standing in front of the mirror with the card in my hand, in the bathroom where the light came through the little window. “Troy, you will call the center in Harrisburg this afternoon, and you will go for ninety days, and I will drive you there myself. I am not leaving you today. But I want you to understand something. Your mother left me money to leave you, and she left you a card to finish what you started, and she trusted me to choose. I am choosing. If you do this, truly, the money is ours. If you walk out of that place, it is mine, and I am gone.”
Troy lifted his gray face. “Charlene,” he said, “I have seen you count my pills in the kitchen at night. I know you stood at the sink and cried. I stood in the dark of the hall and watched, and I wanted to come in, and I could not. I thought if I told you, you would see how weak I was. I am so ashamed.” He covered his eyes. “Mom was the only person who never looked at me as if I were weak. She prayed. She just kept praying. And I let her pass thinking that it had not worked.”
It was the sight of the ninety tablets of oxycodone, still in their bottle on the edge of the sink, that undid him. He lunged for the bottle, snatched it up, and bolted from the bathroom down the hall, out the kitchen door, and across the yard toward his truck. He got as far as the lane. An Amish buggy, the black one of Eli Zook, the neighbor of Edna for forty years, was rolling slowly up the road, drawn by a big bay horse, and it turned across the lane just as Troy reached the gate, and stopped short across his path.
Eli Zook sat in the buggy, bearded and calm, with his straw hat pulled low, and he looked down at my husband with eyes as plain as a field. He did not say anything. He held out one hand, palm up, as a man might ask for a tool. Troy stared at him. Then, slowly, he put the bottle of pills into the callused hand of the old farmer. Eli tucked it into his coat, nodded once, and said in his low Dutch accent, “Your mother asked me, if you ran.” Troy leaned on the gate and sobbed.
The money consequences were clean. The next morning I drove Troy to the center in Harrisburg, with the thirty nine thousand, five hundred dollars locked safely in the bank under both our names, and Naomi, who flew in from Ohio, rode in the back seat and held his hand the whole way. Eli Zook turned the bottle of pills over to the pharmacy take back box at the Rite Aid in town. Troy finished the full ninety days, and then another ninety, and the money stayed in the account.
In the name of Edna, who passed in the fall, I started the Edna Brubaker Fund. It pays for treatment, honest pain management and respite for the families of people living with opioid addiction, in Lancaster, Chester and York counties. In the first year we placed fifty two people in treatment and sent twenty three families to respite weekends. One was a farm wife of sixty from Ephrata whose husband had hidden his pills in the milking barn. She said it was the first night in years that she had slept without listening for him.
Troy came home in the spring, thin and sunburned, with a Bible in his coat pocket. He walked through the farmhouse slowly, touching the door frames. In the bathroom he stopped, and put his thumb on the crack, now filled with new plaster. I stood behind him in the doorway with a cup of tea. He said, “I owe you everything.” I said, “You owe your mother ninety days, and you paid it.” He turned and put his arms around me, and we stood there in the light.