Chapter 4 - The Walk-Up Apartment
At ten o'clock that night, leaving Lily asleep in the hospital pediatric lounge under the watchful eye of a sympathetic floor nurse, Arthur took a taxi back to Clara’s apartment in Rogers Park. He needed to pack three days’ worth of clothes for both of them, grab Lily’s school uniform for the morning, and find Clara’s medical insurance cards.
He climbed the three flights of narrow, carpeted stairs, the stale smell of old cabbage and damp laundry filling the stairwell. When he unlocked the apartment door and flicked on the overhead light, the reality of Clara’s life hit him with the force of a physical blow.
The apartment was spotlessly clean, but it was painfully bare. The living room contained a secondhand sofa with a neat knitted blanket covering a tear in the cushion, a small bookshelf stacked with nursing textbooks and children’s library books, and the shattered remains of the glass coffee table where Clara had fallen. A single brown stain marked the corner of the rug where her head had rested.
Arthur walked into the cramped kitchen and pulled open the door of the refrigerator.
It was almost entirely empty. A gallon of milk with a red clearance sticker sat on the top shelf next to a half-empty jar of peanut butter, three apples, and a plastic container holding two slices of plain white bread. On the second shelf, neatly wrapped in foil with handwritten sticky notes, were five individual lunches prepared for Lily: Monday - Turkey Sandwich, Tuesday - Pasta Salad, Wednesday - Ham and Cheese. Clara had prepared her daughter’s meals for the entire school week with meticulous care, while her own shelf contained only a jar of tap water and a single plastic container of leftover white rice.
He shut the refrigerator door, his chest heaving as a dry sob tore through his throat. He walked over to the small kitchen table, where a stack of mail sat weighted down by a ceramic salt shaker. He flipped through the envelopes: a final notice from the electric company, a medical bill from a pediatric dentist showing a balance of $4,800 for Lily’s specialized palatal expander, and a rejected claim letter from their health insurance provider denying coverage for Clara’s diagnostic heart monitor.
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Arthur sat down on one of the mismatched wooden chairs, burying his face in his hands. While he had been drinking eighty-dollar glasses of scotch at corporate dinners, arguing over decimal points in executive bonus packages, the woman who had birthed his child had been starving herself in a freezing walk-up just to make sure their daughter had fresh fruit and a healthy smile.
He pulled his checkbook out of his coat pocket, looked at the balance on his mobile banking app—a number sitting comfortably in the mid-six figures—and knew with absolute certainty that his entire life had just changed direction forever.
