“Easiest just to show you.”
I followed Winnie out of the living room and through the kitchen to the padlocked door behind the pantry: the maid’s quarters. A lot of older homes had these little bedrooms off the kitchen—holdovers from the days when live-in housekeepers were all the rage. I’d never been in that little bedroom; I had always assumed Louisa just used it for storage.
“You ready?”
I nodded. My pulse was pounding with anticipation as Winnie reached into the cookie jar and extracted a small key. She waved it in front of me like Harry Potter with his magic wand, then inserted it in the padlock and popped it off.
“And . . . voilà!”
“Oh my God,” I muttered as the door swung open and the family secret was revealed. “What is that?”
In the middle of the room, next to a brown leather La-Z-Boy, was a large white square box that looked like an industrial-size copy machine, complete with a colorful keypad and touch screen. Except, unlike its Office Depot counterpart, it had coils of clear medical tubing coming out of the front of it, the kind that might, say, deliver oxygen or an IV drip.
“Mom was in kidney failure,” Winnie announced matter-of-factly, in a tone you might use to announce a contest winner. （And the winner is . . . end-stage renal disease!） “It’s a home dialysis machine.”
“Like, total failure?”
“She had to chain herself to that behemoth for three hours twice a week.”
I flashed to those canceled checks to Silvia Hernandez—two per week. And it suddenly clicked. “That’s why she needed Silvia,” I said, and Winnie nodded.
“They started going after our dad died,” Charlie said as he appeared behind Winnie. “We all thought it was just grief. Who knows, maybe it was related; she wasn’t exactly taking good care of herself. Doesn’t matter, there was nothing they could have done to reverse it once it started. Her condition was not curable. Except—”
“By a kidney transplant,” Winnie finished his sentence for him.
“Of course, at her age, she was too old to make the donor list,” Charlie added.
“So guess who she asked to give her one?” Winnie asked, her eyebrows arching toward the sky.
I looked at Winnie. Then at Charlie. And I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“No, she didn’t,” I said.
“Oh yes, she did.”
“But, I mean, how did she even know you’d be a match?”
“She didn’t,” Charlie said. “But if we weren’t matches, we could have traded with someone on the list who was. She gets theirs and someone else gets mine.”
“Or mine,” Winnie said. “She only needed one of us to do it.”
“That’s a big ask.”
“Ha!” Charlie scoffed, like it was the understatement of the year. Which it arguably was.
“We both said no,” Winnie clarified. “Obviously.”
“So now you know why she hated us,” Charlie said. And the full picture suddenly snapped into focus.
“I tried to be her caregiver in the beginning,” Winnie said. “But every time I brought her in here, she would start bitching about how she wouldn’t have to keep doing this if Charlie and I weren’t so selfish and spoiled, blah, blah, blah—it was like getting pounded with icy snowballs in a never-ending winter. So I quit.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said. And I didn’t. I wasn’t sure what I would do if one of my parents asked me for one of my vital organs. Not that they would. I mean, I don’t think they would? I suddenly had a whole new perspective on the demise of the relationship between Louisa and her kids. They didn’t really abandon their mother; their mother had driven them away.
“It was impossible to be around her after that,” Charlie said.
“I can imagine.” A person only needs one kidney, and it’s not unheard of for people to donate to someone they love. But there was not a lot of love between Louisa and her children. And I suspected the “ask” was more like a threat, because why ask nicely when you have $10 million to withhold if they say no?
I thought about all the chores I had done for Louisa over the years—cleaning her garage, getting her tires rotated, hauling her broken furniture to Goodwill—and I suddenly realized that I’d had it easy.
CHAPTER 38
* * *
WINNIE
The lock on the door was Mom’s idea. She said she installed it because the equipment was expensive and she wanted to make sure it didn’t get stolen. But anyone capable of stealing a five-hundred-pound dialysis machine would certainly have the wherewithal to cut off a ten-dollar lock from Home Depot. She wanted that machine locked away for the same reason she made us swear not to tell anyone about it: she was embarrassed.