The Question That Keeps Her Up

The whole department got the same invitation: a thirty-minute meeting in the staff room. There was a cake waiting when they got there. After thirty years, that was the goodbye Marilyn got.

Joanne stood near the coffee machine with a paper plate she didn't want. The icing said Happy Retirement Marilyn in blue, and somebody had cut the first slice badly, so the H was gone. There was a card too. It had gone around the department all week, and by the time it reached Joanne there was no room left in the middle, so she wrote hers up the side. You earned this. She signed her name under it and could not have said what the words meant.

It was the third week of June. The term was over and the college was half empty. Somebody had brought Timbits that nobody touched, because there was cake.

"Thirty years of getting up at five," Marilyn said to the room. "You know what I'm doing tomorrow? Nothing. Not one thing."

Everybody laughed, Joanne a beat behind them. Marilyn had a plan for tomorrow, and Joanne didn't have one for any of it.

Then Dennis put a hand on Joanne's shoulder. He taught welding and said whatever came into his head.

"You must be next, Joanne," he said. "What are you, sixty?"

"Sixty-one," she said.

"There you go. Counting the days, I bet."

"Down to the hour, Dennis."

He laughed, took that for a yes, and went off toward the cake.

She'd meant it as a joke. It hadn't come out as one. And for the rest of the afternoon she couldn't shake the feeling that Dennis had asked her a real question in front of everybody, and she couldn't answer it.

Because she was sixty-one. She'd taught for thirty years, most of them on sessional contracts, signing a new one every August and hoping there'd be another. There was no pension coming when she stopped. There was only the RRSP she'd built herself, one contribution at a time, in the belief that putting money in was all she had to do.

Marilyn found her by the window on the way out and put both hands on her arms.

"You'll be fine," Marilyn said. "You're organized."

Joanne smiled and thanked her, and didn't say that being organized and knowing what you're doing are two different things.

She dropped her plate in the bin as she left and went back to an office with nothing left to mark.

That night she woke up at two.

She lay there and looked at the ceiling. There was a crack running out from the light fixture that had been there since the spring. She'd called somebody about it in May. He said he'd phone when he had a Saturday free, and never did.

She started doing arithmetic in the dark. She'd done it most nights that week. $318,000 in the RRSP, give or take. She knew it cold. She'd watched it climb for decades and checked it more often than she'd admit. There was some money in a TFSA and some in a savings account. The house was hers, paid off two years ago. She'd made the last payment on a Tuesday morning and told nobody, because there was nobody in the house to tell.

$318,000, then. Divided by how many years. Twenty? Thirty? She didn't know how long she was going to live, and didn't much like having to guess. And she didn't know how much she needed each year to live, which was worse, because that was a number she could have worked out any time and never had.

She did the division four different ways and got four different answers. Not one of them let her sleep.

At four she gave up, went down and made tea in the dark, and sat there until it got light. For thirty years the only money question she'd asked was whether she was putting enough away. She could always answer that one. She had no idea what the new one even was.

On Sunday she hosted dinner for her daughter Maya and her brother Simon, same as every week.

She spent the afternoon at the counter with her back to the room, getting the chicken out on time, starting the second pot she'd forgotten. Her hands did it all without her thinking.

Simon came early. He always did. Her younger brother by three years, he settled into the comfy chair with his tea and let the noise go on around him.

Maya was twenty minutes late and brought a lemon meringue pie from the Sobeys bakery, still in its clamshell. Joanne took it and put it away in the fridge.

"You didn't have to bring anything."

"I know," Maya said.

"You never have to bring anything."

"Mom." Maya was still getting out of her coat. "If I show up with nothing, you look at me."

"I do not look at you."

"You look at me," Maya said, and she was right, and both of them knew it.

As they ate dinner, Maya talked about the latest drama at work, Simon asked the questions that kept her going, and Joanne got up twice for things she'd forgotten. They had the pie for dessert while they talked about Simon's upcoming trip.

She waited until Maya left, until she heard the car pull out of the driveway. Then she caught Simon before he could get to his coat.

"Sit," she said. "I'll make us more tea."

Simon looked at her a second longer than he needed to, and sat back down. She filled the kettle and kept her back to him. It was easier to say facing the wall.

"I have a question," she said. "And I don't want the brother answer, the one where you laugh or snicker at me. I taught you to ride a bike. I get to ask you things without you making that face."

"I don't have a face," Simon said.

"You have a face." She turned around. "You're making it right now."

He laughed, and something in her chest eased. That might be the only reason she'd asked him and not a stranger with an office.

She poured the tea and set the pot between them, and sat there silently for a moment. Saying it out loud would make it real.

She finally got the courage to say it. "Will it last," she said.

Simon didn't answer right away. Instead, he put both hands around his cup and looked at it.

"Will what last?" he said.

"The money." She heard her own voice go careful, the one she used when teaching a hard class. "The RRSP, all of it. Marilyn's off to her garden. Dennis wants to know when I'm next. And I was awake at two on Wednesday doing math I don't have the numbers for. So. Will it last? Is it enough?"

"Those are two questions," Simon said. "And tonight's not the night to answer either one of them."

"Of course it isn't," she said.

"Not because I'm putting you off." He laid his hand on the table. "Can I give you a different one?"

"You'll ask it anyway."

"How much does it cost you to live for a year? The house, the groceries, the car, all of it."

Joanne started to answer him, and stopped. They were both quiet while she thought, and she felt her face go warm.

"You don't know," he said. There was no judgement in it, which made it worse.

"I know what the house costs." She said it without having to think about it. "$652 a month. Tax, insurance, the utilities. I could tell you that to the dollar."

"I believe you. You could probably tell me what your RRSP balance was in 2011."

She could, in fact. She had it in a spreadsheet.

"So that's the trouble," Simon said. "You've watched every dollar go in for thirty years. You've never once thought about withdrawing it."

Joanne sat with that a moment. It was, annoyingly, true.

"Come on, say the rest of what you want to say," she said.

"You've spent thirty years getting good at putting money in. That's one skill." He shrugged. "Taking it back out is a different one, and nobody teaches that, because until now you had nothing to take out. I retired in March and I didn't know it either. I'm still learning, myself."

"That isn't comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be," Simon said.

Outside, the wind was coming up off the fields and pushing at the storm door.

"All right," Joanne said. "Where do I start?"

"People always start with the balance, because the balance is the number they can see." He got up and took his coat off the chair. "Start at the other end. You won't know if it's enough until you know what enough has to cover."

She followed him to the door.

"By next Sunday," she said. "I'll count what a year costs. To the dollar, if I can."

"To the dollar, if you can," he said, and he kissed her forehead on his way past, like he'd done since he got taller than her at nineteen, and she let him go.

She stood at the counter a while after that, in the quiet of a house that was hers and paid for. Then she took the good notebook out of the drawer, the hardbound one she'd been saving for something, and wrote the one number she was sure of.

House: $652.

Underneath it she wrote a question mark, then another on the line below. Then she left the notebook open on the counter where she'd see it at breakfast, and went up to bed.