The Birthday Debt

I was about to turn twenty-eight, on a Tuesday, which felt about right. My birthdays always landed on the boring days. I lay in bed for a minute and listened to the radiator clank, and I thought, well, here we go again. Another year of cleaning other people's toilets.

My name's Becky Jansen, I'm twenty-eight, and I clean houses in Port Haven. Three houses a day, four days a week. It's not a bad job. It pays okay and nobody bothers me. But there's something about scrubbing someone else's bathtub on your own birthday that makes you take inventory.

So I took inventory. No boyfriend. Hadn't really had one since I was twenty-two, when I spent about six weeks with a soldier I met at a bar downtown. He shipped out and that was the end of it. I don't even remember his face that well anymore. I remember he paid for my drinks and laughed at my jokes, which honestly put him in the top five.

I got up. I made coffee. I ate toast standing at the counter like a person with somewhere to be, even though my first stop wasn't until nine. Then I packed my caddy, loaded the car, and drove to the Bradfords' place on Pelican Street.

Andie Petrova is my favorite client, if client is even the right word. She's thirty now, married to a soldier named Trev Bradford, and she hires me twice a week mostly, I think, so she has someone to talk to. Trev's on the base. Their house is big and clean already, and I half suspect she messes it up a little before I come so I'll have something to do.

Anyway. That Wednesday I let myself in with my key at nine sharp and something was different.

There was a note taped to the kitchen counter, right at eye level, like somebody knew exactly where I'd look first. Not Andie's handwriting. Blocky letters, written with one of those thick pens that leave dents in the paper.

"Becky. Trev says you covered a shift at the charity thing four years back so his buddy could make it. That buddy was me. I never said thank you, which is a disgrace. So: I'm cooking you dinner tonight, here, seven o'clock. It's your birthday week, Andie told me. Say yes. Galen Costa."

I stood there holding the note like an idiot for a good thirty seconds.

First, I didn't remember any charity thing. Second, I didn't know who Galen Costa was. Third, who tapes a note to a counter inviting a near stranger to dinner?

Then I heard a car door outside, and keys, and in came Andie with grocery bags, cheeks pink from the cold.

"You're reading that," she said. Not even a question.

"Andie. What is this?"

"That's Galen. Trev's friend. He's staying in the guest room on leave for a couple weeks." She started unpacking bags like we were having a normal conversation about dish soap. "He's been telling Trev for four years that he owes somebody a favor and couldn't figure out who, and Trev finally put it together. Apparently you worked some ticket table so he could go be important somewhere."

"I really don't remember that."

"Well he does. Men like that remember weird stuff." She looked up at me with that face she makes when she's already decided something for me. "Becky. You're turning twenty-eight this week and you were going to spend it eating cereal over the sink. I know you. Don't lie."

"I was not going to..." I paused. "...okay, I was, but that's not the point."

"Say yes. He makes a mean roast chicken. He's been practicing."

"Practicing? How long has he been planning this?"

"Since Sunday." She grinned. "There were two practice chickens. Trev ate both."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "Two chickens."

"Two chickens. Say yes, Becky!"

So I said yes. Which is how, at six fifty that evening, I was standing on the Bradfords' porch in the one decent dress I own, feeling like I was showing up at the wrong party.

Galen opened the door. He's thirty-one, tall, short hair, that way soldiers stand where they take up the doorway without meaning to. He looked slightly nervous, which honestly made me feel better.

"Becky," he said. "Hi. You came."

"You left a very bossy note."

"Trev reviewed it. He said it needed to be more apologetic." He stepped back to let me in. "For the record, if it's weird, you can leave. I'll eat two more practice chickens alone and consider the debt paid."

"It's not weird yet," I said, "but the night's young."

The house smelled amazing. There were candles on the table, which felt like a lot, and I said so.

"Andie's influence," he said. "She came by this afternoon and moved everything around. I had the table set by the window and she said nobody wants to eat facing the drapes."

"She's not wrong."

Dinner was roast chicken, potatoes, green beans, and a loaf of bread that he clearly baked himself because there was flour still on the cuff of his shirt. I pointed at it.

"You missed a spot."

"That's seasoning," he said, dead serious, and then we both cracked up.

We talked about nothing for a long while. He asked what I do besides cleaning, and I said not much, and he didn't treat that like a sad answer, which I appreciated. He told me about the base, about Trev being the worst card player in the platoon, about how he once got a commendation for fixing a truck and considers it the peak of his military career.

"You fixed a truck and got a medal."

"A coin, technically. It's a coin. But I tell people medal at parties."

"Is this a party?"

"You're here. It's a party."

Somewhere in there Andie texted him, I guess, because his phone buzzed and he glanced at it and put it face down. "Trev wants to know if you said yes to the pie."

"There's pie?"

"There was going to be a surprise pie. Trev has now ruined the pie." He turned the phone over and typed with one thumb. "There. I told him you were overwhelmed by the chicken and we'd moved on."

"Tell him the pie is safe. I'm a professional at surprises."

"Good, because he's coming by at nine with it and he's terrible at waiting in cars."

I laughed again, and I realized I'd been laughing most of the night. That's not nothing, on a birthday week. We ate, and he refilled my water without me asking, and I told him about the soldier from when I was twenty-two, the bar one, because somehow it came up that I don't date and he asked why and it was easier to tell the truth than to dodge.

"He shipped out," I said. "That's the whole story. Nobody ever really ships back into your life."

"Some do," he said, and tapped the note, which he'd propped up against the salt. "That's the point of the note."

Over pie, Trev showed up right on time, still in his uniform jacket, and hugged Andie and shook my hand and said, "So you're the shift coverer," like that was a title.

"I'm nobody," I said. "I don't even remember the event."

"She doesn't remember the event," Trev told Galen, delighted.

"Then the debt's even bigger," Galen said. "You have to come back Thursday."

And I said, before I could think about it, "Okay."

So now I'm driving home with a slice of pie on my passenger seat and my birthday still almost a week away, and for the first time in a while I'm curious about a Thursday.

The next few days went the way my weeks usually go. Three houses a day, four days a week, and a lot of silence in other people's kitchens. I scrubbed a shower ring out of a tub in a house on Pelican Street and thought about roast chicken, which is not a normal thing for me to think about, but there it was.

I was back at Andie's on Thursday, same as always, and Thursday was dinner number two. I got there at six fifty again because apparently that's just when I show up now. Galen opened the door before I knocked.

"You have a schedule," he said. "Six fifty, every time."

"Six fifty is when I finish the Hendersons. It's not for you."

"Sure it's not."

It was lasagna that night, and it was honestly too much lasagna, and he admitted halfway through that he'd doubled the recipe because the first time he made it the pan looked lonely. Trev came by at eight with beer and stayed for the card playing, which confirmed the story about him being the worst player. I took four dollars off him. He paid in quarters from his truck's cup holder and made it into a whole ceremony.

It was while Trev was shuffling wrong that Galen said it.

"So Tuesday's a big day, I hear."

I looked up. "What's Tuesday?"

"Your birthday," he said, like I'd forgotten my own birthday, which, fair, I had a little.

I put my fork down. "How do you know that?"

"Trev told me."

"I told him nothing," Trev said, mouth full. "Andie told me to tell him. Andie's the intel here. I'm just logistics."

"Andie knows my birthday because she's a normal person who remembers things about people," I said. "You two are not supposed to have it."

"Why not?" Galen asked, and he sounded genuinely confused, and that confused tone is the one that gets me.

"Because it's a Tuesday. I'll be twenty-eight and it'll be a Tuesday and I'll clean three houses and go home. That is the entire event. That's how it works."

He didn't argue. He just nodded and refilled my water glass, which I've noticed he does, and dropped it.

I thought about it the whole drive home, and by the time I pulled into my spot I was mad, mostly at myself, because the truth is I don't make my birthday a big deal so nobody else has to feel bad about not making it a big deal. It's a system. It's worked for years. And this guy with flour on his shirt was ruining it just by knowing the date.

Friday morning I got to my first house at nine and there was a coffee cup on the porch rail. A proper cup, from the place downtown, with a sleeve and everything, and a sticky note on the lid.

"Four days to go. Saw you order this once. Paying a debt. G."

I stood there on a stranger's porch holding a latte I hadn't ordered and I did not put it down in the sink with everyone else's cups. I drank it in the car between houses and it was exactly right, which annoyed me, because how does he know my order from one time?

I texted Andie from the car. "Did you tell him my coffee order?"

"No. Why?"

"There's a coffee on the Hendersons' porch."

"And a latte appeared out of thin air?" She sent back three of those crying laughing faces. "Becky. He asked Trev months of questions about you and Trev knew nothing, so he asked ME, and I may have mentioned you like that place."

"So it was you."

"I contributed to an operation. That's all I'll say."

Saturday, second house of the day, there was a paper bag on the step of the Calloway place, where I do the upstairs. Inside was a book. The one I mentioned at dinner, actually, the one about the lighthouse keeper's wife, because he'd asked what I read and I said I don't get to the library much and he'd said what would you read if you did and I told him and forgot about it in the same minute.

The note on this one said, "Three days to go. You said you never finish books because you fall asleep by chapter three. No pressure. G."

I sat in my car in the Calloways' driveway and read the first two chapters before my next job, and I did not fall asleep in either of them.

Okay. So by Saturday night I'm lying in bed doing the math, because something's off. Two dinners, that was one thing, I could file that under he owed me a favor and soldiers are formal about favors. But coffee on a porch at eight in the morning means he asked Andie where my Tuesday houses are, and that means he made a plan, and the plan has days in it, like a countdown. Like leave. Two weeks of leave and a mission.

I called Andie. She answered on the first ring, way too cheerful for nine at night.

"You're in on it," I said.

"Hi to you too."

"Andie. What is he doing?"

"He's doing nice things for you on the days before your birthday. That's it. That is the entire plan. Coffee, a book, and tomorrow something he won't tell me because I talk."

"I'm not a thing people do plans for. I'm the person who cleans around the plans."

"Well, you are now, so deal with it."

"Andie, it's sweet, but he doesn't even know me. He remembers one shift I covered like four years ago. He's building a whole birthday out of one shift."

There was a pause on her end, the kind where I could hear her deciding how honest to be.

"Can I say something?" she said.

"You always do."

"When Trev first told me Galen wanted to thank you properly, I thought it was a lot