Part 2: Ten Days of Silence
Not that day. Not that week. She called Monday to ask if I’d thought about it, and I said I was still thinking. Which was a lie of the kind that isn’t quite a lie. I was thinking. I was thinking about where to put the couch.
Jim Olson and his boy moved me on a Wednesday. They backed a flatbed up to the farmhouse porch and wouldn’t let me carry anything heavier than a lamp.
I took my bed. The couch. The kitchen table Dale and I bought at a farm sale in 1981, and four chairs. My sewing machine. Dale’s recliner. And nine boxes.
Thirty-one years in a house, and it came to one flatbed load and whatever fit in the trunk of a Buick.
The rest I gave to the Olson boy’s wife. She cried over the canning jars.
Jim stood in my new front room with his cap off, turning in a slow circle.
“Well, Judy. It’s snug.”
“It is.”
“Dale would’ve had that porch step shimmed level before I got the truck unloaded.”
“He would have,” I said.
We both laughed. Then neither of us did.
I hung my curtains. I set Dale’s recliner by the heating stove, facing the window. I lined my African violets on the sill over the sink, where they could watch the trucks.
That first night the fans roared, and the two o’clock train came through and shook the water in the glass beside my bed. I lay wide awake thinking, what in the world have you done, Judith?
The second night I slept clear through to five.
It was Todd who found out.
He drives right past the elevator on his way to the plant for first shift. On the ninth morning, a Monday, he spotted my Buick parked in front of the Brandt house at a quarter to six. A light on in the window. A woman in a housecoat watering violets.
Michelle called that night at seven.
I knew from the way she said “Mom” that she knew.
“You rented a house.”
“I did.”
“From Mr. Brandt. By the elevator. Todd saw your car.”
“That’s right.”
“You have been living four blocks from me for over a week, and you let me keep asking if you’d thought about it.”
“That was wrong of me,” I said. “I should have told you the day I did it. I was afraid of this phone call, and I put it off, and that was cowardly. I’m sorry for that part.”
A long silence followed. I could hear cartoons playing in the background.
“What did you pay?”
“Five hundred and fifty.”
“So it wasn’t even the money.” Her voice went up thin. “It’s two hundred and fifty dollars’ difference. You’d rather pay a stranger than your own family?”
“Mr. Brandt isn’t a stranger. And no. I’d rather be your mother than your renter, Michelle. That’s all it is.”
“We made a place for you!”
“You did. I saw the work in it.”
“I told the daycare we might be pulling Sadie out. I told my boss I might be able to pick up Fridays.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Because you didn’t ask! You just smiled and said thank you and went and did whatever you wanted!”
I didn’t raise my voice. I have never once gotten anywhere with that girl by raising my voice. Not when she was fifteen, and not now.
“Honey,” I said. “I’m going to say one thing, and then I’ll let you go, because you’re upset and it’s the kids’ bedtime. I would have come and watched those babies for nothing. I’d have done it gladly. But you told me I’d be earning my keep. I earned my keep with you a long time ago. I don’t believe I owe on it.”
She hung up.
I set the phone down on the table Dale and I bought in 1981. I sat there until the window went dark and the elevator lights came on.
Ten days.
No calls. No pictures on my phone, which she used to send nearly every evening. Sadie with spaghetti on her forehead. Eli missing a tooth. Nothing.
I’ll tell you the truth about those ten days.
I had my door. I had my two brass keys and my porch swing and my violets. And every evening I sat on that swing in my denim jacket and watched the trucks pull onto the scale. And I wondered whether I’d paid too high a price.
Because it was never the basement I minded. I’ve lived plainer than that. It wasn’t even the eight hundred dollars, though the arithmetic of it stung.
It was that I’d have been down there on terms.
With every sack of groceries, I’d have been reckoning my share. Every Thursday I was tired and wanted to sit, I’d have heard it in my head. Earning your keep.
A grandmother who lives in the house on wages isn’t a grandmother anymore. She’s the help who loves them.
And when the children got big and the daycare bill disappeared, what would my keep be worth then?
I wanted to be near those children. I did not want to be owned by the arrangement.
But I’d have traded the swing and the violets and both keys for five minutes of Sadie on my lap. I knew it. And that made it a very long ten days.
What got me through was a shoebox.
I went into Brandt’s on the second day for sunflower seed. Mr. Brandt stood at the counter with his glasses pushed up on his forehead and about two hundred slips of paper spread before him. Invoices. Charge tickets. A bank statement with a coffee ring on it.
“Lois did all this,” he said. He wasn’t really talking to me. Lois was his wife. She passed four years ago. “Forty-three years she did it, and I never once asked her how. Now the accountant in Kearney wants the third quarter by the fifteenth, and I can’t tell you if Don Swanson has paid for his creep feed since May.”
I set down my purse.
“Do you have a ledger? Or does it all live in the box?”
“There’s a ledger. I quit being able to make it come out about a year ago.”
“Mr. Brandt, I kept the books at the lumber yard for twenty-two years. Double entry. Give me that ledger and that shoebox and a pot of coffee.”
He looked at me as if I’d offered to carry the fifty-pound sacks out for him.
It took me three afternoons at the little desk in the back, by the vet supplies.
As it turned out, Don Swanson had not paid for his creep feed since May. Neither had four others. And a deposit from July had been written in twice.
When I finished, the ledger balanced to the penny. And I’d turned up a little over two thousand dollars in charge tickets that nobody had ever billed.
He came out to my porch that Friday evening and stood on my one step with his cap in his hand. Men of that age out here do all their important talking with their cap in their hand.
“I’d like you to do that every Friday,” he said. “I can’t pay what it’s worth. But I can knock the rent down to four hundred, if that’d be agreeable.”
“That would be agreeable.”
“It isn’t a favor, Judy. I want you to understand that. You’d be saving my hide.”
“I understand it,” I said. “That’s why I’m saying yes.”
After he left, I sat on the swing a while longer.
There’s a difference. I could feel it, plain as the swing chain in my hand.
Mr. Brandt had come to my door. He’d asked me for what I was good at, and he’d offered what he could. Nobody told me I’d be earning my keep. He told me I’d be saving his hide.
I thought, that’s all I ever wanted from my own girl.
Just to be asked.
On the tenth day, a Thursday, I was frying potatoes for supper when a pickup door slammed out front.
I knew the sound of that door. It’s Todd’s Ford. The driver’s side has stuck ever since he backed into the mailbox.
I turned the burner down and looked out the window over the sink.
Michelle was climbing out of the passenger side. She still wore her work clothes, the scrubs with the little cartoon teeth from the dentist’s office. Her eyes were red all the way around.
Todd came around the front of the truck holding a yellow legal pad. Even from the window, I could see the whole top page covered in his handwriting.
The children weren’t with them.
I wiped my hands on the dish towel and opened the screen door before they could knock.
