- Amy was at our kitchen table with her reading glasses pushed up on her head, doing the bills, when I got home that Tuesday night.
- She took one look at my face and pushed the checkbook aside.
- “What did he do?”
- I told her. All of it. Tammy. The boys. The truck on Saturday. She listened all the way through without interrupting, which is one of the reasons I married her.
- When I got to the part where he said we bought the house so we could feel good about ourselves, she took her glasses off and set them on the table.
- “So call him back,” she said. “Tell him no. It’s your house.”
- But I’d been telling my father no my whole life, and he’d never once heard it as anything but maybe.
- He’d say “fine” and hang up. And then on Saturday morning, that truck would come anyway. And once Tammy’s boys had their beds set up and their mail coming to that address, I’d be the son who put his own father’s girlfriend and her kids out on the curb in November.
- I’d never get them out without becoming a man I didn’t want to be.
- “He doesn’t hear no,” I said. “He hears a starting price.”
- I got up and went into our bedroom. I pulled the gray fireproof box down off the closet shelf and brought it back to the table. I dug through it until I found the envelope from the county recorder’s office.
- I unfolded the deed and laid it flat between us.
- Warranty Deed. Recorded May 14th. Grantees: Shane Kolb and Linda Kolb, as tenants in common.
- Amy put her finger on Mom’s name.
- Then I went to the drawer by the phone where I keep my receipts. I’d always kept them. I don’t know why. Habit, I guess. Every time I paid Dad’s gas bill, I’d written the amount on a sticky note and dropped it in that drawer.
- I dumped them out on the table. Little yellow squares. Six years of them.
- Amy picked up a calculator. She added them up while I sat there not saying anything.
- “Five thousand six hundred and twenty dollars,” she said quietly. “Just the gas. Not counting the insurance or your half of the taxes.”
- We sat there and looked at that number.
- “He told me it’s his house,” I said.
- Amy thought about that. She put her glasses back on and looked at me over the top of them, the way she looks at a patient who’s just told her he feels fine.
- “Then call your mother,” she said.
- I called Mom at nine o’clock, which is late for her.
- She answered on the second ring with the television going in the background. Some show about people buying houses on tropical islands.
- “What’s wrong?” she said.
- Mothers don’t say hello after eight-thirty.
- I told her everything. Tammy. The boys. Saturday. And I told her about the gas bills, which I’d never once told her in six years.
- She was quiet for a long time.
- “Well,” she said finally. “Isn’t that something.”
- “Mom,” I said. “What’s going on with your lease?”
- That was the thing I’d been carrying around in my head the whole drive home.
- Mom’s lease at the Meadowbrook Apartments was up on October 31st. Ten days away. A new management company out of Indianapolis had bought the complex in the summer, and in August they’d sent every tenant a letter on fancy letterhead.
- Her rent was going up $175 a month. From $790 to $965.
- On a school cook’s income, with her retiring at Christmas break, that was not a small thing. She’d be living on her pension from the school corporation and an early Social Security check. She’d been fretting about it for two months and pretending to me that she wasn’t.
- “I was going to talk to you and your daddy after Thanksgiving,” she said. “I was going to sign on for six more months and then see.”
- “You don’t have to sign anything,” I said. “You own half a house.”
- “Shane.”
- “You were always going to retire there, Mom. That was the plan. That was the whole plan from the very beginning. You said it at the closing. I was sitting right there.”
- “I am not going over there to fight your daddy,” she said. “I am 64 years old, and I have not been in a room with that man for longer than a funeral in twenty years. I’m not starting with a fight.”
- “You’re not fighting,” I said. “You’re moving home.”
- She didn’t say anything for so long I thought the call had dropped. I could hear the island show in the background. Somebody was very excited about a kitchen with an ocean view.
- “The front bedroom gets the morning sun,” she said, very quietly.
- “It does.”
- “June’s violets would like that.”
- I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t ask. I just said I’d take Friday off and borrow a trailer and be at her apartment by seven.
- After we hung up, I sat at the kitchen table for a long time with the deed still lying open in front of me.
