The Bank Card He Called Severance

Where I landed

I moved into a rented room over a detached garage behind a house on the east edge of town, out where Route 9 turns into a county road and the streetlights give up. The woman who owned the house, Glenda, was kind about the rent and let it slide the months I came up short, God bless her, but the room itself was hard.

The roof leaked near the little baseboard heater, so there was always a coffee can catching water and a brown stain spreading on the ceiling tile like a map of some country nobody wanted. The one window rattled in its frame every time a semi came off the highway, and in January the cold came up through the floorboards so bad that I slept in my coat with two pairs of socks and a stocking cap, and my breath still showed in the lamplight.

I want to be honest about how far down it went, because people my age are so good at hiding it. We learned to hide it. We were raised to.

I cleaned houses. I scrubbed other people’s bathrooms and ran their vacuums and folded their laundry warm out of the dryer while my own laundry hung stiff on a line strung across that garage room. I picked up weekend shifts at the Bluebird, the diner on Main that has been there since before I was born, refilling coffee for farmers at five in the morning and wiping down booths that smelled like bacon grease and syrup. And on Saturdays and some Sundays I sat with an old woman named Ada Prewitt, who could not be left alone anymore, and I read to her from the county paper and warmed her soup and helped her to the bathroom and back, and her son paid me forty dollars a day, which some weeks was the difference.

When the grocery money ran out too early, and it ran out too early more often than I will ever admit to my children, I walked the ditch along the county road with a garbage bag and picked up cans, and I carried them to the redemption machine at the IGA and fed them in one at a time and watched the little screen count up nickels. Some nights supper was saltine crackers softened in hot water because a can of soup cost more than I was willing to spend on myself. I told myself it was fine. I told myself a lot of things.