The Modest Salary She Mocked At Dinner

Keith, and the girl he brought home

Keith is twenty-eight now. He is sharp in a way I like to think he gets from spending a childhood at a kitchen table doing homework across from a math teacher who checked every problem twice. He went to Ohio State on loans and grants and that slow drip of a teacher’s salary, majored in finance, and landed a job in Columbus doing something with mergers and spreadsheets that pays him, some months, more than I clear teaching in an entire year.

I am proud of him in a way that does not have a ceiling. I want to say that plainly before anything else, because everything that follows might sound like a story about resentment, and it is not. It is a story about a woman my son loved, and about the two months this past summer when my son found out something about me that I had never planned on telling him, and about what he decided to do with it.

Eighteen months ago, Keith brought a young woman named Paige home to meet me for the first time. She grew up in Dublin, one of the nicer suburbs on the west side of Columbus. Her family owns three car dealerships strung along two counties and a lake house up near Sandusky with a boat lift bolted into the dock. Paige has never, to my knowledge, worked a job that came with a time clock or a name tag.

She was polite that first dinner. She complimented my kitchen curtains in a tone I have come to recognize, the tone people use when they are admiring something they would never actually choose to hang in their own home. She asked, kindly enough, where I bought my dish towels, the way you might ask a child where she found her favorite rock.

I told myself I was being oversensitive. Keith loved her. She made him laugh in a way I had not heard since he was a boy running around this yard with the neighbor kids before school let out for summer. I decided that was supposed to be enough for me, and mostly, for a long while, it was.