The Truck Door My Father Opened
Before Stacy’s Roof
To understand why I was walking that road at all, you have to understand what the last year had done to us.
Tony and I had been married four years when the transmission shop on Caraway Road let him go. It was not his fault. The owner was retiring, selling the building to a used car lot, and every one of the four mechanics on staff got the same two weeks’ notice on the same Friday afternoon. Tony took it hard in the quiet way he takes everything hard, working the phone every morning for three weeks straight, driving out to shops in Trumann and Paragould and even as far as Blytheville when nothing local turned up.
We had been renting a small brick house near Nettleton, nothing fancy, but ours, with a yard Tony had reseeded himself the spring before Henry was born. When the unemployment ran out and the landlord raised the rent forty dollars a month right along with it, the math stopped working no matter how many times I ran it. I picked up more hours at the dental office where I did billing, but a receptionist’s paycheck was never going to cover a mortgage-sized rent on its own, not with formula and diapers and a truck payment on top of it.
Stacy offered the spare room before Tony even worked up the nerve to ask her. I remember him coming home from that phone call almost relieved, like a weight had come off him, and I remember feeling the opposite settle into my stomach, a weight going on.
I had spent four years of holidays watching how Stacy ran a room. She was not loud about it. She did not need to be. She had a way of making a comment about somebody’s weight or somebody’s cooking or somebody’s choices sound like she was doing you a favor by saying it out loud instead of just thinking it. Tony called it her being direct. I had another word for it, but I never said it in front of him, because Tony loved his mother the uncomplicated way a son loves the parent who raised him alone after his father left, and I was not going to be the wife who made him choose.
I told myself six weeks, maybe two months, just until Tony landed something. I told myself a lot of things that summer.