The Daughter Who Kept The Lights On

Redding Is Five Hours North

There was a job I had turned down back in the spring. A regional farm supply distributor headquartered outside Redding, almost five hours north up Interstate 5 and then off onto smaller roads through country that looked like ours but greener, had reached out through a trade contact of Stuart’s looking for someone to run their accounts payable and receivable across four branch offices. Real salary. Health insurance that did not require me to gamble on a bronze plan. A relocation stipend. I had said no in April because my mother had just had a small stroke scare that turned out to be nothing serious, and I did not feel right leaving while that was still an open question.

I called the number back on a Wednesday, four days after my mother told me to be out by Saturday.

“This is Leslie,” I said when a woman picked up. “I interviewed back in April, for the accounts position. I know it’s been a while. I wanted to ask if it’s still open.”

There was a pause I remember exactly, because I had spent the drive over rehearsing what I would say if the answer was no, and none of what I had rehearsed mattered once she spoke.

“For you,” she said, “yes. We were hoping you’d call again.”

I gave two weeks’ notice to Stuart that same afternoon, sitting across the desk from him in the propane office with the swamp cooler rattling in the window behind his head. He did not look surprised. He had known me since I was twenty one and grieving in his parking lot, and I think he had been waiting a long time for somebody to finally offer me a reason to leave that county road.

“You want me to keep that household account open in your name a while longer,” he asked, “while you get settled, or you want to close it out now?”

I sat with that question longer than it probably deserved.

“Leave it open through the end of the month,” I said finally. “After that, close it. It’s not mine to keep paying for a house I don’t live in.”

Stuart nodded like that was the most obvious math in the world, which, looking back, it was.