The Mortgage I Paid In Silence
Almeda told me the rest of it in pieces over the following days, because that first night on the phone she could barely get through it without her voice breaking. She told me how she had arrived in the dress she picked out herself, a green one she had saved her babysitting money for, and how my mother had met her at the door with a smile that did not reach her eyes and a whispered instruction to wait in the front room a minute while things got settled. She told me how she watched through the kitchen doorway as Almon’s wife’s parents were seated in the good chairs, the ones with the carved backs that always went to whoever my mother wanted to impress most, and how the caterers, actual hired caterers, a first for a Rutledge Christmas as far as any of us can remember, kept brushing past her in the narrow kitchen with trays of food she had not been offered a plate of yet. She told me how her cousin, Almon’s stepdaughter from his wife’s first marriage, had been given a seat at the table though she had met the family exactly twice, while Almeda, who had spent every Christmas of her life in that house, stood by the stove.
I did not understand yet what he meant by because of the store. I would understand it in about six weeks, and when I did, it would explain a great deal more than one bad Christmas.
“Go home,” I told her. “Lock the door. I’ll be there the second I can.”
I hung up the phone in a supply hallway that smelled like antiseptic and cardboard boxes, and I stood there for perhaps ten seconds doing absolutely nothing, which for me is a very long time. Then I wiped my face with the inside of my wrist, because I did not have a clean sleeve left, and I went back out to my patients, because a sixteen year old having the worst night of her holiday season does not stop a nineteen year old from needing his chest tube checked.
My charge nurse partner that night, a woman who has worked beside me for nine years and has seen me cry exactly twice, caught my face when I came back to the desk and asked, quietly, what I needed.
“I need to finish this shift,” I told her. “And then I need to go have a conversation with my mother that I have been putting off since roughly 2014.”
I want to explain what I meant by 2014, because it is the part of this story I have never told anyone outside my own kitchen table, and it is the part that changes everything that came after.