The Landlord Who Made Me His Cook

There was one night in October that I think about the most.

Brooke was seven months by then and big and miserable and honestly sweet to me, when she had the energy to be anything. She never treated me like help. I think, in her fog, she believed I was a friend who happened to love cooking, because that is what Gerald told her, and why would she not believe her husband. That night I had made chicken and dumplings, my grandmother’s recipe, the one that takes all afternoon, and I had cleaned the whole downstairs and gotten Cole bathed and into bed, and it was going on nine o’clock and I had opened at the Dollar General at seven that morning.

I was standing at their sink with my hands in gray dishwater and my feet about done, and Gerald came in and set a piece of paper on the counter next to me.

“Little list,” he said. “For the week. Brooke’s cravings are on the fridge, I circled the ones she’s been asking for. Cole’s got a thing at preschool Thursday, somebody needs to bring two dozen cookies, I told them you’d handle it.” He slid a second sheet over. “And the downstairs bath grout’s looking rough, if you’ve got a Saturday.”

I looked at the lists. I did not say anything. I was too tired to say anything, which he counted on.

Then he took his wallet out, and for one stupid hopeful second I thought, here it is, he is going to pay me, he has finally seen it. And he pulled out four hundred and seventy-five dollars in cash and set it on the counter.

“Oh, and rent,” he said. “You can just hand that back to me. Saves you writing a check.” He smiled. “See? I even bring it to you.”

He thought that was funny. He thought handing me my own rent money so I could hand it right back to him was a little joke between friends. I took the cash and I set it in the drawer where he kept it and I never saw a receipt, not once in sixteen months, because Gerald Vance ran every dollar through his own hands in the dark and wrote nothing down.

I handed it back. I always handed it back. And I drove the two miles home to the little white house I was paying for and could barely stand to be in anymore, and I sat in the Corolla in my own gravel driveway and I cried the way you cry when you cannot even say out loud what is wrong, because the minute you say it out loud you have to do something about it, and I did not know what there was to do.

That is when I called my grandmother.