The Rent Bill In Howard’s House

Now I wrote the columns. I put them down with a ballpoint pen and I numbered them.

Property taxes: $2,090 in January and $2,090 in June, both paid from my checking account, because the county mailed the bills to the same name they always had and I never changed the address. Homeowner’s insurance: $1,940 a year, premium paid by me, the policy still carrying my name next to Stan’s. Propane for the furnace: the tank held five hundred gallons and I had filled it twice, at over a thousand dollars each time, once the winter they moved in and once in the spring when Sheila decided the house was “too cold to stay healthy.” Water, internet, and the landline. A new water heater in August that cost $1,350, because Sheila’s shower “wasn’t getting hot enough.” The groceries, which I bought every week, because every week Sheila would leave a list on the counter, in her tidy handwriting, headed “For the house.”

I added it. I added it twice, once forward and once backward, the way I used to check long division on the board.

The total came to $14,860, in fourteen months.

I put my pen down. And then, because I am who I am, I added one more line at the bottom of the page. Rent: $800 a month, due on the first. For fourteen months, that would have been $11,200. In fourteen months, I had already paid more than that, and Sheila had known it. She had to. She was the one who opened the mail.

That was when I stopped being hurt and started being organized.

The first calls

On Wednesday morning, I waited until Stan left for the co-op, where he had a job in the office that Lloyd Dawson had helped him get. Sheila drove her mother to a hair appointment. The house went quiet, and I made my calls at the kitchen table, from the old landline, with my glasses on and my legal pad in front of me.

The first call was to the insurance agency on Main Street. The woman who answered had been writing my policies for twenty-two years and knew my voice before I said my name.

“I need to take my name off the homeowner’s policy for the house on County Road 9,” I said. “My son owns it now. He will need to carry it on his own. I’d like the change to take effect on the first of next month, and I’d like it in writing, so nobody can say they were surprised.”

She said she would mail the confirmation and that Stan would get a letter explaining he needed to open his own policy within thirty days or the coverage would lapse. I thanked her and hung up and drew a line through the first item on my list.

The second call was to Ernie at the propane company, who had delivered to our house since Howard was alive. I took my name off the account and asked him to put it in writing. “A quarter tank in October won’t carry that house past Thanksgiving, Miss Marlene,” he said. “I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m telling them now.”

I was not trying to freeze anybody. I was giving notice, the way a tenant gives notice, in writing, with dates, with plenty of time. That was the whole point. They had handed me a lease. I was just reading it back to them in the way it was written.