The Rent Bill In Howard’s House

What Lloyd said

“Your father,” Lloyd said, “framed the walls in this room in the spring of 1989. I know because I held the other end of every stud. He worked the second shift at the axle plant, and he’d come out here at midnight with a trouble light hung from a nail, and he’d put up one wall by himself before going home to sleep. Four hours of sleep, Stan. Every night for most of a summer. I told him to slow down and he told me, ‘Lloyd, I’ve got a wife and a boy coming, and I’m not raising them in somebody else’s house.'”

The room was silent. Somebody’s chair creaked.

“I dug the footing for this house,” Lloyd said. “I poured the concrete under the floor you’re sitting on. I did it at cost, because your father didn’t have the cash, and because I’d have done it for free if he’d let me. When it came time to pay for the lumber, and the shingles, and the windows, there was a gap, and do you know who closed it? Your mother. Out of her teaching paycheck. Eleven hundred and forty dollars, in a sealed envelope, handed to me in the lumber yard in front of God and everybody on a Tuesday morning. I never told Howard. That’s the first time I’ve said it aloud.”

I felt Rita’s hand take mine under the table.

“Your mother carried block,” Lloyd said. “She painted every wall in this house,. She laid that kitchen floor on her hands and knees. Your father built the table in your kitchen from a barn on County Road 12 and carved your parents’ initials into it. I saw him do it. I was standing there.”

“Lloyd,” said Sheila, in a high, thin voice. “This is not appropriate.”

He kept looking at Stan.

“I’ll tell you what else I know,” Lloyd said. “I know who’s been paying for the propane in this house since the day you moved in. Your mother filled that tank twice, at a thousand dollars apiece. She paid the property taxes. She paid the insurance. She put in a water heater in August. The woman bought your groceries every week and was handed a list for it.”

A sound came from someone in the middle of the table, a small gasp, quickly swallowed.

“And three weeks ago,” Lloyd said, “somebody handed her a bill. For rent. In this house.”

He let that sit.

“I’ve known you since the day you were born, son. I held you at the christening. You were a good boy. You’re a good man, I think, somewhere in there. But I want you to hear this plain, in front of every person here that you care what they think of you.” He lifted his chin. “That woman at the end of the table built this house. She and your father built it with their own hands, and they gave it to you, and she has been paying for it ever since. You can have your name on the paper, Stan. Nobody can take that from you, because she put it there herself. But you cannot own what you did not build, and you cannot rent a room to the person who laid the floor.”

Nobody breathed.

“That’s my answer,” Lloyd said. “Your father would be proud of the house. I couldn’t tell you about the man in it.”

He sat down.