The Bill My Daughter-in-Law Handed Me
I did not say any of it. My mother used to say that the minute you start listing what you have done for someone, you have turned a gift into a loan. I was not going to stand in my son’s front hall and turn eight years of gifts into loans.
“I’ll write you a check,” I said. “I don’t have the apps.”
I set my suitcase down. I walked back through the hall into her kitchen, the white one with the stone counters she is so proud of, and I took my checkbook out of my purse. My hand was not steady, so I pressed it flat on the counter for a second first. Then I wrote it out. Pay to the order of Courtney Harlan. Two thousand and no hundredths.
On the memo line I wrote: One week with my family.
I tore it out along the perforation, slowly, so it would not rip. I handed it to her.
She looked at the amount and not the memo. “Thank you, Peggy. I really appreciate you being a grown-up about it. Some people get so emotional about money.”
“I hope you have a good week, honey,” I said. “I wish you well.”
And I meant it, which may be the strangest part. I picked up my suitcase and called goodbye up the stairs. Addie came thundering down in her socks and wrapped herself around my middle and asked when I was coming back.
“We’ll see, sugar,” I said.
It was the first time in her life I had not been able to give her a date.
The subdivision where they live is one of those new ones out east of Wichita, toward Andover, where the trees are all the same height as the mailboxes and every street is named after a bird. Meadowlark Court. Killdeer Lane. I have always thought it was funny, since they scraped off every acre a meadowlark would want in order to build it.
It is two hours from there to my place. You take the highway west through the city and out the other side, past Goddard and Garden Plain, and then the land opens up and goes flat and red and honest. Kingman. Cunningham. Then Pratt, and eleven more miles of blacktop and gravel to the farmhouse Dale and I moved into in 1984.
I did not cry on that drive. I want to be truthful about that. I was too busy doing arithmetic.
I had driven that road to their house twice a month for six years. Every other Friday, down and back on Sunday, so Courtney could work her weekend open houses at the model home and Brian could pick up Saturday overtime without paying a sitter. Twenty-four trips a year, more or less. A hundred sixty miles each way. I had never once thought of it as mileage. It was the road to Addie. That was all it had ever been.
And now there was a number on it. That was what she had done, standing there so pleasant with her printout. She had not just charged me. She had taught me the price of things. Once somebody shows you a price, you cannot stop seeing price tags.