The Bill My Daughter-in-Law Handed Me
“Nobody told me. I heard Mom and Dad in the garage. Dad said, ‘She paid two thousand dollars to sleep in our house.’ And Mom said, ‘It’s what it costs.'” She looked at her mother, not accusing, just reporting. “And you didn’t come for a really long time. So I figured it out. It costs too much.”
“Addie,” Courtney said. It came out a whisper.
But Addie was not done. She slid off her chair and went to her coat on the hook by the door and came back with a plastic sandwich bag. It was full of coins and three or four folded bills. She set it on my mother’s tablecloth, next to my plate, and pushed it over with two fingers.
“That’s eleven dollars and forty cents. I counted it twice. It’s my tooth money and my birthday money from Aunt Lisa.” She looked up at me. “How much is it for just one Saturday? You don’t have to stay the night. You could just come for the day and I could pay.”
I could not speak. I put my hand flat on the tablecloth the way I had put it flat on Courtney’s counter, and I looked at that little bag.
Then I looked at my daughter-in-law.
She had both hands over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking. I had known that woman nine years, and I had never seen her cry. Not at her wedding, not when Addie was born, not at Dale’s funeral.
“Addie,” Brian said, and his voice broke right down the middle. “Baby. Grandma does not pay to see you. Grandma is never, ever going to pay to see you. That was a mistake a grown-up made. Put your money back in your coat.”
“But Mom said.”
“I was wrong,” Courtney said.
She took her hands down. Her face was wet and blotched and ten years younger.
“I was wrong, Addie. Mommy did something wrong. I gave Grandma a bill, like at a restaurant, and I should never have done it. And Grandma was so nice about it that I didn’t even know how wrong it was until right now.” She turned to me. “Until right now, Peggy. I swear to you. I thought you were being petty. I told Brian you were being petty.”
“I know you did, honey,” I said.
“Take your money, Addie,” she said. “Please. Please pick it up.”
Addie picked it up. She looked at each of us in turn, the way a child does when she has set off something she does not understand, and then she climbed up into my lap, eight years old and nearly too big for it, and put her head under my chin.
“So you can come?” she said into my collar.
“I can come,” I said.
Brian took Addie out to the barn after pie to look for the cat. I think he did it on purpose. That left Courtney and me and a sink full of dishes.
She washed. I dried. It is easier to say hard things when your hands are busy and you do not have to look at each other.
“I want to tell you something,” she said to the dishwater. “It’s not an excuse. I just want you to know where it came from.”
“All right.”
“My mother kept a notebook. A spiral one, in the drawer with the phone book. Everything my brother and I cost went in it. School pictures. Shoes. The co-pay when I broke my wrist. When I turned sixteen and got a job at the movie theater, she sat me down with the notebook and a calculator and told me what I owed for room and board going forward. Sixty dollars a week. I paid it until the day I left for college.”