The Five Thousand a Month I Never Saw

So when my son said five thousand a month, the first thing I did was arithmetic, the same way I do it standing at the end of lane four. Five thousand times twelve is sixty thousand. He had said, earlier that fall, something on the phone about three years, about how he was glad he had been able to do it for three years now, and I had thought he meant Tyler’s ball team.

Sixty thousand times three.

One hundred eighty thousand dollars.

I buttered my roll.

“Mom.” Matt had taken his arm away. He was not smiling now. “Five thousand dollars. Every month. It comes out on the first, I see it on the sheet.”

“What sheet is that, honey?”

“The household sheet. Lauren does it up for me.” He looked down the table at his wife. “It says Mom. Right there on the line. Mom, five thousand.”

“Matt, sit down,” Lauren said. “The food is getting cold and you are embarrassing your mother.”

“I’m not embarrassed,” I said, and I was not. I was something, but it was not that.

“She’s proud,” Lauren told the table, in a low kind voice, as though I had stepped out of the room. “We’ve talked about this, Matt. She doesn’t like it brought up. That’s why we don’t bring it up.”

Her father set his fork down on the edge of his plate. Gary is a big quiet man who ran a tire shop for forty years, and he did not say anything, but he set that fork down.

Diane looked at the centerpiece.

I thought about a Tuesday in March, almost four years gone.

We buried Ray on a Tuesday. He had been sick fourteen months, and the last four of them had taken the savings, and the two before that had taken the part of the savings we used to call the cushion. The ladies at church put on the funeral lunch in the fellowship hall. Ham, as it happens. Green beans. Three kinds of pie.

I was in the church kitchen drying a casserole dish that was not mine, because I did not know what else to do with my hands, and Lauren came in and took me by the elbow.

She had on a black dress that fit her like it was made for her. She leaned in close.

“Sandy, I need to tell you something and I need you not to repeat it,” she whispered. “Matt’s business is in trouble. Real trouble. He’s carrying more debt than he’ll ever admit. He would never tell you.”

I remember the dish towel in my hand. It had roosters on it.

“The kindest thing you can do for him right now,” she said, “is not ask him for anything. Please. He’d give it to you, and it would sink us.”

I said of course. I said I would never.

And I never did.

Not for the funeral bill, which I paid off at fifty dollars a month for two years. Not when the transmission went on the Buick. Not when I understood that I could not keep the house on Ray’s half of the Social Security and mine, and I sold the place we had lived in for thirty-one years to a young couple from Kiefer who painted the shutters blue.

I told Matt I wanted something smaller. I told him I had found a nice apartment downtown, handy to everything.

That was true as far as it went. It is handy to everything. It is on the second floor of a brick building on Dewey Avenue in Sapulpa, right over the Suds and Duds, and you get to it by an iron staircase that goes up the outside of the building from the alley.