The Help Eats in the Kitchen
Past the Kimberling City bridge he said, “I’m going to pay you back. Half. All of it, if you want.”
“It isn’t about the check.”
“I know it’s not. I’m going to anyway.”
He did. He wrote it the next morning at the kitchen table, nineteen hundred dollars, and I let him. But the thing that mattered he did that evening, and nobody had to stand over him with a spoon.
Alexis had texted me by then. I still have it. “Sorry if the joke came out wrong. But you didn’t have to ruin the whole day over it.”
I showed him. I did not answer it.
He read it standing up. Then he got his keys and drove forty minutes to her apartment in Ozark, by himself, and he was gone till after ten.
I never asked him to repeat what was said. He told me the one part I needed.
“I told her I’ve been letting her treat you like hired help since she was thirteen, and that was my failure before it was hers. And I told her she’s not coming to this house for Sunday dinner again until she can say she’s sorry to your face and mean it. Not in a text. Not with an ‘if’ in it.”
“What did she say?”
“She said I was choosing you over her.”
“And?”
“I said I was eleven years late choosing right over easy.” He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “She cried. I about did. I left anyway.”
It was a long summer after that.
She did not come in June or in July. Her chair sat empty on Sundays, and I will not pretend that was a victory, because I watched what it cost her father. He did not waver, though. More than once I saw him pick up his phone and set it back down.
She came the second Sunday in August.
I was on the porch snapping beans. Her car pulled into the drive and sat there running for so long I thought she might back out again.
Then she got out. Nothing fancy this time. Jeans, a ponytail, no makeup. She had nothing in her hands. I was glad. I would not have known what to do with flowers.
She stopped at the bottom of the steps.
“Is Dad here?”
“He’s at the lot till four.”
“Good,” she said. “I mean. I came for you.”
I kept snapping beans. It gave my hands a job.
“I had this whole thing planned out to say,” she said. “I practiced it in the car. It’s gone.”
“Then say something else.”
She almost laughed. Then her face folded up.
“Aunt Wanda made a photo album,” she said. “On the computer, all nine years. For Grandma. She sent everybody the link and I went through the whole thing. Four hundred pictures.” She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. “You’re in three of them. Three, Karen. And in every one you’re behind a table.”
I had not known that. I set the bean bowl down.
“I looked for you,” she said. “I went back through it twice, looking. You’re not in the big group picture any year. I think you were taking it.”
“I was.”