A Grandmother With Her Own Door

The children weren’t with them.

I wiped my hands on the dish towel and I opened the screen door before they could knock.

Nobody said anything for a second. A grain truck geared down on the street behind them.

“Judy,” Todd said. He’s a big man, six foot two, and he was standing on my walk like a boy sent to the principal. “I wrote that number. The eight hundred. That was me, not her. I want that said first.”

“All right.”

“Can we come in?”

“You can always come in. The potatoes are about to burn, so somebody’s going to have to eat them.”

Michelle made a sound that was partly a laugh. She came up my one step, and she stopped in the door and looked at my front room. The couch. Her daddy’s recliner. The violets. Her eyes went to the table and she put her hand flat on it, right on the burn mark where she’d set a hot pan down when she was eleven.

“You kept the table,” she said.

“Of course I kept the table.”

I dished up potatoes and sliced what was left of a ham, and nobody ate much. Then Todd set the legal pad down in the middle of my kitchen table and turned it around to face me.

“I need you to look at this,” he said. “I should have shown you this instead of that other paper. I didn’t want you to see it. I didn’t want anybody to see it.”

It was a budget. An honest one, the kind a man writes at one in the morning when he’s finally quit lying to himself.

Across the top, what came in. His take-home from the plant and hers from the dentist’s office, added up to $5,400 a month.

Underneath, what went out, line by line. The house payment with the taxes and insurance, $1,180. The truck, $612. Daycare, and he’d underlined it, $1,080. Groceries. The light bill. The credit card they’d put a new furnace on last January, when the old one quit in a cold snap, forty-eight hundred dollars at a rate that made me suck my teeth.

Fourteen lines in all. At the bottom he’d drawn a box around the total going out.

$5,710.

“That’s three hundred and ten dollars short,” I said.

“Every month. Since June.” He rubbed his jaw. “They cut the overtime in June. I’d been getting ten, twelve hours a week for three years and we built everything on it like it was wages. That was my mistake. When it went away I figured it’d come back by fall. It didn’t. We’ve been putting the difference on the card.”

Michelle was looking at her plate.

“So when your place came up,” Todd said, “I sat down and I thought, if Judy’s in the basement, that’s Sadie out of daycare most of the week and Eli out of after-school. And then I looked up what an apartment costs and I wrote down eight hundred, and I told myself it was fair because it was the going rate.” He made himself look at me. I’ll give him that. “It wasn’t fair. I was plugging a hole in my boat with your Social Security check. And I knew it when I circled it, and I slid it across the table anyway, because I was scared. I’m sorry, Judy. Dale would’ve taken me out behind the machine shed.”