The Bill I Finally Sent My Mother

“Did I ever send you a bill for raising you?”

My mother said it with her back to me. She was at the sink in the house I grew up in, peeling potatoes into a colander, and she did not turn around to say it.

The credit report lay on the counter by the bread box where I had set it down. Eleven pages, stapled at the corner. She had not picked it up. She had looked at it the way you look at a dish somebody else left out.

“I asked you a question, Kristin.”

“No,” I said. “You never sent me a bill.”

“That’s right.” The peeler went on, long brown strips dropping into the sink. “I kept a roof over you and your brother when your father walked out. I did what I had to do. Family does not send family a bill.”

Then she ran the water, and that was the end of it as far as she was concerned.

I stood there in my work clothes with my purse still on my shoulder. I was thirty-three years old. I did not raise my voice. I have never once raised my voice to my mother, and I was not going to start in her kitchen on a Thursday.

I picked up the report, because it was mine, and I went out the side door.

I should tell you how I came to be holding it.

Two days earlier I had sat down in a little glass office at the credit union on Second Avenue in Kearney, across the desk from a loan officer named Mrs. Abel. She was near sixty, with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and a dish of butterscotch candies she pushed toward me before I had my coat off.

I was there to buy a house. My first one.

It was a two-bedroom on a corner lot east of the college, white siding, a detached garage, a clothesline in the back that somebody had kept painted. The asking price was $172,000. I had $14,000 in savings for the down payment, and it had taken me nine years to put it there.

I had my pay stubs in a folder. I had two years of tax returns. I do the billing for an irrigation dealer out on the highway, center pivots and parts and service calls, and I am the kind of person who keeps a folder.

Mrs. Abel typed for a while. Then she stopped typing.

She looked at her screen for a long moment, and she took her glasses off, and she put them back on.

“Kristin,” she said, “tell me about these three credit cards.”

“I don’t have any credit cards.”

“None?”

“I have the debit card you all gave me when I was sixteen. I’ve never borrowed a dime.”

That was the plain truth. I bought my first car for $1,800 cash from a farmer near Gibbon. I bought the one I drive now from a widow at church, cash again. I rent half a duplex from a retired man who has never asked me for anything but the check on the first. I was raised to think owing money was the same as being in trouble.

Mrs. Abel turned her screen so I could see it.

“This is your credit report. All three bureaus.” She ran the cap of her pen down the page. “A bank card opened in June of 2011. A department store card, September of 2011. Another bank card, November of 2011. They’re all open. They all carry a balance.”

I turned eighteen in May of 2011.