The Lease My Son Typed Himself

The lease was one page long, and my son had typed it himself.

I knew that before I read a word of it, because Troy has never in his life learned where the apostrophe goes. There it was in the second line: “Tenant agree’s to pay.” I stood in my own upstairs hallway in my bathrobe, with a hospital bracelet still on my wrist, and I read my son’s spelling the way you would read a stranger’s handwriting on a ransom note.

Rent, $600 per month. First month, last month and a $600 deposit due at signing. Kitchen privileges. No smoking. Do not use downstairs bedroom.

The downstairs bedroom was mine.

At the bottom of the page were two lines. On the one marked Tenant, a young woman had signed her name in careful round letters. On the one marked Landlord, in the big slanting hand I had watched him practice at my kitchen table in the second grade, it said Troy Kessler.

My name was nowhere on that paper. My name is the only one on that house.

On either side of me, in the doorways of my two spare bedrooms, stood a young man and a young woman I had never laid eyes on. They were watching me read. Neither one of them was breathing much.

I should back up about twenty minutes.

I had been in the hospital in Norfolk for eleven days. It started as a cough I ignored through most of July, because the tomatoes were coming on and I did not have time for a cough. By the middle of August I could not walk from the garden to the back door without sitting down on the steps. My sister Mavis drove over from Wakefield, took one look at my ankles, and put me in her car without letting me change my shoes.

Pneumonia, they said. Then they said the pneumonia had shown them something else, which was that my heart was not pumping the way it ought to. A doctor named Patel, a slim, patient man who sat down on the edge of the chair every time he talked to me instead of standing over the bed, drew me a picture of it on the back of a menu. He said the words “heart failure” and then said right away, “That is a terrible name for it. It does not mean your heart has failed. It means it needs help, and we know how to help it.”

I liked him. I liked him even when he told me I could not have salt.

For the first few days he talked about sending me to a rehabilitation place for three weeks afterward. Then I did better than he expected, and on the tenth day he said I could go home, on two conditions. I was to weigh myself every morning. And I was not to be alone in the house for the first few weeks.

“Do you have family nearby?” he asked.

“My son lives across town,” I said. “He has a key.”

Troy is forty-four. He is my only child. He came to see me the first day and the second day, sat in the vinyl chair with his cap in his hands, and told me not to worry about a thing. He would bring in the mail. He would water the African violets. He would feed Biscuit, who is a fat orange cat with opinions.

After the second day he did not come again. He texted Mavis that the concrete crew was working long days over by Wisner. I believed it. A mother will believe a great deal when she is lying flat with a tube in her arm.