The Lease My Son Typed Himself

Mavis already had her own phone out. “I’m calling the sheriff.”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Not yet? You have just come out of the hospital. There are strangers in your house.”

“Strangers who brush the cat,” I said.

I do not know why I was so calm. I think eleven days in a hospital bed takes the hurry out of a person. And I had heard a floorboard creak over my head, in the room that used to be Troy’s, and it was not the creak of someone sneaking. It was the plain, ordinary sound of somebody crossing a room in their socks.

I was cold, the way you are cold for days after a hospital. I took my robe out of the bag and put it on over my slacks and blouse. Then I took hold of the stair rail.

“You are not going up there,” Mavis said.

“It is my upstairs.”

“Dr. Patel said no stairs for a week.”

“Dr. Patel said to take them slowly,” I said, which was not what he said. I took them one at a time, both feet on each step like a toddler, and stopped twice to breathe. Mavis came up right behind me with her hands out as if she meant to catch me.

By the time I reached the landing, both bedroom doors had opened.

In the doorway of Troy’s old room stood a young man of about twenty-four, dark-haired, broad through the shoulders, in a gray T-shirt with the name of a welding and fabrication shop across the chest. In the doorway of the room that had been Dale’s mother’s, the last three years of her life, stood a girl in blue nursing scrubs who did not look old enough to vote.

They looked at my robe. Then both of them, at the same moment, looked at the plastic bracelet on my wrist.

“Ma’am,” the young man said. “Are you Troy’s mother?”

“I’m Wanda Kessler,” I said. “This is my house.”

The girl put her hand flat over her mouth.

“He told us you were staying with your sister for a while,” she said through her fingers.

“I’m the sister,” Mavis said, behind me. “She was not staying with me.”

“He said he managed the property for you,” the young man said. He had gone a dark red under his tan. “He said you knew. He said you’d be glad of the company when you got back.”

“What are your names?” I asked.

“Miguel,” he said. “Ma’am.”

“Hailey,” the girl said.

“How much is my son charging you to live here?”

They looked at each other.

“Six hundred a month,” Hailey said. “Each.”

I want you to understand what $600 means in Wayne, Nebraska. There are whole houses on the south side of town that rent for not much more than that. A bedroom with a shared bath and the use of an old woman’s kitchen is worth half of it on a good day.

“Why on earth would you pay that?” I said.

“Because classes started Monday,” Hailey said, “and I’d been sleeping in my car in the lot at the care center for four nights. Everything near the college was gone by July. I saw his notice on the board at the laundromat and I called in the first ten minutes.”

“I started at the trailer plant the same week,” Miguel said. “I was driving from my cousin’s in Norfolk and sleeping four hours a night. I’d have paid seven.”

“And you paid him? Up front?”