The Lease My Son Typed Himself

It took him a long time. The clock over the stove went around. Finally he put his cap down on his knee and looked at Miguel, because I suppose it was easier to look at a man.

“It’s not my house,” he said. “I don’t manage anything. She didn’t know. She was in the hospital and I knew she’d be gone a while, and I put up the notice.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry. To both of you.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because I was three payments behind on the truck.” He said it to the tabletop. “The crew I was on in the spring went under owing me six weeks. I picked up with the outfit in Wisner in June but I never got caught up. The bank sent the last letter the week you went in. They were going to come get it, Mom. If I lose the truck I can’t get to Wisner. If I can’t get to Wisner I’ve got nothing.”

“How much were you behind?”

“Seventeen fifty-five. And the insurance had lapsed. That was another six-forty.”

“That is not $3,600.”

“No, ma’am.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I put six hundred on the credit card because they were calling me at work. The rest was gas and groceries. I couldn’t tell you where all of it went.”

“What is left?”

He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a fold of bills and laid it on my table. He counted it out without being asked. Two hundred and twelve dollars.

I looked at that little pile for a while.

I will tell you what I was thinking, since I have promised to be honest. I was thinking that I had known something was wrong since the Fourth of July, when he came to the Chicken Show parade and did not buy himself so much as a lemonade. I was thinking that I had not asked. And I was thinking that he could have sat in that vinyl chair by my hospital bed and said, “Mom, I am in trouble,” and I would have written him a check before the nurse came back with my pills.

“Why did you not ask me?” I said.

His jaw worked.

“Because I’m forty-four years old,” he said. “And you were lying there with a tube in your arm. And Dad never asked anybody for anything in his life.”

“Your father borrowed four thousand dollars from my mother in 1986 to keep this house,” I said. “He paid it back at fifty dollars a month and he ate Sunday dinner at her table the whole time. He just never told you.”

Troy looked up at me then. He had not known that. Nobody had, except Mavis, who nodded once over her coffee.

“Here is what is going to happen,” I said. “Mavis wanted me to call the sheriff this afternoon. I want you to know that I could have, and that I thought about it.”

“I know.”

“These two are staying. They have a lease with me now. I have honored every dollar they gave you as if they had given it to me. So you do not owe them $3,600 anymore. You owe it to me.”

He nodded.

“You will pay it at $200 a month. Not by mail, and not through the bank, and not by leaving it in the door. You will bring it here on the first Sunday of every month, in person, and you will sit down at this table and eat supper with the three of us. Eighteen months. If you miss one without calling me first, I will make the telephone call I did not make today.”