The Lease My Son Typed Himself

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you will give me your key.”

That one landed harder than the money. I watched it land. He has had a key to that house since he was nine years old and came home from school before I got off work. He took out his ring and worked it off, and it took him a while because his hands were not steady, and he set it on the table beside the bills.

I picked up the money. I counted out $200 and put it in my robe pocket with his lease. I pushed the twelve dollars back across the table to him.

“That is the first one,” I said. “Seventeen to go. Now wash your hands. Hailey made the rice and Miguel made whatever is in that pot, and it smells better than anything I have cooked since Easter.”

It was chicken, stewed with tomatoes and peppers, his grandmother’s. It did not have much salt in it, because Hailey had stood at his elbow with my folder open and seen to that.

I will not tell you that supper was comfortable. It was the longest meal of my son’s life. He ate with his eyes on his plate. Nobody was unkind to him, and I think that was the hardest part. Once, Miguel passed him the tortillas without being asked, and Troy took them and said thank you, and his ears went red.

Before he left he stood at the back door a minute.

“I’d have fixed that step,” he said. “I kept meaning to.”

“I know you did,” I said. “Good night, Troy.”

That was the last Thursday of August.

I had thought I was doing those two young people a kindness. It took me about a week to understand it ran the other way.

Hailey taped a sheet of notebook paper to the wall beside my bed, with a column for the date and a column for my weight, and a pencil hung from a string. Every morning before she left for Norfolk she stuck her head in the den and said, “What’d we get?” and I would tell her, and she would say “Good” as if I had done something clever.

On the ninth night I woke up a little after two and could not catch my breath lying down. I sat on the edge of the bed with my heart going like a bird in a box. I did not want to be a bother. I had just about decided to sit there until daylight when I heard the back door, and it was Hailey coming in from a late shift at the care center, and she saw my lamp.

She did not make a fuss. She knelt down on my den floor in her scrubs and pressed her thumb into my shin and watched the dent it left. She looked at my paper on the wall. I had gained three pounds since morning. I had also eaten a ham sandwich at Mavis’s that noon and not told anybody.

“That’s the ham,” she said. “It’s all right. This is exactly what the number on the sticker is for.”

She called it for me. She told the nurse on the line my weights and my medicines without looking at the folder once. Then she propped me up on three pillows and sat on the floor with her back against my bed until the extra pill they told me to take had done its work, which was near four in the morning. She had class at eight.