The Lease for the Room Over the Garage

The weeks after

I kept my Tuesdays and Thursdays. Daycare at three, the park by the water tower, popcorn from Dale, noodles at my little table.

Brooke started coming up the stairs at 5:15 instead of waiting at the curb. At first she’d just collect the twins and thank me. Then one Thursday she sat down and had a cup of coffee. The next Tuesday she stayed for supper. Noodles, with a can of green beans on the side, because that’s what the twins wanted.

Nobody said anything about the lease. Nobody said anything about the $700 check. I noticed it never got cashed.

I liked my apartment. I want to say that plainly. I was not pining. I liked my front window and my gas stove and walking down to the bakery on Saturday mornings. I liked that the kitchen was open whenever I wanted it, and I liked that nobody moved my cups.

I unpacked all eleven boxes the first week. Even the four.

Sunday dinner

The second Saturday in May, somebody knocked on my door. Not two short knocks. Three soft ones.

It was Brooke. By herself.

She had on a sweatshirt and jeans, and she was holding three typed pages, stapled in the corner. My lease. My signature in Gary’s blue ink.

She held it out to me.

“I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with one of these,” she said. “When you want to take it back. I looked it up and I couldn’t find anything. So I just brought it.”

I took it.

“We’d like you to come to Sunday dinner,” Brooke said. “Tomorrow. Pot roast. One o’clock.” She swallowed. “Not as a tenant. You’d be our guest. And I know the kitchen schedule was terrible, and I know you’ve got your own place now, and you should keep it if you like it. But Sundays, if you want them, Sundays are yours.”

I looked at that lease in my hands. I thought about tearing it up the way I’d torn up Jake’s note, but it didn’t feel like that kind of paper. It felt more like something you keep, the way you keep a bill from a hospital stay you lived through.

So I folded it in thirds and put it in my Bible, in the back, behind the maps.

“What should I bring?” I said.

Brooke let out a breath like she’d been holding it since April. “You don’t have to bring anything.”

“I know I don’t have to,” I said. “That’s not what I asked.”

She almost laughed. “The kids talk about your pie.”

Sue’s rhubarb had come up in her garden that week, the first of the year, early and red. She’d left me a grocery sack of it on the stairs.

Sunday morning I got up early and made the crust from my mother’s recipe, the one with the lard, and I filled it with Sue’s rhubarb and a cup and a half of sugar and a little nutmeg, the way Gary liked it.

At ten to one I drove the four miles to Prairie Rose Lane. The trees in the yard had leafed out since April. Somebody had drawn a purple horse on the driveway in sidewalk chalk.

Emma and Owen were at the front window watching for me.

I parked by the curb, not in the driveway. Then I walked up to the front door, the door I didn’t have a key to anymore, and I rang the bell like a guest.

Brooke opened it. Jake was right behind her, and he wasn’t looking at the floor.

And I brought the pie.