The Lease for the Room Over the Garage

Jake

Jake came Wednesday night. Alone.

I heard the two short knocks and I knew. This time I opened the door.

He was still in his work clothes, a seed company polo and jeans with dirt on the knees, and he had a manila envelope in one hand. He looked around the apartment like he’d never seen one before.

“It’s nice, Mom,” he said.

“Heat’s included,” I said. “Come sit down.”

He sat on the edge of my little couch with the envelope on his knees. I sat in Gary’s recliner. For a while neither of us said anything.

“I should have said no,” he said. “Right there. In your room. I should have said no, and I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Because she was scared, Mom. I didn’t understand it, but I knew she was scared, and I thought if I just let her have the paper, she’d feel safe and it would blow over. I thought you’d be mad at me for a week. I didn’t think you’d go.”

“I didn’t go far.”

“You know what I mean.” He looked at the floor again, and then he made himself stop, and looked at me instead. “Dad would have taken me out to the shop and made me split wood until I figured it out.”

That made me smile, because it was true. Gary believed you could split your way out of most trouble.

“Your dad would have been ashamed of you for about one afternoon,” I said. “And then he’d have helped you fix it. So let’s fix it.”

Jake opened the envelope. He took out two pages and handed them to me.

It was a promissory note. Typed, like the lease. Jake Kaltenbach promises to pay Deborah Kaltenbach the sum of $48,000, at zero percent interest, in monthly payments of $400 beginning June 1. Signed by Jake. Dated that day.

He’d signed it in blue ink.

“I can do $400,” he said. “I did the numbers. If I pick up the Mitchell co-op account this fall I can do more. It’ll take me ten years, but I’ll pay you every cent. You should have had this from the start. I should have made you take it.”

I looked at that paper a long time. I’m a billing clerk. I know what a promise on paper is worth, and I know what it isn’t.

Then I tore it in half. Then in half again.

“Mom.”

“Hush,” I said. “Listen to me. I didn’t give you that money as a loan. I gave it to you because you’re my boy, and those are my grandbabies, and I wanted them to have a yard. They have a yard.”

“But it’s your money.”

“It was. Now it’s a house.” I folded the torn pieces and set them on the side table. “If you want to pay somebody $400 a month, you open an account for Emma and Owen down at the bank on Main, and you pay it there. For college. Or trade school, or whatever they want. You pay it to them.”

He stared at me.

“And every year on my birthday,” I said, “you bring me the statement so I can see it. That’s my interest.”

Jake put his face in his hands. My son is not a crier. He didn’t cry at his father’s funeral, not where anyone could see. He cried that night, in my little apartment over the hardware store, and I got out of Gary’s chair and sat beside him on the couch and put my arm around him like he was six.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know, honey. I know you are.”

After a while he wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “Brooke told her mom,” he said. “Last night. She drove over to Brandon after the kids went down.”

“How’d that go?”

He let out a breath. “Her mom cried. Then she got mad. She said, ‘You did to that woman what Arlene never even did to me. Arlene at least never charged me rent.’ Brooke didn’t sleep all night.”

I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything good to say. Some lessons cost what they cost, and you don’t make them cheaper by talking.

“She’s going to come see you,” Jake said. “She wants to. She’s working up to it.”

“My door’s open,” I said. “It’s got its own stairs.”

He laughed, a real laugh, the first one I’d heard out of him in weeks.