The Widow Across the Gravel Road

The notepad was yellow, the long legal kind, and my mother kept it on the counter by the bread box, right where the church bulletin used to sit.

She tore the top sheet off on the first Friday in January and slid it across the counter to me. Owen was in the living room in his socks. Sam was asleep on the couch with one boot still on.

The sheet said, in her neat schoolteacher handwriting: Tues 6. Wed 6. 12 hours at $15. $180. She had underlined the $180 twice.

“I figured we’d make it official,” Mom said. “New year. Everybody ought to be fair.”

I looked at that paper a long time. I had just come off two twelve-hour nights on the medical floor at the county hospital, and my eyes felt like somebody had rubbed sand in them.

“You’re charging me,” I said.

“I’m charging you for my time, Jenna. I’m not charging you for sleeping. I don’t count the hours I’m in bed.” She said it like she was being generous, and I think in her own mind she was.

That was how she got to twelve. I dropped the boys at her house in town at a quarter after six on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. She counted the evening, supper and baths and prayers, and she counted the early morning when she got them up and fed. She left out the middle. Six hours a night, two nights a week.

Twelve paid hours. Fifteen dollars an hour. One hundred and eighty dollars, every Friday.

The other grandchildren

I want to tell this fair, because I have had a long time to think about it and I have tried hard not to make my mother into somebody she is not.

There were toys all over her living room floor that morning, and most of them were not mine. A plastic kitchen. A baby swing. A pink bike with training wheels leaned up by the back door, though it was eleven degrees outside.

My brother Kyle has three. Kaylee is five, Mason is three, and Emma was not quite one that winter. They were at Mom’s four days a week, Monday through Thursday, from about eight in the morning until Kyle got off at the co-op elevator at five.

I asked the question I should not have asked. I asked it quietly, so Owen would not hear.

“Mom, does Kyle pay you?”

She did not even look up from the sink. “Brittany needs the break. She’s got three little ones. You’ve got two and a paycheck.”

“Brittany doesn’t work.”

“That’s what I’m saying. She’s home with them all day otherwise. She needs the break.”

I stood there with my coat half zipped. There is a kind of sentence that makes no sense and still closes the door, and my mother had always been good at those. I did not push it. I paid her the $180 in cash out of my purse and I took my boys home.