Thirty One Days in the Church Basement

The Red Cross Lady

A woman from the Red Cross got to us a little after midnight. Her name was Carla, and she had driven over from Chillicothe. She sat with me at Bev’s kitchen table and filled out forms on a clipboard.

She was kind and fast. She gave me a card with some money on it for clothes and shoes, and she got us three nights at a motel in Chillicothe. She said the Red Cross usually covers a few nights while families figure out the next step.

“Do you have insurance?” she asked.

We did. We had a homeowner’s policy through a little agency on the square. But I had already called our agent, Gail, and Gail had said the words “claim number” and “adjuster” and “additional living expenses” and “could be a couple of weeks.”

The motel was forty minutes away. The kids’ school was four blocks from our house. Brody had basketball. Kenzie had a spelling bee. Lily went to the Head Start in the church annex three mornings a week.

Forty minutes each way, twice a day, with four kids and a borrowed car, on a CNA’s schedule. I did the math sitting at Bev’s table, and the math did not work.

That was why I had called Jessica. Not because I wanted to. Because she was eight minutes away, and she had a house with four empty bedrooms, and she was my sister.

Jessica

You have to understand something about my sister, and I did not understand it all the way myself until later.

Jessica is three years older than me. Our dad left when I was six. Mom cleaned motel rooms and later worked at the shoe factory before it closed. We lived in a rented house on the north end of town that had plywood floors in two of the bedrooms.

Not plywood under carpet. Just plywood. Mom painted it brown one summer to make it look nicer, and the paint wore off in paths where we walked.

Jessica was the oldest. She was the one who went to the church clothing closet first and wore the coats before they came to me. She was the one the girls at school noticed. She was the one who stopped bringing friends home in the fourth grade.

I was the baby. I had Jessica in between me and most of it.

She married Rick at twenty. Rick works at the ethanol plant, a good steady man who coaches T-ball. They had two boys right away, and they lived in a trailer for eleven years and saved every dollar they could.

Six years ago they built a house on the edge of town. Five bedrooms, a basement, a big kitchen. Her boys are grown now. Tanner is in the Army at Fort Leonard Wood, and Josh is at the community college in Trenton and lives in an apartment there.

That fall, Jessica had finally put carpet in. Wall to wall, through the whole upstairs and the living room. A soft, pale color called Oyster. Eleven thousand dollars, financed over five years at the flooring place in Chillicothe.

She had sent me a picture of it in October. Just the carpet, nothing else in the picture. She had written underneath it, “I keep taking my shoes off to walk on it.”

I had sent back a heart. I had meant it.