Thirty One Days in the Church Basement

The Answer

I want to tell you that I ran across the room and hugged my sister. I did not. I stood there, because I wanted to be sure of what I was going to say before I said it.

The whole room was waiting on me. I could feel it.

“You hurt my kids,” I said. My voice was quiet. I have never been a yeller. “Kenzie stopped saying your name. That’s what it cost. Not the carpet. Her.”

“I know,” Jessica said.

“I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen.”

“I don’t want you to,” she said. “I want to fix it. I don’t know how, but I want to.”

I looked at Lily, still on the carpet, now drawing what was definitely a dog with five legs. I looked at Kenzie.

“Then here’s how,” I said. “The house won’t be done until spring. You take them on weekends. All four. Every weekend until we’re home. They sleep in your bedrooms, and they walk on your carpet in their socks, and you let them be kids in your house.”

Jessica did not even blink.

“Every weekend,” she said. “Friday after school. I’ll pick them up myself.”

“On the carpet,” I said.

“On the carpet,” she said. “Shoes and all, if they want. I don’t care anymore. I’ll buy a steam cleaner.”

Somewhere behind me, Harold made a sound that was half a laugh and half a cough.

Then Kenzie set the quilt down on her cot, walked over, and stood in front of her aunt. She was almost as tall as Jessica now. I had not noticed that until that minute.

“I’d have taken my shoes off,” Kenzie said. “I’d have been careful.”

Jessica put her arms around her, and Kenzie let her, and that is when I finally crossed the room.

Weekends

Jessica kept her word. Every Friday at 3:15, from that December until the end of April, her silver Equinox was parked outside the school.

The kids slept in her four bedrooms. Brody got Tanner’s old room with the deer mounts. Kenzie got the guest room with the window seat. Cole and Lily fought over the room with the bunk bed until Jessica gave up and let them both sleep on the living room floor in sleeping bags, on the Oyster carpet, right in front of the TV.

Lily spilled grape juice on it the second weekend. Jessica sent me a picture of the stain. Underneath it she wrote, “Rick says we should frame it.”

Cole spilled chocolate milk on it in January. Brody tracked in mud from the barn lot in February. Kenzie dripped red fingernail polish in March, and cried, and Jessica sat down with her on the floor and painted her own toes the same color on purpose, right there on the carpet.

Jessica and Kenzie started doing something together on Saturdays that neither one of them would tell me about. I found out later it was quilting. Doris Albright was teaching them. They were making a quilt out of the kids’ clothes from the donation bags, the ones they had worn through that whole winter.

Jessica came back to church in January. She sat in her regular pew. The two women who had moved came back across the aisle the next Sunday, and nobody said a word about that either.