The Date on the Kitchen Calendar

The Phone Call

Carla called at noon. Kyle had not told her. I am sure of that. Kyle does not call anybody.

But in a town our size, Nate had stopped at the gas station and mentioned to his cousin that Kyle might be looking for a place, and the cousin’s wife sings in the choir with Carla.

“I can’t believe you would do this to him,” Carla said when I answered. She did not say hello.

“He took care of my mother for four years. He has nowhere to go. And you’re putting him out like a stray dog.” “Nobody is putting anybody out, Carla,” I said. “We gave him three months. We’re going to help him find a place. I’m going with him Saturday.”

“You had no right to make that decision.”

“It’s our house,” I said. I kept my voice soft. I was folding towels while I talked, and I made myself keep folding.

“You sold it to us. We paid you $186,000 for it. We’d be glad to have Kyle for supper any night of the week. But he deserves his own door.” There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear her kitchen radio playing the farm report.

“And the money,” she said finally. “I meant what I said. By Christmas.”

“I heard you,” I said. “We’ll talk about it Sunday, when Bob’s there too.”

She hung up without saying goodbye. I finished the towels.

Then I sat on the bathroom floor for a few minutes, because my hands were shaking, and I did not want the kids to see.

The List

That week Kyle and I did homework. I am not proud of much, but I am good at paperwork.

I spend all day at the hospital explaining bills to people who are scared of them, and I have learned that most fear is just not knowing what comes next.

So on Tuesday evening, before his shift, I sat at the card table with Kyle and a yellow legal pad. I asked him what he made.

He told me, a little embarrassed, and it was a fair wage for the mill, about eighteen dollars an hour with the night differential, forty hours a week, sometimes more at harvest.

“You can afford a place,” I told him. “A good one. You’ve been paying your grandma three hundred a month and buying her groceries for four years, and you still have money in savings. Did you know most people your age can’t say that?”

He shrugged, but he sat up a little straighter. I wrote it all down for him: what a landlord would ask for, what a deposit was, why they might want a pay stub, what it meant if they ran his credit.

He had never had a credit card. “That’s all right,” I said. “No debt is better than bad debt.”

On Wednesday he brought home three listings he had printed off the computer in the mill office. He had found them himself.

He held the papers out to me like a kid handing in a test, and I made a big deal over them, because he had earned it.

The first was a one-bedroom over the old hardware store downtown. The second was in a small brick building on Elm Street, four units, two up and two down.

The third was the back half of a duplex out by the highway, near the ethanol plant.

“Which one do you like best?” I asked him, and he turned the papers over in his hands like the answer might be printed on the back.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen one.”

“Then Saturday we’ll see all three,” I said. “And you’ll know. I promise you, you’ll know it when you walk in.”

Nate called the first number for him on Thursday, because Kyle could not make himself do it, and then I told Nate to stop.

“Let him do the next two,” I said. “You stand right there beside him. But let him do it.”

Kyle made the other two calls with Nate standing next to him at the kitchen counter. His voice shook on the first one and was steady by the second.

When he hung up he looked at Nate and said, “That wasn’t so bad,” and Nate clapped him on the back so hard he nearly fell over.