The Loft Above the Shop

The envelope fell out of Brody’s jacket when he climbed into my pickup outside the grocery store. It was ten after nine on a Wednesday in September, and he had just finished a six-hour shift.

It landed on the floor mat face up. Somebody had written on it in blue ink, in neat block letters, a name and a month. Kurt. September.

Brody grabbed it fast, the way you grab something you hope nobody saw. He stuffed it back in his pocket and pulled his seat belt across and stared straight out the windshield at the cart corral.

“What’s that, bud?” I asked him. I kept my voice easy.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just rent.”

I didn’t put the truck in gear. I sat there with my hand on the shifter and the heater fan running and looked at my son, who was sixteen years old and suddenly looked about forty.

“Rent for what?” I asked.

He let out a long breath, and then he told me. He told it flat, like he had practiced telling it so it wouldn’t sound like a complaint. That was the part that got me first.

Back in June, Kurt had sat him down at the kitchen table. Kurt is my ex-wife’s husband. They have been married a little over two years, and he moved into the house Jen kept when we split.

“He said if I was old enough to have a job, I was old enough to pay my way,” Brody said. “He said two hundred a month was a deal. He said anywhere else it would be six.”

“And your mom said that was fine?” I asked.

Brody looked down at his hands. They were rough already, nicked up from box cutters and pallet wrap. “Kurt said it was between him and me. He said it was a man thing, and Mom didn’t need to be in it.”

I did the math in my head without meaning to. Brody makes twelve dollars an hour stocking shelves. Two hundred dollars is about seventeen hours of his life, every month, to sleep in the bedroom he grew up in.

“How many times have you paid it?” I asked.

“This is the third,” he said. “June was free because I started late. July, August, and now September.”

Six hundred dollars. I sat with that number for a second. Then he said the thing that made my hands go cold on the wheel.

“I’m not going out for basketball this year,” he said. “Tryouts are in November, and practice is every night. I can’t get my hours if I’m in the gym till six.”

My son has played basketball since he was six years old. He has dribbled a ball on every driveway, church parking lot and gravel road in this county.

“Brody,” I said.

“Dad, it’s fine,” he said. “Kurt says his stepdad made him pay rent at sixteen, and it made him a man. He says I’ll thank him someday.”

I reached for my phone. I did not even think about it. My thumb was already on Jen’s name when Brody put his hand on my arm.

“Please don’t,” he said. “Dad. Please. It’ll just turn into a fight, and you’ll yell, and she’ll yell, and then I’m the one who has to go back there and sleep in that house.”

I looked at him. He was not crying, but he was close to it, the way boys his age get close and then swallow it down hard.

“I don’t yell,” I said.

“You don’t yell at me,” he said quietly. “You and Mom yell. You know you do.”