The Loft Above the Shop
He told his mom I had fixed up a room for him in the shop. He did not tell her why. He asked me not to, and I didn’t. I figured it was his to tell, when he was ready.
I’ll be honest, part of me wanted Jen to find out. Part of me wanted her to know exactly what her husband had done and how long our son had carried it. I am not proud of that part.
The other part of me remembered what my dad said about Grandpa and the coffee can. People can make things right if you leave them the room to do it. I decided to leave the room.
I could not make Kurt stop charging him. But I could make sure rent was never the price of a bed.
Two weeks after the key, we got our first real snow. Six inches overnight, wet and heavy, and the county plow had not been down my road yet.
Brody had gone straight from practice to the shop, and he was under a customer’s grain truck with me, holding a light while I pulled a starter.
The side door opened, and a blast of cold came in, and so did Jen.
She was carrying Brody’s winter coat, the heavy brown Carhartt one. She had stamped the snow off her boots and was already talking when she came in.
“You left this in the front closet, and it’s twenty degrees out,” she said. “You’re going to freeze to death driving around in that hoodie.”
Then she stopped talking.
She was looking up at the loft. The wooden staircase, the pine railing, the light on in the window up top. Kelly’s curtains. She stood there in her snowy boots with that coat over her arm, and her mouth closed slowly.
“Brody,” she said. “Why do you need a bedroom out here?”
Brody slid out from under the truck on the creeper and stood up. He looked at me. I did not say a word. I wiped my hands on a rag and kept my mouth shut, and it was the hardest thing I had done all year.
It was his to tell.
He took a breath. “Because Kurt charges me rent,” he said. “Two hundred a month. Since June. I paid him six hundred dollars, Mom. I quit basketball for a while to pay it. Dad built this so I’d have somewhere that was free.”
Jen did not move. She stood there holding the coat, and I watched the color go out of her face, and then come back in a hard red line across her cheeks.
“He charges you rent,” she said. “To live in my house.”
“He said it was between him and me,” Brody said. “He said you didn’t need to be in it. Mom, don’t be mad. He wasn’t mean about it. He thinks it’s good for me.”
She set the coat down on my workbench very carefully, like it was made of glass. Then she sat down on the bottom step of the new stairs, right where my dad had stood, and put her face in her hands.
I did not know what to do. I am a mechanic. When something breaks, I fix it, and if I cannot fix it, I find the part. There is no part for your ex-wife crying on a staircase you built.
Brody went and sat next to her. He put his long arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him, and the two of them sat there while the shop heater ticked overhead and the snow came down outside the open door.