The Loft Above the Shop
After a while, she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and looked up at me.
“Why didn’t you call me?” she said. It was not angry. It was just tired.
“He asked me not to,” I said. “He said if I called, we’d fight, and he’d be the one who had to go home to it. He was right, Jen. You know he was.”
She closed her eyes and nodded. She did not argue. I think that was the moment I knew something had changed between us, because three years ago she would have argued with me about the color of the sky.
Then she said the thing I will remember for the rest of my life.
“Nobody pays rent in my house,” she said. “Not my son. Not ever. Not one dollar. I don’t care whose name is on the refinance.” She stood up and looked up the stairs at the loft and shook her head slowly. “And you built him this.”
“Dad and I did,” I said. “Six weekends.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, very softly, “Thank you, Ryan. And I hate that you had to.”
She took Brody up to see the room. I stayed downstairs and finished the starter, because I did not know what else to do with my hands. I heard them up there talking low for a long time.
When they came down, Jen had seen the beam. I could tell by her face. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and put her hand on the pine post Dad had turned.
“Gene did that?” she asked me.
“Last Saturday,” I said. “He wouldn’t let me come up.”
She nodded. My dad had always liked Jen, even after. She looked at that post a long time, and then she picked up the coat off my workbench and handed it to Brody.
“Put this on,” she said. “Come home for supper Sunday. Kurt and I are going to talk tonight. Then all three of us are going to talk Sunday.”
“Mom,” Brody said, worried. “Don’t make it a whole thing.”
“It’s already a whole thing, honey,” she said. “It’s been a whole thing since June. I just didn’t know it.” She kissed him on the cheek, which he had to bend down for, and went out into the snow.
I don’t know exactly what Jen said to Kurt that night. Brody told me later that the house was very quiet when he went over on Sunday, and that Kurt was sitting at the kitchen table when he came in, with an envelope in front of him.
On Thursday, Kurt came to the shop himself.
He pulled in at six in the evening and sat in his truck for a minute before he came in. When he did, he took his hat off just inside the door, and he stood there holding it in both hands.
“Ryan,” he said. “Is Brody here?”
“Up in the loft doing homework,” I said. I called up the stairs, and Brody came down, slow, and stood next to me at the workbench. I put my hand on his shoulder.
Kurt held out an envelope. It was the same kind of envelope, plain and white. On the front, in that same neat blue block printing, it said Brody. Nothing else.
“That’s six hundred dollars,” Kurt said. “Every dollar. I should have never taken it.”
Brody did not reach for it right away. He looked at me, and I nodded, and he took it.
Kurt cleared his throat. He looked at the floor, then made himself look back up at Brody. I respected that.