The Bedroom I Asked For

“Angie,” he said. “What are you doing?”

“Packing,” I said.

“You’re leaving me? Over my mother?”

“No,” I said, and I zipped the suitcase. “I’m going to go see what I bought.”

He didn’t understand that, and I didn’t explain it. I put my toothbrush and my reading glasses and my phone charger in the side pocket and rolled the suitcase out past him, and he stepped back to let me by.

Now, I know what somebody is going to say, because I said it to myself in the driveway. Call the credit union. Call somebody. Get the money back.

But it was a joint account. His name was right beside mine on the signature card, and it had been since 2004.

Every dollar he took was his to take. There was no phone call on earth that could undo a check that had already paid off a mortgage.

I could have called a lawyer, I suppose. Sat in a waiting room in Dalton and paid somebody two hundred dollars an hour to tell me what I already knew.

I didn’t want a lawyer. I didn’t want a motel room out by the interstate either.

What I wanted was to stand in front of that house with my own eyes. And I wanted to look his mother in the face and ask her what she knew.

Ronnie stood on the front porch while I loaded the suitcase into the back of my dark green SUV.

He didn’t come down the steps. He didn’t stop me. I think he thought I was going to drive around the block and come back.

He called me twice before I got to the highway. I let it ring.

Our daughter Kaylee called once, too. She is twenty, in her second year at the community college, sharing an apartment in Dalton with a girl from her nursing classes.

She’d have been on her way home from her night class.

I didn’t answer her either. She would have heard it in my voice in one word, and I didn’t want her driving with that in her head.

It is fifteen minutes from our house to Faye’s place in Chatsworth. I have driven it a thousand times for Sunday dinners and Thanksgivings and the night Ronnie’s daddy passed.

I had never once driven it with my whole life in a suitcase behind me.

I thought a lot of things on that drive. I thought about every pair of shoes I had walked past at the outlet mall.

I thought about the year I worked doubles all through August because the mill was behind and I wanted the overtime in the account before Christmas.

And I thought about Faye.

Faye Whitfield and I had always been polite with each other. That is the best word for it.

Polite. Christmas, Easter, birthdays, a card with ten dollars in it for Kaylee every year until she turned eighteen.

She worked thirty-one years in the sewing room at the same mill before I ever got there, binding the edges of rugs.

She used to tell me I talked too fast on the telephone. I used to think she didn’t think much of me.

But when my own mama died eight years ago, Faye was the first person at my door. Before my sister. Before the preacher.

She came in without knocking, put on a pot of coffee, and sat with me until the last casserole dish went home.