The Bedroom I Asked For

“He told me it was overtime and a bonus,” she said. “He said the propane company gave the drivers a bonus for a safe year, and he’d been putting back his overtime for a long time, and he wanted to do it for me. He sat at my table and told me that.”

The storm door was swinging shut on its spring, and I put my hand out and caught it.

“I knew it didn’t add up,” she said. “I’m not a fool. A man doesn’t get sixty thousand dollars of overtime driving a propane truck around Murray County. I knew. I just wanted it to be true so bad I let it be.”

She took her hand off her chest and reached out and took hold of the handle of my suitcase, right over my hand.

“The good bedroom is at the end of the hall,” she said. “The one with the quilt. Come in this house before Earl falls off his porch trying to see.”

So I went in.

Faye’s house smells the same as it has for twenty-four years, like coffee and Jergens lotion and whatever she cooked last.

That night it was cornbread. She rolled my suitcase down the hall herself, as if I were company, and I let her.

The good bedroom has a double bed with a wedding ring quilt her own mother pieced, and a dresser with a picture of Ronnie in his Little League uniform. She pulled the quilt back and felt the sheets.

“These are clean,” she said. “But I’ll put fresh ones on. You go sit down at the table. I’m putting the coffee on, and then you’re going to let me tell you something, and then you can be as mad as you need to be.”

I sat at her kitchen table. It is the same Formica table she has had since 1979, yellow with the little gold flecks, and the chair cushions tie on with strings. I put my hands flat on it and waited.

She came in and poured two cups and sat down across from me. She didn’t take her housecoat off. She folded her hands.

“You remember when Dale was sick,” she said.

I did. Ronnie’s daddy had a bad heart for six years before it finally gave out, and the last two years were one hospital after another, Dalton and then Chattanooga and then Atlanta for the surgery that didn’t take.

“His insurance didn’t cover near what we thought,” she said. “When he passed there was better than forty thousand dollars in bills. People were calling the house. A man from a collection place called me the morning of the funeral.”

“Faye,” I said. “You never told us that.”

“I didn’t tell anybody,” she said. “I refinanced this house. The house was paid for, Angie. Dale and I paid it off in 2001, and we burned the paper in the grill out back.”

She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

“And I went to the bank and borrowed ninety thousand over fifteen years, the bills and a new roof and the closing costs, and put it back in debt so nobody would have to know we couldn’t pay a hospital.”

She said it like a confession. In a way, I suppose it was.