The Bedroom I Asked For

“I would have said yes,” I said again. “I’d have been scared to death and I’d have cried about it in the car. But it’s your mama. It’s the house Kaylee learned to walk in. I would have said yes.”

“Angie,” he said.

“That’s what you took from me,” I said. “Not the money. You took me getting to be the one who said yes. You decided I was the kind of woman who’d let your mother lose her house. And I’m not. I never have been. You should have known that after twenty-four years.”

Nobody said anything for a long time. The clock over Faye’s stove ticked. Across the road, Earl’s dog barked once at something.

Then Ronnie put his face in his hands and said, “I’m sorry. Angie, I’m so sorry. Mama, I’m sorry.”

He said it to both of us, and he meant it to both of us, and I believed him.

I have been married to that man long enough to know what it sounds like when he means a thing.

But Faye wasn’t finished.

She got up again and went to the drawer by the telephone, the same drawer the foreclosure letter came out of, and she came back with a sheet of paper from the credit union and laid it down in front of me.

“I went to the credit union Friday while you were at work,” she said. “Earl drove me. I don’t drive to Dalton anymore.”

It was a form for an automatic transfer. Four hundred dollars, on the third of every month, from Faye’s checking account, the one where her Social Security goes, into an account in my name.

“That’s not our account,” I said.

“No,” Faye said. “It’s yours. Just yours. You’ll go open it Monday in your own name, and then you call that girl at the credit union and give her the number. She already knows it’s coming.”

“Faye, you can’t,” I said. “That’s your Social Security. You live on that.”

“I live on it just fine,” she said. “That house payment was seven hundred and eighty dollars a month, and now I don’t have one. Four hundred to you still leaves me three hundred and eighty to the good. I did the arithmetic. I’m not senile.”

“Mama,” Ronnie said.

“Hush,” said Faye. “This isn’t yours.”

She turned back to me.

“At four hundred a month,” she said, “it takes a hundred and fifty months to pay you back sixty thousand dollars. That’s twelve and a half years. I’ll be eighty-six and a half. Earl’s eighty and still mows his own yard, so I intend to make it.”

I laughed. I didn’t mean to, and it came out half a sob, and Faye smiled for the first time all day.

“I have paid a house payment every month of my married life,” she said. “To the bank, to the government, to the man Dale bought this land from. This is the first house payment I ever made to a daughter. You let me make it.”

I could not say anything at all. I just nodded.

Then she looked at her son.

“And you,” she said. “Whatever overtime you work from now until Christmas goes into Angie’s account, too. Not the joint one. Hers. And every Sunday, you’re going to come to this house for dinner, and when we’re done, you’re going to wash every dish in that sink.”