Nine Days in My Mother in Law’s Sewing Room
I sat in the daycare kitchen with the door shut and the baby monitor turned low and asked for anybody who could help.
I got Pam, who has worked the front counter at Farmers State since before I was born.
She taught Sunday school to half the town. She lowered her voice like she knew exactly why I was calling.
“Honey, she came in Tuesday morning,” Pam said. “She had us cut a cashier’s check made out to the county treasurer. Her name is on that account as a joint owner, Kaitlyn. Joint owners can take out any amount they want. There’s nothing we can do on our end.”
“Even if it’s not her money?”
“The bank doesn’t know whose money is whose. It just knows whose names are on the card.” Pam sighed. “You could file a report with the sheriff, I suppose. But it would be Nate who’d have to say she took it without permission. And it’s his mother.”
I thanked her. I sat in that daycare kitchen for a minute with my hand over my mouth. The county treasurer. So it was her property taxes.
I didn’t know yet why a woman who kept her house as neat as a church would be behind on her taxes.
That night I told Nate what Pam said.
He was sitting on the edge of the tub while Owen splashed and Hailey read him a library book about a tugboat, holding it up so he could see the pictures.
“I’m not calling the sheriff on my mother,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, Kait. I won’t do it.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“I know you’re not.” He rubbed his face. His hands were still rough from the cold, chapped across the knuckles from the elevator. “I’ll go talk to her tomorrow after work. She’ll put it back. She said Friday.”
And he did go. I’ll say that for Nate. He drove over there in his work coat after his shift on Thursday and sat at her kitchen table for an hour.
He came home quiet and kissed the top of my head where I sat folding towels.
“She says Friday,” he said. “She says she’s sorry it came at a bad time. She wouldn’t tell me what it was for. She just kept saying it’s handled and she’ll make it right.”
“Did she say she was sorry she took it?”
He thought about it, the way he does. Nate never answers a thing fast. “No,” he said. “She said she was sorry about the timing.”
I called our landlord on Friday morning. Mr. Weber is eighty-one and owns four rental houses on our end of town, the kind of man who still writes receipts by hand in a carbon book and tucks them in your door.
I told him the truth. Not every part of it, but the part he needed.
A family thing had happened with the account, and I could give him four hundred today and the rest as soon as it came back.
There was a long quiet on the line. Then he said, “Your husband’s mother?”
Small towns. I said, “Yes, sir.”
“Well,” he said. “Pay me what you can. I’ll knock off the late fee. I had a mother-in-law once.” And then he laughed, a dry little cough of a laugh, and hung up before I could thank him.
So the rent was not going to put us on the street. I want to be fair about that. We were not going to be homeless.