Nine Days in My Mother in Law’s Sewing Room
Hailey held up her coat. The new button was sitting there, crooked by about a hair, sewn as tight as a drum.
“I did it,” she said. “Grandma, I sewed my first button.”
“You did,” Linda said, and she put her hand on the back of Hailey’s head. “My mother taught me on a treadle machine when I was just about your age. I sewed my first button on my daddy’s work shirt. I sewed it on the wrong side.”
Hailey laughed so hard she nearly fell off the chair. And Linda laughed too, a real laugh, the first one I’d heard out of her since we came through that door.
I stood in that hallway and cried. I didn’t make a sound.
I just leaned against the wall with a stack of clean diapers in my arms and let it come, because I hadn’t known how much I’d missed that sound in that house until I heard it.
It was the sixth night when I found out why.
June woke at two and wouldn’t settle, so I carried her to the kitchen to warm a bottle. The light over the stove was on.
Linda was sitting at the kitchen table in her robe with a cup of cold coffee in front of her and a set of keys in her hand.
They were Ron’s keys. Nate’s dad’s. I knew the key ring, a little brass tractor from the John Deere dealer in Salina.
His pickup had been sitting under the carport for two winters, a white Chevy with a hundred and eighty thousand miles on it. Nobody had driven it since the funeral.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll get out of your way.”
“You’re not in my way. It’s your kitchen.” I put June’s bottle in a pan of water on the stove and stood there swaying with her. “Linda, can’t you sleep?”
She turned the keys over and over in her hand. The little brass tractor caught the stove light. For a long time she didn’t say anything at all, and I didn’t push her.
“I haven’t paid the county since Ron died,” she said finally. “Not the full amount. I paid what I could. I kept thinking I’d catch up. Then in December the letter came with what was left from last year and the new first half and the interest, and the word delinquent stamped across the top.”
“Delinquent.”
“On this house.” She said it like the words tasted bad. “Ron and I paid it off the year Nathan graduated. Twenty-six years we lived in it together, and I was scared to death I’d lose it because I couldn’t keep up with the taxes on what I make at the school cafeteria and the little bit of pension he left me.”
I didn’t say anything. June found her fist and gnawed on it.
“I kept paying the insurance on that truck,” she said. “And the tag. Every year. Two years I’ve paid to keep a truck in my carport that nobody drives. Because he loved it. Because it smells like him in there, Kaitlyn. Sunflower seeds and that awful aftershave.”
“Why didn’t you tell Nate?”
“Because he’d have tried to fix it.” She laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “He’d have worked doubles at the elevator. He’d have sold something. And he has three babies and a wife and rent of his own. I’m his mother. I’m supposed to be the one who takes care of him.”
“So you took the money.”