The Aunt Who Took the Daycare Job

The space heater was gone. I stood at the bottom of the basement stairs at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night in January and looked at the bare outlet and the square dent in the carpet where it had sat for two winters.

It was nine degrees outside. I knew because the twins and I had read the thermometer on the kitchen window that afternoon, and Ella had said “nine” four times, holding up the wrong number of fingers every time.

I could hear the garage door rattling in the wind. I went back up the stairs, through the kitchen, and opened the door to the garage.

My brother was standing at his workbench with the heater on the floor beside him and the cord wrapped around it.

“Brandon,” I said. “That’s mine. That’s the one from the basement.”

He didn’t turn around right away. He was wiping his hands on a shop rag, the way he does when he is getting ready to say something he already decided on. Our dad used to do the same thing with a dish towel.

“It’s forty bucks a month, Jo,” he said. “I looked it up. That thing runs all night down there and it’s forty bucks a month on the electric. Use another blanket. You’ve got the green one.”

I was twenty-four years old. For three years I had raised his four children. Hunter was four. The twins, Ava and Ella, were two.

Wes was ten months old and still woke up twice a night, and most of those nights I was the one who heard him.

I had done it days, every weekday, and most nights when Kayla worked late at the hospital laundry and Brandon had to be at the plant by five in the morning.

My pay was a cot in the basement next to the furnace room door, and whatever groceries I ate.

Not a paycheck. Not a dollar a week. I had never asked for one, and they had never offered, and after a while it stopped being a thing anybody mentioned.

“Brandon, it’s nine degrees,” I said. “The basement isn’t finished. The window down there has frost on the inside.”

“Then sleep on the couch,” he said. “I can’t run a heater for one room all winter. I’m not made of money, Josie. You know they cut my overtime.”

I did know. The meat plant had cut everybody’s overtime in November, and Brandon had gone from bringing home fifty-two hours a week to forty.

He had been sitting at the kitchen table every night since then with a calculator and the stack of bills, punching numbers and rubbing his eyes.

I didn’t sleep on the couch. The couch was right outside Brandon and Kayla’s bedroom, and Wes slept in a crib in their room, and if I slept out there I would hear every word they said to each other about money. I had heard enough of those words already.

I went back down the stairs and put on my winter coat and my wool socks and got under the green blanket and the quilt our mom made, and I lay there looking at the ceiling joists.

I want to be honest about that night, because it would be easy to make myself sound braver than I was.

I didn’t cry because I was cold. I cried because he had stood there and said forty dollars like it was a number that settled something.