The Day Mom Took the Front Bedroom

Six free years

I want to be fair to my father, because he is my father and because he is not a bad man. He is a man who has been disappointed by almost everything, and who learned early to be the first one to walk away.

He kept the yard mowed. He kept the gutters clean. He fixed the drip in June’s bathroom sink with a washer from his own coffee can of washers. He did not tear the place up.

But he did not pay for it, either. Mom paid half the property taxes, about $350 a year. I paid the other half and the homeowner’s insurance. And most months, around the twentieth, Dad would call me about the gas bill.

“Running a little short this month, bud.”

It was never a lot. Eighty dollars. A hundred and ten in January. I paid it because he was my father and because it was easier to pay it than to listen to him not ask for it.

Six years of that is a lot of Januarys.

Mom never once went to the house. Not one time. When Dad moved in, she said it was his place to live in until it was hers, and she was not going to be the ex-wife standing in his kitchen.

She would ask me about it, though. Whether the lilac by the back step had bloomed. Whether he had kept the porch swing painted. Whether the front bedroom still got the morning light.

I always said yes. It did. That front bedroom has two windows on the east side, and in the morning the light comes through June’s old lace curtains and lands on the floor in little flowers.

The phone call I did not make

Amy was at the kitchen table with her reading glasses on her head, doing the bills, when I got home that Tuesday. She took one look at me and pushed the checkbook aside.

“What did he do,” she said.

I told her. She listened all the way through without interrupting, which is one of the things I married her for. When I got to the part about feeling good about ourselves, she took her glasses off.

“So call him back,” she said. “Tell him no. It’s your house.”

But I had been telling my father no my whole life, and he had never once heard it as anything but maybe. He would say fine and hang up, and then on Saturday the truck would come anyway.

And once Tammy’s boys had their beds set up and their mail coming there, I would be the son who put his own father’s girlfriend and her kids out on the curb in November. I would never get them out without becoming a man I did not want to be.

“He doesn’t hear no,” I said. “He hears a starting price.”

Amy thought about that. She put her glasses back on and looked at me over the top of them, the way she looks at a patient who has told her he is fine.

“Then call your mother,” she said.