The Day Mom Took the Front Bedroom

My mother’s lease

I called Mom at nine o’clock, which is late for her. She answered on the second ring with the television going in the background, some show about people buying houses on islands.

“What’s wrong,” she said. Mothers do not say hello after eight-thirty.

I told her. I told her the whole thing, including the part about the gas bill, which I had never told her. She was quiet a long time.

“Well,” she said finally. “Isn’t that something.”

“Mom, what’s going on with your lease?”

That was the thing. I had been carrying it around in my head the whole drive home. Mom’s lease at the Meadowbrook Apartments was up on October 31. Ten days. The new management company had sent a letter in August.

The rent was going up $175 a month. On a school cook’s income, with her retiring at Christmas break, that was not a small thing. She had been fretting about it for two months and pretending to me she was not.

“I was going to talk to you and your daddy after Thanksgiving,” she said. “I was going to sign on for six more months and then see.”

“You don’t have to sign anything,” I said. “You own half a house.”

“Shane.”

“You were always going to retire there. That was the plan. That was the whole plan from the beginning, Mom. You said it at the closing.”

“I’m not going over there to fight your daddy,” she said. “I am 64 years old and I have not been in a room with that man for more than a funeral in twenty years. I’m not starting with a fight.”

“You’re not fighting,” I said. “You’re moving home.”

She did not say anything for so long I thought the call had dropped. I could hear the island show. Somebody was excited about a kitchen.

“The front bedroom gets the morning sun,” she said, very quietly.

“It does.”

“June’s violets would like that.”

I did not know what she meant. I did not ask. I just said I would take Friday off and borrow a trailer and be there at seven.

Friday

I called Rick at six in the morning and told him I needed the day. He did not ask why. He just said he would put the Hendersons’ heat pump on Monday and told me to give my mother his best.

Amy’s brother Jeff brought his flatbed trailer and his own dolly, and the three of us were at Mom’s apartment by seven. She had coffee made. She had been up since four, and she had labeled every box in black marker in her careful school-cook printing.

Kitchen, everyday. Kitchen, good dishes. Bathroom. Winter. And one small box, on the counter by itself, that said only June.

By eleven the trailer was full. By noon we were on Persimmon Street.

Dad was not home. His truck was gone. He spent most days at Tammy’s place now, out on the county road past the grain elevator. I had a key. I had always had a key. I had never once used it without knocking first.

I knocked anyway. Nobody came. I unlocked the door.

Mom stood on the porch for a long minute before she came in. She put her hand on the white swing, the one June used to sit me on, and gave it a little push, and watched it go.

“He kept it painted,” she said.

“Every spring.”

She went inside.

The front bedroom had been Dad’s junk room for six years. Boxes of foundry paperwork, a broken treadmill, a recliner with the stuffing coming out, and about forty empty coffee cans he was saving for no reason anybody could name.

By three o’clock it was a room again. Mom’s quilt on the bed. Her dresser between the windows. Her recliner in the corner. Her Bible on the nightstand next to her reading glasses. Her housecoat on the hook on the back of the door.

The box marked June was still in the truck. Mom had not let anybody carry it. I asked her where she wanted it, and she said to just leave it in the cab for now, and I did.