The Deed I Gave on Mother’s Day

The one time I said something

I let it go the first few times. I told myself he’d had a bad day. I told myself it was the way young men talk now, and I was out of touch.

But it did not stop. It got easier for him. By that first Christmas it was just what he called me when I spoke, the way some families call Grandma “Nana.”

“The stupid old woman wants to know if we’ve tried the new Mexican place.” “Better ask the stupid old woman, she knows everything.”

He said it smiling, every time, so that if I took offense I would be the one with no sense of humor.

In February of the second year, I asked him to step out on the porch with me after supper.

It was cold and the porch light was buzzing. I said, “Troy, I’d appreciate it if you’d quit calling me that in front of the kids.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he said, “It’s my house, Marcy.”

And I said, “Well, it’s my mother’s house,” and I should not have said that, and I knew it the second it was out.

He went inside. I heard the back bedroom door shut. I drove home, and the next morning Heather did not answer my call, or the one after that.

She did not answer my calls for two weeks. When she finally did, she said, “Mama, you make it worse. When you push him, he’s like that all night. Please just let it go. Please.”

So I let it go. I am not proud of that.

I want to tell this honestly, and the honest part is that for a long time, I sat at that table and ate quiet so my daughter would not have to pay for it later.

Why I did not just put them out

People will ask why I did not just raise the rent, or hand them a thirty-day notice and let Troy see how he liked eleven hundred a month in somebody else’s house. My friend Kim asked me exactly that.

Kim works the window at our post office. We have eaten lunch together in the break room for fifteen years.

She is a no-nonsense woman, and when I finally told her about the stupid old woman business, she slapped the table.

“Put him out,” she said. “It’s your house. Give them thirty days. Let him find out what a rent payment looks like.”

“And where do Heather and those babies go for thirty days?” I asked her. “Back to some place in Shawnee that eats half their money? Bella just started at the school here. Jace has his little friend across the street.”

Kim did not have an answer for that. Neither did I, for a long while.

It was my house to do with as I pleased, and every way I thought of to make Troy pay for it, the people who would pay first were my daughter and her kids.

That is the plain truth of it. I could have punished him.

But I would have been punishing Heather to do it, and I was not going to put my own girl and two little children on the street to teach a grown man some manners.

Troy

I want to be fair to Troy, because this story is not fair if I am not. He is not a lazy man.

He works ten-hour days at the pipe yard, out in the wind and the sun, and he has not missed a shift since I have known him.

He is good with those kids. I have seen him lie on the living room floor and let Jace climb on him like a jungle gym for an hour.

Heather told me some of what I did not know. Troy’s own daddy talked to his mama like that, every day of Troy’s growing up.

Stupid this, stupid that. Troy’s mama never said a word back, and she died at sixty-one still not saying it.

“He swore he’d never be like his dad,” Heather told me once, in the car, quiet. “He says it all the time. And then he does it, Mama, and he doesn’t even hear himself.”

I believed her. I still do. I think Troy grew up in a house where that was what a man sounded like at the supper table, and every time I helped them with something, he heard his daddy telling him he was worth nothing.

That is a reason. It is not an excuse. Plenty of people grow up with a mean daddy and turn out gentle on purpose.

But it was a reason, and I tried to keep it in front of me.