The Little White House on Elm Street

She sat there for maybe five minutes. I watched her. I don’t think she knew I could see her.

Then she got out, and she had a shopping bag in one hand, and she came up the five steps and stood on the porch and didn’t knock.

I opened the door. The screen eased shut behind me with that soft little click.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi.” She held the bag out. “You don’t have curtains. I drove by. I could see right into your front room from the street.”

Inside the bag were curtains. Not new ones from the store. She’d sewn them.

Pale yellow cotton with a little white stitch along the hem, enough for the front window and the kitchen window both.

I recognized the fabric. She’d bought it years ago for a quilt she never made.

“You made these,” I said.

“I had the fabric.” She looked past me into the house. “I measured the windows from the outside. I hope they fit. Your grandpa told me which ones.”

“Do you want to come in?”

She hesitated, and then she nodded, and she came in and stood in my little front room with her purse still on her shoulder, the same way she’d stood in the driveway, and looked around at everything.

“It’s nice,” she said. “It’s small.”

“It’s seven twenty-five.”

She flinched at that, a little, and I was sorry I’d said it. I didn’t say it to be mean. I think I just wanted her to know I’d done the math.

She sat down at my kitchen table, in one of Great-Grandma’s chairs. I made coffee.

She didn’t say anything until I set the cup in front of her, and then she put both hands around it and looked at it.

“I listed the lot,” she said. “Last week. A man from Cedar Rapids already called about it. He wants the camper too.”

“Mom, you didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did.” She looked up. “I’ve been driving past this house every day for a month. Every day. And every day I’d see that blue truck parked here, or I’d see your light on, and I’d think, she did it. She did it by herself, and I’m the reason she had to.”

“You’re not the only reason.”

“I’m the main one.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I told myself you were fine. I told myself that every single month when I picked up that envelope. She’s fine, she’s got a job, she’s young. I needed it to be true so bad that I made it true.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m going to pay your grandpa back what I can,” she said.

“And whatever’s left, I want it to go to your last term. Not to him. To you, with your name on it.”

“Okay,” I said. And then, because it was true, “I’m glad you came.”

“I’m sorry, Haley.” She said it to her coffee. Then she said it again, to me.

“I’m sorry. For the rent. For all of it. You should have had your own grandpa’s money the whole time.”

We hung the curtains together that afternoon. She stood on a kitchen chair and I handed her the rods, and they fit, every one of them, right to the quarter inch.

My mother can measure a window from a sidewalk. I’d forgotten that about her.