The Party At My Own Grill
“I paid twice,” she said. “Two times, in eighteen months. And I told a lot of you it was my house. It’s not my house. It’s my brother’s house. I was ashamed, and I lied about it.”
Dylan was standing by the cake table. I saw his face change. He had not known. I could see that he had not known any of it.
“I’ve had a hard couple of years,” Tracie said. “Some of you know. Rick, the lawyer, the car. And I told myself Kyle and Lindsey were fine, that the Army was paying them to live over there, and they wouldn’t miss it.”
Her voice wobbled. She pushed through it.
“That wasn’t true either,” she said. “Kyle’s been paying the mortgage out of his own check the whole time. Lindsey’s been bagging groceries on base. Mom told me last night on the phone. I didn’t want to hear it.”
Kyle’s mother had not told me she had called Tracie. I found out later she had called her at ten o’clock Friday night and talked for an hour.
“So I owe them,” Tracie said. “I owe them fourteen thousand, four hundred dollars. And I’m going to pay it.”
Nobody said anything. A balloon popped somewhere behind the garage, and half the yard jumped.
Tracie looked around at the folding tables. Then she picked up a paper plate off the stack beside the cake, a clean one, and turned to the table nearest her.
“Does anybody have a pen?”
Jim Ostrander’s wife dug in her purse and handed one over.
Tracie set the paper plate on the corner of the folding table, right next to the sheet cake, and wrote on it with her head down. Her handwriting was the same big, loopy handwriting she had used on Kyle’s birthday cards since he was a boy.
She wrote: “$14,400. $300 a month. 48 months. Starting July 1. I’ll be moved out by August 1 so Kyle and Lindsey can rent to a real tenant.”
She signed it. Tracie Pruett. Then she held the pen out to me.
I want to be honest about what went through my mind. I thought about the eighteen months. I thought about every fifth of the month and the commissary tips in a coffee can and Kyle on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees.
I thought, too, about the morning her car got hauled off out of my driveway, and Dylan getting a ride to school with a neighbor.
I took the pen.
“You don’t have to move out by August,” I said. “Dylan’s starting at the tech college in Manhattan in the fall. Stay through the end of summer. Get him settled. Then move.”
Tracie looked at me like I had said it in German.
“Lindsey,” she said.
“September first,” I said. “And I’m not taking it on a paper plate because I think a paper plate means anything to a judge. I’m taking it because you wrote it in front of everybody you told it was your house. That’s what I want. That’s all I wanted.”