The Rent Book in the Frame

The first I heard of it was over a pot roast on a Sunday in September, with my mother passing the green beans across the table like nothing in the world had changed.

Kayla was halfway through her second dinner roll when she said it. She was six months along then, hungry all the time, and happy in the way that makes a person talk a little too much.

“I still can’t believe we close in three weeks,” she said, buttering the roll. “Debbie, I don’t know how we will ever thank you. Thirty-three thousand six hundred dollars. Who just has that kind of money?”

My fork stopped over my plate. I remember the gravy running off the end of it, back down onto the potatoes, and the tick of the old kitchen clock over the stove.

Thirty-three thousand six hundred dollars. I did not have to do the math.

I had done that exact math in my head every month for seven years, every time I tore a check out of my checkbook.

Mom did not look at me. She said, “Well, that’s what family is for,” and she reached across Cody for the butter dish, and her hand was perfectly steady.

Cody grinned and squeezed Kayla’s shoulder. He had grease in the creases of his knuckles that never fully washed out, the way it never did with Dad’s hands either.

“Mom’s been squirreling it away for years,” he said, shaking his head and smiling. “Don’t ask me how she did it. I sure couldn’t.”

I knew how she did it. I sat there with my fork in the air and I knew exactly how, down to the dollar and down to the date.

The jar

I need to explain about the jar first, or none of the rest of this is going to make any sense to you.

My Grandma Teague kept an old blue mason jar on the windowsill over her kitchen sink for as long as I can remember.

It was the old kind, the glass gone a little cloudy, with a zinc lid she never screwed down tight.

She called it the house jar. When she and Grandpa were first married they rented two rooms over a feed store in Lyons, and she put every spare coin she had into that jar until they had enough to buy a little place.

When I was small she let me drop pennies into it. She would lift me up under the arms so I could reach over the sink, and the coins made a sound against the glass like a little bell ringing.

“A jar is just a promise you can see,” she told me once, setting me back down on the linoleum.

“That’s all it is, Megan. You look at it every morning and you remember what you’re doing it for.”

When she died I was nineteen. Dad had been gone two years by then, his heart, at fifty-one, out in his shop with the radio still going.

Mom took the blue jar home and set it on her own windowsill.

I used to look at it while I did the dishes. I used to think about Grandma lifting me up, the cold glass and the bell sound, and the feed store rooms she got herself out of one coin at a time.