The Rent Book in the Frame

After

I moved into my apartment above the hardware store on the first of November.

I set Grandma’s blue jar on the windowsill that looks out at the water tower, with Cody’s twenties still in it, and his note tucked under it.

Two weeks later Mom climbed the stairs to my apartment on a Sunday afternoon.

I heard her coming slow on the steps, because her knees aren’t good. She stood in my doorway holding the green ledger book.

I had left it on Cody’s kitchen table that night without thinking, and Mom had picked it up and carried it home with her.

She had carried it around for two weeks, she said, trying to work up to the stairs.

“I can’t pay you back four hundred,” she said, standing there in the doorway.

“I can’t even pay two. But I can pay fifty. Every month. Out of my own check. For as long as I’m alive or until it’s done.”

She held out an envelope. Then she held out the green book, open to the first blank line after September.

“Would you write it down for me?” she said. “I’d like it to be in the book. I’d like there to be some lines going the other way.”

So I sat down at my kitchen table and I wrote it, in my own handwriting this time. November 15. Received from Debbie Teague, $50.00. House jar, paid back. And my initials. M.T.

Mom watched me write it. Then she sat down across from me, and I made a pot of coffee, even though it was after noon.

We didn’t talk about much. But she stayed two hours, and she hugged me at the door.

Cody’s first official payment came on December first, in a card, with a photo of the yellow nursery tucked inside.

The baby came on December twentieth. They named her Emma Jean, after Grandma. Jean was Grandma Teague’s name.

I stood up at her baptism in January in my maroon sweater and promised to help raise her in the faith. Mom sat two pews back. She cried through the whole thing. So did I.

Three years

Cody never missed a month. Not once, not even the spring the dealer cut his hours, when I told him to skip it and he wouldn’t.

Mom never missed either. Fifty dollars, the fifteenth of every month, and the green book on my table.

It isn’t paid back yet. It won’t be for a long time.

But the lines keep going the other way, every month, in my handwriting, and some months Mom writes her own line and I just initial it.

In the spring three years after the housewarming, I closed on a little white two-bedroom on Elm Street with a chain-link fence and a lilac bush by the back step. One hundred forty-two thousand dollars.

My down payment was Cody’s money, and Mom’s fifty dollars, and every dollar I could put away from my own paycheck once I was paying my own way.

The loan officer at the bank in town didn’t ask for ten percent, and I didn’t need her to.

Emma Jean was two by then. Cody lifted her up under the arms at my new kitchen sink so she could reach, and she dropped a penny in Grandma’s jar, and it made that little bell sound against the glass.

The jar sits on my windowsill now, over my own sink, in my own little house.