The Rent Book in the Frame
The rent book
At twenty-two I finished my nurse aide certificate and went to work at the county nursing home, the long brick building out past the grain elevator.
I worked nights at first, and then days, for a little over fourteen dollars an hour.
That fall Mom sat me down at the kitchen table. She had made a pot of coffee, which she never did after noon, so I knew right away that it was something serious.
“I’m not going to charge you rent like some landlord,” she said, pouring two cups.
“But I want you to pay me four hundred a month. And every dollar of it is going in Grandma’s jar. For your first house.”
She said it so kindly. She put her hand over mine on the table.
Her hand was warm from the coffee cup, and her eyes were wet, and I could tell she had been thinking about it for a long time.
“You’ll never save on your own,” she said. “Nobody your age does. So I’ll save it for you, at the bank, and the jar will be there to remind us. When you’re ready, you’ll have a down payment waiting.”
“You’ll never have to rent two rooms over anything,” she said. “Not like your grandma did. Not my girl.”
I cried a little, I will admit it. I thought it was the most loving thing anybody had ever done for me.
I thought it was Grandma’s jar coming back around to do for me what it had done for her.
The next day she came home from the dime store on Main Street with a little green ledger book, the kind with the red and blue lines, and she wrote the first entry right there at the kitchen counter.
October 1. Received from Megan Teague, $400.00. Then, in the last column, in her neat church-bulletin printing: House jar. And her initials at the end of the line, D.T.
She did that every single month, the first of the month, for seven years.
I would hand her the check, and she would get the book down out of the cupboard by the jar, and she would write the line while I watched.
Twenty-eight lines to a page. Three pages by the end. One Christmas, I think it was the third year, she got the book down after we opened presents and paged through it slowly, out loud, like it was a photo album.
“Look how far you’ve come,” she said, running her finger down the column of four hundreds. I remember being proud.
I remember thinking, I am a person who saves. I am a person who is going to have a house.
Seven years
Seven years is a long time for a grown woman to live in her mother’s back bedroom. I want to be honest about that part, because it matters for everything that came after.
I could have moved out. Most of the girls I graduated with had apartments, or husbands, or both.
But the jar was the reason I didn’t. Every month I stayed home was another four hundred toward a real house instead of somebody else’s.
I turned down a trip to Branson with the girls from work. I drove the same Malibu with the cracked dash for all seven years.
I bought my scrubs two sets at a time from the uniform place in Salina and wore them until the knees went thin.
I helped around the house too, which is what you do. I mowed the yard. I cleaned out the gutters every fall.
I drove Mom to her eye appointments in Wichita when they dilated her eyes and she couldn’t drive herself home.
Mom works in the kitchen at the grade school, and has for twenty years. She makes about twenty-two thousand a year.
After Dad died there was a paid-off truck, a small life policy that went to the funeral, and a stack of shop bills.
Cody married Kayla when I was twenty-six. He’s two years older than me, a diesel mechanic at the implement dealer, good with his hands and quiet in a room, the way Dad was.
Kayla’s a sweet girl, a teacher’s aide at the same grade school where Mom works. That’s how they met, at a school carnival, with Cody fixing the generator on the cotton candy machine.
I never once thought of my brother as somebody I was competing with. He was just Cody.
He fixed my Malibu for the price of parts and a pizza. He called me Meggie when nobody else was listening.