The Rent Book in the Frame

What she told me about Cody

Then I asked the thing I was most afraid of. “Does Cody know?” I said. “Does he know whose money that was?”

She looked right at me then, for the first time. “Cody knows what he needs to know,” she said.

“And you are not going to put that weight on your brother with a baby coming. Do you hear me? You will not do that to him.”

I took that to mean yes. I took that to mean my brother knew, and took the money anyway, and sat there grinning about it over pot roast while I passed him the rolls.

That’s the honest reason I never just called him. I couldn’t stand to hear him say it.

I thought if Cody said, well, Meg, you didn’t need it yet, something in me would break that wouldn’t go back together.

So I didn’t call. I went to my room and got my own shoebox down off the closet shelf, where I kept the carbon copies of my checks. Eighty-four of them. Four hundred dollars each.

I had known the total for years. I added it up again anyway, on the back of a pharmacy receipt, just to see the number sitting there in my own handwriting. Thirty-three thousand, six hundred.

Then I lay on my bed in my clothes and looked at the ceiling until it got light out.

I had a seven o’clock shift. I went in and turned residents and passed breakfast trays and didn’t say a word to anybody.

The waiting room

Mom and I lived in that house for five more weeks like two people in a doctor’s waiting room. Polite. Careful. Passing each other in the hallway. Saying good morning and good night.

On October first I didn’t write a check. Mom got the green book down out of the cupboard that morning, from habit, and then she saw my face and put it back without a word.

“I’m not paying it anymore,” I said that evening. “There’s no jar to put it in, Mom. There never was.”

She didn’t argue. She just nodded and went and put the coffee on. Somehow that was almost worse than if she had fought me about it.

I started looking at apartments. There was one above the hardware store on Main, three hundred fifty a month, with a radiator that knocked and a front window that looked right out at the water tower. I signed the lease for the first of November.

Then the invitation came in the mail. Kayla had made it herself on the computer at school, with a little drawing of a house and a pumpkin on it. Housewarming. Saturday afternoon at four. Come hungry.

I took it to work and stuck it on the inside of my locker door. I looked at it every shift for a week, every time I put my lunch away.