The Rent Book in the Frame

Mr. Hollis

I want to tell you I prayed about it, and I did.

But I also thought about it on my breaks, standing out behind the nursing home by the dumpsters where the aides go to stand in the wind and call their kids.

One of my residents, a retired rural mail carrier named Mr. Hollis, ninety-one and sharp as a tack, caught me one afternoon.

I was doing his blood pressure and he said I’d been looking like a wet cat for a week.

So I told him a version of it, without any names. He listened with his hands folded on top of his blanket.

He had carried mail on the same county roads for forty years, and he knew everybody, and he didn’t ask who.

When I was done, he was quiet a while. Then he said, “The truth’s not a weapon, honey. It’s just the truth. Now what you do with it, that’s the part that’s yours to answer for.”

That night I found the green ledger book. Mom had moved it to the junk drawer, under the rubber bands and the dead batteries, like it didn’t matter anymore. Three pages of her handwriting. House jar, house jar, house jar.

The frame

I didn’t want to wreck anything. I need that understood. I didn’t want to stand up and make a speech, or make my mother cry in front of the neighbors, or ruin Kayla’s party.

But I wanted my brother to know what he’d been given. Whether he knew already or not, I wanted him to hold it in his hands.

I wanted him to see the eighty-four times our mother wrote down a promise and signed her name to it.

So I took the ledger book over to the print shop in Great Bend on my day off.

The woman there laid the three pages side by side on the glass and copied them onto one big sheet of heavy paper.

Every line was there in Mom’s own handwriting. Every date. Every four hundred. Every house jar. Every D.T. I stood at her counter and counted the lines on the copy twice, just to be sure. Eighty-four.

On the way home I bought a dark wood frame at the hardware store below my new apartment, nineteen dollars, and I put the sheet in it that night in my room at Mom’s, and I wrapped it in brown paper with a bow.

I wrote a card to go with it. On the outside I put: To Cody, from Meg. On the inside I wrote: Open this when everybody’s gone home. I love you.

And I put the ledger book itself in my purse. I didn’t want to give that to anybody. I didn’t know yet what I wanted to do with it.

The housewarming

Cody’s house was a tan split-level on the west edge of town, on one of those new streets where the little trees are still tied to stakes.

Somebody had planted maples, and in October they had gone bright orange.

Kayla had tied balloons to the mailbox. There were maybe twenty-five people there: guys from the implement dealer and their wives, Kayla’s folks from Ellinwood, two of her teacher friends, and a couple of neighbors who had walked over.

I came in carrying my wrapped frame. I was wearing my maroon sweater, the good one, and I had my long brown hair down and straight the way I wear it to church.

I looked like any other person going to a party. That was the idea.

The living room still smelled like new carpet, beige, wall to wall, the kind that shows every footprint.

There was a big white sheet cake on the kitchen counter with welcome home written on it in colored icing, with little icing flowers along the edge, and a stack of paper plates beside it.

Mom was already there. She had on her teal top, the one she wears to every wedding and every graduation, and she’d had her hair frosted that week, short and silvery blonde. She looked nice. She looked happy.

She had brought Grandma’s blue jar. It was sitting on the windowsill above Cody’s new kitchen sink, with a bow of red ribbon tied around the neck, empty.

“For the new house,” she was telling Kayla’s mother. “It was my mother-in-law’s. She called it the house jar. I think it ought to be here now.”

I stood there in the kitchen doorway and looked at that jar for a long minute.

Then I set my present on the table with the other gifts and went and got myself a plate of cake.