The Rent Book in the Frame

Eighty-four lines

He tore the brown paper off. He turned the frame over in his hands. The room was talking and laughing, and then, a little at a time, it wasn’t.

I watched him read the first line. October 1. Received from Megan Teague, $400.00. House jar. D.T. I watched him read it again.

I watched him read the second line, and the third. His lips moved a little. Cody always did that when he read, ever since we were kids at the kitchen table doing our homework.

He kept going. Somebody in the kitchen laughed at something and then stopped. Kayla leaned over from the couch to look, and I saw her face change.

I had come over to stand beside him without even thinking about it, close, the way we used to stand together waiting for the school bus.

I could see the rows past his arm. Twelve lines a year. Seven years.

He read every one. It took a long time. Nobody in that living room said a word. A man by the front window set his plate down very quietly on the sill.

Behind us I could hear my mother breathing. I turned my head just a little.

She was standing a few steps back, still holding her paper plate, and her face looked like somebody had let all the air out of it.

When Cody got to the last line, he stopped. He read it twice. September 1. Received from Megan Teague, $400.00. House jar. D.T.

Then he looked up from under the bill of his cap. Not at me. At Mom.

“Mom,” he said, very quietly. “Where did my down payment come from?”

The answer

Mom opened her mouth and closed it again. She set her plate down on the counter. Kayla’s mother reached over and took hold of Kayla’s hand.

“Cody, honey,” Mom said, her voice gone high and thin. “Can we please talk about this later? We’ve got all these people here.”

“No, ma’am,” Cody said. “I’d like to talk about it right now, if you don’t mind.”

Nobody moved. I don’t think I had ever heard my brother say no ma’am to our mother in that voice.

It was Dad’s voice. Low and even, the voice he used when somebody brought in a tractor they’d run without oil.

Mom looked around at all those people holding their paper plates. Then she looked at me.

I didn’t look away from her, and I didn’t say anything either. I had already said all of it, in her own handwriting.

“It was Megan’s,” she said finally. “It was the money Megan paid me. I was saving it for her. Then you two needed it, and the bank wanted ten percent, and there was the baby coming, and I thought…”

She stopped. Her chin was shaking. She pressed her lips together hard.

“I thought she had time,” she said. “I thought I’d make it up to her somehow. I didn’t know how. I just thought I would. I was going to tell her. I was going to tell you both.”

What I know about my mother

Cody stood there holding the frame. I watched the muscle in his jaw work. Kayla had both hands over her mouth now.

“You told me it was Grandma’s,” he said to Mom. “You told me Grandma left you some insurance money and you’d been sitting on it all these years for something important.”

Mom didn’t answer him. She didn’t have to. It was on her face for every person in that room to see.

I want to say something here about my mother, because people hear this story and think she must be some kind of monster.

She isn’t. She is not a thief by nature. I lived with her for twenty-nine years and she never took a dime from anybody.

She grew up with nothing, in a trailer outside of Hoisington. She watched Dad drop dead at fifty-one with one paid-off truck and a stack of shop bills.

She was scared to death for her boy and his baby, and she made a terrible choice.

She robbed one of her children to save the other one. And then she wrote it down every month in a green book and couldn’t stop writing it down, because if she stopped, I would know.

That doesn’t make it right. Nothing makes it right. But I knew all of it, standing there in my brother’s living room. And I think every person in that room knew it too.