The Room Over Haskins Hardware
On October first, I wrote a check for $1,020 and left it on the counter under the salt shaker. On the memo line I wrote “spare room, October.” Nothing else.
He came home from nights at seven. I was already logged in, on hold with a Medicare contractor. I heard the paper slide across the counter. I heard him stand there a long time.
He did not say a word about it that day, or that week. He deposited it, though. I saw it go into the joint account, the one we only used for groceries and the electric.
Here is what it felt like. Every morning I sat down at my grandfather’s desk and felt like a tenant, using somebody else’s outlet, breathing somebody else’s heat.
I had never felt like that in our house before. I had felt like a wife.
Now, at eight in the morning, with my coffee in a mug I bought, I felt like I was on a lease.
By the middle of October, I knew I could not pay it again. Not because of the money. Because of what it was turning us into.
Everyone asks the same thing first. Why didn’t I just leave him?
Because I love him. This was not a marriage problem. It was a money problem and a family problem, and it was his father’s problem, and I was not walking out over a legal pad.
I did not want a divorce. I did not want to sit in the pastor’s office. I wanted a room that did not cost me thirty percent of myself, and I wanted my husband back.
So I went looking for a room.
Walt Haskins has owned Haskins Hardware on Main Street since 1979. It is the kind of store where the floor creaks under the nail bins and Walt knows your furnace filter size before you say it.
There is a room upstairs. Everybody in town knows it, the way you know the bell tower at the Lutheran church. You can see its two tall windows from the street, over the awning.
I knew Walt the way everyone knows Walt. Once I needed a single brass screw for my grandfather’s desk drawer, and he went in the back and found one in a coffee can.
On a Tuesday in mid-October, on my lunch hour, I walked down. Walt was cutting a key for a farmer in coveralls. I waited until the farmer left, then asked about the room upstairs.
Walt looked at me over his glasses. He was seventy-four that fall, with white hair cut short and a red work apron over a plaid shirt. I have never seen him in anything else.
“What would you want it for?” he asked.
I told him. Medical billing. A door that locks. Quiet. Internet. Eight to five, Monday through Friday, and nobody would come up but me.
“What about your house?” he said. “Travis has that place on Third Street.”
“I’m not comfortable working there anymore,” I said. That was all. I did not say one word against my husband, and I am proud of that.
Walt looked out the front window at the street for a moment. Then he took a key ring off a nail by the register. “Come on up and see it,” he said.