The Room Over Haskins Hardware
I had not. I let him in. He set the sack on the corner of the desk, then set the envelope beside it, very carefully, squared with the edge of the oak.
“That’s the thousand and twenty,” he said. “Cash. I went to the bank before I came. I didn’t want to write a check. Then it’s just numbers moving around.”
I did not pick it up. There was only one chair, so he sat on the radiator, got up quick because it was hot, and sat on the windowsill instead.
“I need to tell you something,” he said. “Let me get it all out, because I’ve been trying to say it since August and I keep not saying it.”
I said all right. I sat down in my chair and folded my hands.
“When they cut the overtime,” he said, “I lost about six hundred a month. The house payment’s eleven forty with taxes and insurance. I’ve been short every month since.”
“I took it out of savings in August,” he said. “I took it out of savings in September. I didn’t tell you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because it’s my house,” he said. Then he heard himself, and he put his hand over his eyes. “That’s what I mean, Kels. My house. My payment. If I can’t make it, that’s on me.”
He told me the rest sitting on June Haskins’s windowsill, with the sun on the back of his neck and the leaves going past the glass behind him.
His father always said he charged rent so Denise would have a stake in the place, so she would feel it was partly hers. Travis believed that his whole life. He thought it was respect.
When he saw the savings going, he panicked. He sat in the truck in the plant lot and did the math on the back of a fuel receipt, and thought about what his father would have done.
“So I did what Dad did,” he said. “I put a number on it. Thirty percent, because that’s what Dad told me was fair. On a legal pad, because that’s what he used.”
“Then I cashed your check,” he said, “and I felt sick for two weeks. If I tore it up, I’d have to tell you why I wrote the number down in the first place.”
I asked him what his mother had said on the phone.
He was quiet a long time. Outside, a truck went by with a load of corn, and the windows shook a little in their frames.
“She said Dad was wrong,” he said. “She said it was never about a stake. It was about keeping the house his, so if she ever wanted to leave, she’d have nothing.”
“She said she stayed because of me,” he said, “and she isn’t sorry. But she’s sorry I learned it.”
He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. Travis is not a crying man. I had seen him cry once, at his father’s grave, and even then he turned away.
“And then she said, ‘That girl carried a desk down Main Street so she wouldn’t have to become me. You go up those stairs and you make it right.'”