The Sewing Room Sign on Our Door

The Kitchen Table

That Sunday night, after the drive home, Kyle and I sat at our kitchen table with the savings book between us.

It’s an actual book. Our credit union still prints them, and Kyle likes to see the numbers in ink.

We had $3,140 in savings. We had built it back up since closing, one Saturday at a time.

I had taken every extra client the salon could give me all summer, and Kyle had picked up every overtime shift when the mill ran harvest hours.

It was supposed to be our furnace money. The furnace in that house was older than both of us, and the inspector had written it up in red. We were hoping it would last one more winter.

“If we pay her back, we’ve got a hundred and forty dollars in savings going into November,” Kyle said.

“I know.”

“And if the furnace goes?”

“Then we’ll put it on the card, and I’ll work Saturdays through Christmas,” I said. “I’d rather owe the credit union than owe a room.”

He sat back in his chair. The refrigerator hummed. Outside a dog barked twice somewhere down the block and quit.

“You’re not going to fight her on it,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“No. There’s nothing to fight. It was a family loan. The only clean answer to a family loan is to pay it back. Once we don’t owe her, there’s nothing for her to collect.”

“She’s my mom,” Kyle said slowly. “But that room is yours. It’s been yours since before we ever saw the house. I knew that when we signed.”

He looked toward the garage door, toward the shape under the moving blanket that he had carried in himself in April.

Then he looked back at me, and his face was set the way it gets when he’s decided something at work.

“Pay her,” he said. “At dinner, with everybody there, since that’s where she said it. But do it kind.”

“I’ll do it kind.”

“And I’ll sit by her when you do,” he said. “She’s going to be hurt, and I’m not going to have her sitting there alone across from it. She’s still my mother.”

I reached over and took his hand on the table. Kyle is not a man who makes speeches.

He’s a man who shows up and sits where he’s needed. I loved him more right then than on our wedding day.

The Credit Union

On Friday, on my lunch break, I walked down Main to the credit union in my work smock.

The teller was a girl named Kim I had gone to high school with. I filled out the withdrawal slip for three thousand dollars.

“How do you want it?” Kim asked.

“Hundreds,” I said. “Thirty hundreds. New ones if you have them.”

She raised her eyebrows but she didn’t ask. She went to the back and came out with a stack of bills and counted them twice in front of me, snapping each one under her thumb, and then she counted them a third time because I asked her to.

She put them in a white bank envelope and slid it across the counter. It was thinner than I expected. Four years of pancakes and coffee cans, and it fit in an envelope I could fold in half.

“You okay, Brooke?” Kim asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m paying somebody back.”

“Good for you,” she said, and she meant it, and I walked back to the salon with the envelope in the inside pocket of my smock and my hand pressed flat over it the whole way.

That night I took the sign out of the hall closet and wrapped it in a dish towel and put it in my big purse. I didn’t tell Kyle. I just wanted it near me.