The Sunday Drive That Settled Daddy’s Rent

“Yes, Daddy,” she said into his knee.

I stood there and cried. I am not ashamed of it. I had come into that room ready to be angry at my sister the rest of my life, and Daddy had taken that away from me as neatly as he had taken his rent back from her. I did not know whether to thank him or be mad about it.

After a while Sherry got up and wiped her face. She turned around to me and stood there with her arms at her sides. She did not try to hug me and I did not try to hug her.

“I’m sorry, Teresa,” she said. “I’m sorry about your roof. I know you were saving for your roof.”

I thought about my sister going to bed every night for three years knowing what she knew. I did not forgive her right then. But I understood her a little, and that was the start of it.

“Go home and tell Roger,” I said. “Not all at once, if he’s not able. But tell him. Don’t carry it by yourself anymore, Sherry. It’s too heavy.”

She nodded and went out. I watched her go down the hall, slow, with one hand on the rail along the wall, like she was the one who had broken a hip.

Roger came to see me the next Saturday. He drove himself to our house, which he is not supposed to do yet, and he stood on our porch in his good jacket with his hat in his hand. He looked old. He had lost weight since the surgery and his face was gray.

“Teresa,” he said. “Doug. I just found out. I want you both to know I didn’t know. I’d have sold the truck. I’d have sold the house. I’d never have let her take it from Clayton, or from you.”

Doug shook his hand and brought him inside and made him sit down before he fell down. We gave him coffee. He sat at our kitchen table and turned the cup around and around and could not look at us.

“She did it for me,” he said. “That’s the part I can’t stand. She did it so I wouldn’t worry. And I laid there and let her handle everything, and I never once asked her how.”

“You were sick, Roger,” I said.

“I was sick,” he said. “I’m not sick now. I’m going back to the lumberyard part time in January. The first five hundred is coming out of my check, not hers. I want you to know that. That money’s coming from me.”

The first check from Sherry came on the first of December. Five hundred dollars, in a plain envelope with a note in her round handwriting. One of 152, it said. I am so sorry. Love, Sissy.

One hundred and fifty-two checks, a little over twelve and a half years. She had done the arithmetic on my whole bill and divided it out. Sherry always had been good with paperwork.

I put it on the refrigerator under a magnet shaped like Kentucky.

But that is getting ahead. The part I want to tell is the first of November.

I went to see Daddy that morning the way I had promised, to go over his statement. When I got to his room he was sitting up in his recliner with his good cardigan on and his reading glasses on the end of his nose, and he had an envelope in his lap.