The Tax Bill I Mailed My Stepson

The phone call

Keith called three days later, at seven at night, while I was washing my one plate.

“What is this,” he said. There was no hello. I could hear the television behind him and Addie singing something about a pumpkin.

“It’s the property tax,” I said. “On the cabin. It’s yours, so it comes to you.”

“Forty-eight hundred dollars,” he said. “Kristi. I don’t have forty-eight hundred dollars. I’m two months behind on my own house. You know that?”

I did not know that. I sat down at the kitchen table, the same one Hank and I ate at for twenty years, and I let him be quiet for a minute. Then I said, “I didn’t know that, honey.”

“You’re living in it,” he said. “You should pay it.”

“I’m a guest in your cabin,” I said. “You told me so yourself. I’ll pay rent if you want me to. But the tax is the owner’s. That’s how it works. I didn’t make that rule.”

He breathed hard into the phone for a while. Then he said, “You’re doing this to make me give it back.”

“No,” I said. “I’m doing it because it’s your bill. If you want to give it back, that’s between you and your daddy. I’m not asking.”

He hung up. I finished washing my plate. Deputy came in through the screen door I had propped for him, and I fed him and went to bed, and for the first time since July I slept all the way through.

What Becky did not know

The next Saturday, Becky’s car came up the gravel drive around ten in the morning. Brody and Addie were in the back.

Keith was not with them. Saturday is the biggest day at a car dealership, and Keith never missed one.

Becky got out slowly, like she was not sure she was allowed. She was holding a bag of donuts from the gas station on the highway. She looked like she had not slept much.

“I hope it’s all right,” she said. “The kids wanted to fish. Keith said you were living up here now, so I thought I’d better bring something.”

“It’s more than all right,” I said. “Get in here.”

Brody ran straight for the dock the way his grandpa taught him. Addie stood behind her mother’s leg until Deputy came down off the porch rail, and then she forgot she was shy.

Becky and I drank coffee on the screened porch and watched the kids. She was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, “Keith told me you signed the cabin over to us. He said it was too much for you, with Hank gone. He said you wanted the kids to have it.”

I held my cup with both hands. I could have said a lot of things right then.

I could have told her everything, and I could have made it ugly. I said, “Is that what he said?”

She looked at me. “Is that not what happened?”

“I’d rather Keith tell you,” I said. “It’s his to tell. Do you want to get the life jackets out of the shed? Hank kept them in the back, behind his workbench.”