The Porch by the Bus Stop

The House

About a month after the funeral, I came by on a Thursday with a pan of lasagna and found the mortgage statement on the counter with a pink envelope under it.

Two payments behind. Nick was standing at the sink with his back to me, and I saw his shoulders.

“I’ve got it handled,” he said, before I could open my mouth. He had not got it handled.

With Kelsey’s paycheck gone, they were short almost nine hundred dollars every month, and the daycare for Gracie alone was eating a third of what he brought home.

I drove home that night and sat at my own kitchen table until two in the morning with a yellow legal pad. I was fifty-seven.

I had my postal pension coming, and my Social Security later. I had a house that was paid for and a little in savings.

What I did not have was my daughter. And what her children did not have was their mother.

By the time the sun came up, I knew what I was going to do, and I have never once in my life regretted the doing of it.

I listed my house with a woman from church who sold real estate on the side.

It was a small two-bedroom on an acre with a detached garage and a pole barn, and it sold in nine days to a young couple from Farmer City for ninety thousand dollars.

After the closing costs and the realtor, I cleared a little under eighty-six thousand. I kept back some for my own car and my own doctor bills.

Then I went to the bank and had them cut a cashier’s check to Nick’s mortgage company for fifty-two thousand dollars.

I wrote a note on an index card and paper-clipped it to the receipt. I wrote, “For the kids’ house. Love, Mom B.”

That was what the kids called me, Mom B, because Lily could not say Grandma Biel when she was small and it stuck.

Nick stared at the receipt for a long time when I handed it to him. “Roxanne, I can’t take this,” he said.

I told him he could and he would, because those children had lost enough already, and they were not going to lose the house with the swing set too.

He cried then. A big man, a union electrician, standing in his own kitchen with a cashier’s check receipt in his hand, crying like a boy.

I put my arms around him and let him. I did not think there was any shame in it then, and I do not now.

That brought the balance down from about a hundred and forty-eight thousand to under ninety-six.

The monthly payment stayed the same, because that is how a mortgage works unless you go in and have it recast, which neither of us thought to do. So I added four hundred a month toward it.

And I moved into the spare room with two suitcases, my sewing machine, and Dale’s old recliner, which Nick carried in from the truck without a word and set by the window where I could see the swing set.

There was never any paper. I want that understood too. I did not ask for a note or a lien or a signature on anything.

It was family. You do not ask your dead daughter’s husband to sign a promissory note while her flowers are still on the porch.