The Porch by the Bus Stop

Nick

He came the next Wednesday evening. I heard his work truck pull up out front at a quarter to six, the same as always, but this time there was no honk.

I heard the truck door shut, and then I heard boots on my porch steps.

The kids were still inside finishing their snack. I told them to stay at the table.

I went to the door and opened it, and Nick Varner was standing on my porch in his work clothes with his hands jammed in his jacket pockets.

“Can I talk to you a minute, Roxanne,” he said. “Out here, maybe.”

I stepped out onto the porch with him. He did not look at me. He looked out at the street where the bus stops. “I’m not going to make excuses,” he said.

“Ashley would kill me. And there aren’t any good ones anyway. What I said to you in June was wrong. Calling it rent. That was wrong.”

“Then why did you say it,” I asked him. Quietly. I was not trying to hurt him. I wanted to know.

He took a long time. Then he said, “Because I wanted a clean start. I wanted the kids to look at Ashley and see a mom. And every time they looked at you, they saw Kelsey. Every time I looked at you, I saw Kelsey. You were in every room. Her mother, in her kitchen.”

“I couldn’t breathe in that house,” he said. “Not because of anything you did. You were perfect. That’s what made it so hard. And I knew if I let myself think about the money, about what you’d done, I’d never be able to ask you to go. So I just didn’t think about it. I called it rent so I wouldn’t have to.”

His voice broke on that last part. He was still looking at the street.

“I never added it up,” he said. “Ashley added it up. Monday night, at the kitchen table, with a calculator. Fifty-two thousand on the house. Four hundred a month for thirty-five months. That’s another fourteen thousand. And she didn’t even try to count the groceries, because she said she couldn’t stand to.”

He took his hand out of his pocket. There was a check in it, folded once. He held it out to me.

“It’s five hundred,” he said. “That’s what we can do right now and still keep the lights on. I’ll bring one the first of every month, and it goes up when my union scale bumps in the spring. I’ll bring it myself. I’m not going to mail it. I’m going to hand it to you. Until it’s paid.”

I looked at the check for a long moment. Part of me wanted to tell him to keep it, to put it toward the kids. That is what my mother would have done.

But I was living on a postal pension in a rented house with a sloping kitchen floor, and I am not too proud to say I needed it.

And there was something else. I knew, looking at him, that he needed to hand it to me.

A man has to be allowed to make a thing right, or he never forgives himself for it.

Dale taught me that. So I took the check, and I put it in the pocket of my cardigan.

“Thank you, Nick,” I said. “I’ll put it to good use.”

He nodded. Then he finally looked at me, and his eyes were wet. “I’m sorry, Roxanne. I’m sorry I did that to you. You didn’t deserve it. She’d have been ashamed of me.”

“She’d have been ashamed of both of us if we let it stay broken,” I said. “And we’re not going to. So that’s that.”

He laughed a little, wet and surprised, and wiped his face with the back of his hand.

Then he did something he had not done since the night I gave him that cashier’s check. He hugged me, a big awkward electrician’s hug that smelled like sawdust and cold air.