The Rent Mom Wrote on a Napkin
“I am not angry that you’re scared,” Mom said to Cheryl. Her voice got softer. “I’m angry that you were scared alone. You’ve been driving Jim to Columbus three days a week since October, and you never told me the money was gone. I had to hear tonight that you took a loan on the house.”
“I didn’t want to be a burden,” Cheryl said.
“You’re my daughter,” Mom said. “You were a burden for nine months and twenty hours of labor in 1972, and I’d do it again tomorrow. You don’t get to stop being my burden now.”
Cheryl laughed then, finally. It came out wet and broken. She put her forehead down on her arm on the table, right next to the cake, and laughed and cried into her sleeve.
Jim put his hand on her back and rubbed it in slow circles.
“I’ve got a CD at the bank in David City coming due in April,” Mom said. “I was going to roll it over. I’m not going to roll it over. I’m going to help with Jim’s bills myself, the dialysis and whatever the insurance won’t cover, and you’re going to let me, and we’re not going to talk about it at the co-op.”
“Mom, you can’t,” Cheryl said into her sleeve.
“I can do whatever I want with my money,” Mom said. “We’ve established that tonight.”
That got a laugh out of everybody. Even me. I’ll admit to that one.
Kathy reached across the table and picked up Cheryl’s paper, the one with the sixty-four thousand on it. She looked at it a minute. Then she folded it into quarters and put it in her purse.
“I’ll throw it away at home,” she said. “I don’t want it in Mom’s trash.”
Cheryl sat up and wiped her face with the napkin from her place setting. Not Mom’s napkin. Mom had hers folded under her hand again, and she was not letting go of it.
“Marvin,” Cheryl said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I said.
“No, you don’t. Let me say it.” She took a breath. “I’m sorry I made it about money. I’m sorry I listened to Ron Petersen. I’m sorry I did it on Mom’s birthday. I just didn’t know what else to do, and you’ve always seemed like you had it handled, and I was so tired of not having anything handled.”
That one got me. I’ll be honest. I had to look at the lamp for a minute.
Because I remembered that I had seen Jim at the parts counter in November, thinner than I had ever seen him, and I had said, “How you doing, Jim,” and he had said, “Fine, fine,” and I had let it go at fine.
I had let it go at fine for five months. I was not so different from my sisters. I had not asked either.
“I should have asked,” I said. “I knew he was sick and I never asked how you two were getting by. That’s on me too.”
Cheryl shook her head, but she reached across and squeezed my wrist.
Mom cleared her throat.
“Now,” she said. “The rent.”
She slid the napkin across the table to me. I unfolded it. The handwriting shook a little, but it was hers, the same hand that wrote my name on my lunch sack every day for twelve years.
Rent, home 160, 2026. One dollar ($1.00). And three Sunday drives: May, July, October. Verna Ohlsen.
She had signed it. Of course she had signed it.
I took my billfold out of my back pocket. I had a dollar in it, a wrinkled one, and two twenties. I took out the dollar and smoothed it flat on the table and slid it across to her.