The Week the Kids Got the Big Bedroom

Our bedroom is downstairs off the kitchen. The upstairs had sat mostly closed off to save on propane since we moved in.

There are three rooms up there. The big front bedroom has two tall windows, a closet you can walk into, and the best register in the house.

There is a small square room at the top of the stairs. And there is a back room with a slanted ceiling that Travis’s grandma used for sewing.

Jodi stood in my kitchen that first night with her coat still on and made a promise.

I remember it word for word, because she said it twice, the second time with her hand flat on the table like she was swearing on something.

“Fifteen hundred a month,” she said. “For the room, the groceries, the propane, the electric, all of it. I am not going to be a charity case in my own brother’s house, Callie. I mean that. Fifteen hundred, the first of every month.”

I told her that was too much. Travis told her that was too much. She would not hear it.

She said she needed to pay her way or she would not be able to look at herself, and I respected that, so we let it stand.

We never wrote anything down. You do not, with family. Nobody in this part of Missouri writes up a lease for their husband’s sister.

You shake on it at the kitchen table and you trust that it means what it meant when it was said.

She paid the first time in February. She handed me fifteen hundred dollars in an envelope from the bank, and she cried a little, and I hugged her, and I put it in a coffee can because I could not bring myself to deposit it right away.

March came and she said next month. April she said next month. In May she said the nursing home had cut her hours.

In June she paid again, the second full fifteen hundred, and I thought we were turning a corner.

We were not. July was next month. August was next month. September, October, November, December. Every month I asked, quietly, at the sink or on the porch, never in front of the kids, and every month she said next month.

I want to be fair about this, because I have thought about it a hundred times since.

I never once heard her laugh it off. She always looked sorry. She always said it like she meant it.

And I believe now that she did mean it, every single time.

But two payments in twelve months is three thousand dollars out of eighteen thousand. And meanwhile the propane bill for that house in a Missouri winter runs what it runs, and two growing kids eat what they eat, and I was the one who did the grocery list.

The other thing that sat with me was the rooms. The first night, Jodi carried her suitcase up the stairs and turned left into the big front bedroom, and she never came out of it again.

Avery and Lane got the square room at the top of the stairs. Travis and his dad hauled up an old set of bunk beds from Ron and Judy’s machine shed, and we found one dresser for the both of them.

Lane kept his Legos in a plastic tote under the bottom bunk.