The Week the Kids Got the Big Bedroom

The square room is small. With the bunks in, there was a strip of floor about as wide as a church pew between the beds and the dresser.

Avery did her homework sitting on the top bunk with her knees up because there was no room for a desk.

Meanwhile, Jodi had the two windows and the walk-in closet and a queen bed, and on her days off she slept until ten in there with the door shut.

But a year went by. A year is a long time for a ten-year-old girl to do her homework on a top bunk while her mother’s room sits empty most of the day.

I mentioned it once, in the fall, as gently as I knew how.

“They’re fine in there,” Jodi said. “They like being together. I shared a room with Travis till I was twelve.”

And then she changed the subject to the price of school pictures, and I let it go, because letting it go was what I had been doing all year.

Here is the thing about Jodi’s tax refund. She got it the spring before, the first year she filed on her own as head of household with two kids.

It came to just over six thousand dollars. She told us about it at supper, beaming.

“That’s my emergency money,” she said. “I’m not touching it. If the car dies or one of the kids breaks an arm, it’s there.”

So I did not push her about rent through that summer, because she had that money and I figured she was holding it for a real emergency.

Then, right after Christmas, she came downstairs one night while I was folding towels and asked me if I knew where Travis’s mom kept the family birth certificates.

She needed hers. She did not have a passport, and the cruise line said a birth certificate and a driver’s license would do.

“What cruise line?” I asked her. I had a dish towel in my hands, and I remember folding it in half and then in half again while she told me, because I needed something to do with my hands.

Two girlfriends from high school, Kim and Tammy, were going on a five-night cruise out of Galveston at the end of January.

Tammy’s sister had backed out. Kim had called Jodi and said come on, we will cover half your share of the cabin, you need this more than anybody we know.

“I haven’t done one single thing for myself in eleven years, Callie,” she said. “Not one. I didn’t even get to pick the paint in my own kitchen. I just want five days where nobody needs anything from me.”

I want you to know that I felt that. Every woman who has ever been married to the wrong man, or watched her sister be, knows exactly what she meant.

But part of me was doing math. The car still had the cracked windshield. Avery had a bread bag in her boot.

And there were ten months of next month written on the inside of my head where I had promised myself I would not keep score.

“How are you paying for it?” I asked, and I asked it softly, I promise you I did.

“My refund,” she said, and then, seeing my face, “it’s my money, Callie. They’re covering half. I’ll catch up on everything with you when I get back. I swear to God I will. Next month.”