The Week the Kids Got the Big Bedroom

“And I’m not going to yell at her either,” he said. “She’s had enough men yelling at her to last her the rest of her life.”

He was quiet again, and then he turned his head on the pillow and looked at me. “But those kids need that room more than she does.”

“They do,” I said.

“She’s not going to hear it from us,” he said. “We’ve said it. You’ve said it a hundred times. I think maybe she needs to see it.”

I lay awake for a while after he fell asleep. I asked myself whether it was spite.

I asked myself whether I would want it done to me. And the answer I kept coming back to was that I would want somebody to make sure my kids had a place to put their homework.

On Wednesday morning, Travis called his dad and told him he would be late to feed.

Ron did not ask why. He just said he would take care of it, and that Judy wanted to know if we needed a casserole, which is how Ron says he loves you.

The kids had a snow day anyway, because the roads had drifted shut overnight along the county line.

I made pancakes. And while they ate, Travis sat down at the table across from them and folded his big rough hands, the way he does at church.

“How would you two like to switch rooms?” he said. “You’d get the big one. Both of you. Your mom would get Grandma’s sewing room in the back. It’s a nice room. It’s just smaller.”

Avery put her fork down. She looked at me, then at him, then back at me, like she was checking whether this was one of those jokes grownups tell that turns out not to be funny. “Does Mom know?”

“Not yet,” Travis said. “When she gets home, she’ll see. If she wants to talk about it, she can talk to me.”

He said it so calm that both kids believed him, and so did I.

Lane was already off his chair. “Can the Legos go by the window?” he said, and Travis said the Legos could go anywhere Lane wanted, and Lane ran up the stairs in his pajama pants so fast he tripped on the third step and did not even cry.

It took most of the day. I want to tell you how we did it, because the how was the whole point.

We did not throw anything. We did not pack anything in trash bags. Nothing of Jodi’s went to the basement or the barn.

Travis took the bunk beds apart with a socket wrench and carried them down the hall one piece at a time.

He set them up again in the big room under the two tall windows, square to the wall, and put a level on the top rail because he is like that.

Then he and I carried Jodi’s queen mattress and box spring down the hall into the back room.

It barely fit up under the slanted ceiling, but it fit. Travis put the frame together on his knees with a flashlight in his mouth.

I emptied her dresser into laundry baskets, drawer by drawer, and I folded every single thing that came out of it.