The Week the Kids Got the Big Bedroom

They did not put any words on it. Just pictures. Lane drew a parade of orange cats and one very large dog that we do not own.

Avery drew rows of flowers in pink and purple and colored a strip of green grass along the bottom.

I came down the hall with the last basket of Jodi’s folded clothes while they were taping it up with a roll of blue painter’s tape.

Avery had her long wavy hair falling in her face, pressing tape down on one corner, and Lane was in his striped pajama pants, standing on his toes to get the other.

I had to stop and stand there with the basket on my hip. The light from the window at the end of the hall was on both of them, and the old floorboards, and that crooked crayon sign with its orange cats and its rows of flowers.

“Who is the big dog?” I asked Lane, and he looked at me like I was slow.

“Uncle Travis,” he said. “Obviously.” And Avery laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor.

That night they slept in the big room for the first time. I checked on them at eleven.

Avery was asleep at the school desk with her head on her math book, and Travis carried her to bed.

Jodi was due home Saturday. The ship docked Friday morning, and they drove as far as Oklahoma City that night.

Kim texted me from the road Saturday afternoon to say they were past Chillicothe and about half an hour out, and that Jodi was asleep in the back seat.

Travis came in early from chores that day. He washed up at the kitchen sink and put on a clean flannel shirt, like we were having company.

He did not say anything about it. He just stood in the kitchen doorway with his coffee and waited, the way his dad waits at the sale barn.

The minivan pulled in a little after four. Jodi came up the porch steps sunburned across the nose with a canvas bag over her shoulder and a big rolling suitcase bumping behind her.

The kids hit her at the front door so hard she almost went over backward.

She smelled like sunscreen and two long days in a car. She kissed both their heads and told them she had brought them each a shell from Cozumel, and they would have to wait until she unpacked. Avery held my hand behind her back while her mom talked.

“Thank you for keeping them,” Jodi said to me over their heads. “I mean it, Callie. I owe you.”

Then she picked up her suitcase and started up the stairs. Travis stayed in the kitchen doorway.

He did not say a word. The kids went quiet as church mice. Avery’s hand got tight around mine, and I felt Lane push in close against the back of my leg.

The old stairs creak on the fourth step and the ninth. I heard both. I heard the suitcase wheels drop onto the landing.

I heard her stop, and I knew she was looking at that crayon sign on the big bedroom door.

She stood there long enough that Lane whispered, “Is she mad?” and I shook my head without knowing if it was true.

Then I heard the doorknob turn, and the door swing open, and then nothing at all.