The Week the Kids Got the Big Bedroom

We went up after a minute, all four of us, Travis last. Jodi was standing in the doorway of the big room with her suitcase handle still in her hand.

She was looking at the bunk beds under her windows, and the school desk, and Lane’s Legos spread out on the floor in the sun.

She did not say anything. She let go of the suitcase and walked down the hall to the back room, and stood in that doorway too, and looked at her bed with the quilt on it and her pillows set the way she liked them and the picture from the fair on the nightstand.

Then she sat down on the edge of that bed and put her face in her hands and cried.

Not loud. Just her shoulders going. The way you cry when you have been holding something up a very long time and somebody finally takes it out of your arms.

I told the kids to go down and help Uncle Travis with supper. Avery looked back twice on the stairs.

Travis took them both by the hand without a word, and I heard him in the kitchen asking Lane how many potatoes he thought four people needed.

I went in and sat down next to Jodi on her bed. I did not say anything for a while.

I just sat. The register ticked. Out the window the hay field was white and the creek line was gray, and the light was going.

“You could have yelled at me,” she finally said, through her hands. “Either of you. Any time this year. I kept waiting for it. Every first of the month I would lie up there and wait for Travis to come up the stairs.”

“He wasn’t going to,” I said. “He said you’ve had enough men yelling at you to last you the rest of your life.”

She cried harder at that. I put my hand on her back and kept it there.

“It wasn’t six thousand,” she said when she could talk. “I want you to know that. The cruise was about two. Kim and Tammy really did pay half the cabin. The rest just went, Callie. A little at a time, all year. Gas. Christmas. His lawyer’s letter. I don’t even know where.”

“I thought you were holding it,” I said. “I thought that’s why you couldn’t pay. I thought it was for an emergency.”

“It was,” she said. “I just kept deciding everything was one.” She laughed at that, a wet, miserable laugh, and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her shirt the way Lane does.

I let her sit with that a minute. Then I told her the truth, because I figured I owed her that much after a year of not telling it.

I told her about the bread bag in Avery’s boot, and the homework on the top bunk, and what Lane asked me on the counter at ten o’clock on Tuesday night.

She went very still. “He asked you that?”

“Word for word,” I said. “How come Mom’s room is the biggest when there’s two of us and only one of her.”

She did not say anything for a long time. Then she said, very quietly, “I never even thought about it. I walked in that first night and that was the room with a lock on the door, and I just needed one door I could lock. I never thought about it again.”