The Week the Kids Got the Big Bedroom

I had not known that about the lock. I had not known a lot of things, it turned out.

I sat there next to her on Grandma’s quilt and felt a whole year of being right drain right out of me, and I was glad to see it go.

“Do you hate me?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I love you. Travis loves you. Those kids think you hung the moon. But we couldn’t keep saying it, Jodi. So we showed you. And I’m not going to pretend we did it by accident.”

She nodded. She wiped her face with both hands. Then she stood up, smoothed the quilt where she had been sitting, and went down the hall and stood in the doorway of the big room again, and looked at it for a long time. She did not ask for it back.

Supper that night was quiet but not bad. Jodi gave the kids their shells. Lane’s had a hole in it, and he put it on a string and wore it.

Avery held hers up to her ear and swore she could hear the Gulf of Mexico, and Jodi said that was just the furnace, and everybody laughed.

After the dishes, Jodi asked Travis to step out onto the porch with her. It was ten degrees out there.

They stood in the yard light in their coats for twenty minutes, and I watched from the kitchen window and did not try to hear. When Travis came in, his eyes were red.

“She’s going to get a second job,” he said, and that was all he said about it that night.

On Monday, Jodi drove into Trenton on her lunch break from the nursing home and went to the farmers co-op on the edge of town.

They needed somebody on the counter and in the warehouse, weeknights from four to eight and Saturday mornings from six to noon. The manager, Mike, went to school with Travis.

Mike told her she could start that Saturday. And on that Saturday morning, her first shift, at a quarter after five, her Pontiac would not turn over.

It was nine below, and the battery just clicked. I heard it from bed, that click, click, click, and then I heard the back door, and then I heard our truck start.

Travis drove her in himself. He had to be at his dad’s to feed by seven anyway, he said, which was true but not why he did it.

Jodi told me later that neither of them said a single word the whole fifteen miles into town, and that it was the best talk they had ever had.

He waited in the co-op lot with the truck running until she was inside, and he did not pull out until he saw the lights come on in the warehouse.

Then he drove out to his dad’s and fed sixty head of cows in nine below and came home at noon to pick her up.

Two Fridays later, she came downstairs after supper and set an envelope on the kitchen table in front of me.

There were four one-hundred-dollar bills in it. She did not make a speech. She just set it down and said, “Friday,” and went upstairs to give the kids their baths.