The Rent I Charged His Daughter

Nine Hundred

I picked nine hundred because the room over the hardware store had been $450, and I doubled it. I thought that sounded like a fair, businesslike number. It was neither. I had no idea what the farmhouse cost her to live in. I only knew what the number would do.

Here is what I understood about rent, and I understood it precisely. A lodger can be given notice. A tenant is not family. If Trudy paid me, she became a person in my house on terms, and terms can end. And if she did not pay, she would leave, and the house would be mine and Arlo’s again, and the bedroom at the top of the stairs would be quiet.

I told myself I was setting a boundary. What I was setting was a price on a daughter.

And she paid it. On the first of September she came back from Arlo’s therapy with nine hundred-dollar bills from the bank in Ellory and counted them onto my kitchen table, one by one, out loud. “One hundred. Two hundred.” In the voice you would use to count out change to a stranger.

I folded them once and put them in my apron pocket. I said thank you. I could not look at the front room.

The door to it was open. From where I stood, I could see the arm of Arlo’s recliner and his good hand on it, white at the knuckles.

I did not spend the money. I want to be clear about that, and I want to be clear that it does not improve anything. I carried it in my apron until bedtime and put it in the sugar canister I had brought from the room over the hardware store. It sat there a month and a half, nine bills, folded once. I could not have told you what it was for. I had not wanted her money. I had wanted something she could not give me, and the nine hundred dollars was the closest thing to it I could name.

September

For a month Trudy did not say a word about it. She cooked on the days I worked. She wiped down the counters. She got up at night. She kept doing everything she had done, and she said “Good morning, Lenora” at the stove with the same plain voice, and she never once raised it.

I kept waiting for her to ask me why. She never did.

Arlo stopped looking at me at supper. He looked at his plate, at the window, at his daughter’s hands. When I passed him his coffee he said “Thank you” in the slow way, one syllable at a time, and I knew he was being careful, and I knew what he was being careful of.

Marjorie came by with a pie and spoke to Trudy at the back door for a quarter of an hour and to me for about a minute. In Ellory the news goes out on the mail route before the mail does.

I did not take the money back. I did not apologize. I told myself that I’d been right.