The Rent I Charged His Daughter

What He Said in the Kitchen

On the last Sunday in September, they went to the potluck without me. I had stayed home, saying I had a headache, and I sat in the farmhouse alone in the middle of the afternoon with the clock ticking and the radio turned down.

They came back at three. Trudy’s face was white and set, and neither one of them said a word to me through supper. After the dishes, Arlo asked her to roll his chair into the middle of the kitchen.

He looked at me. I had my hands in the dish water, and I took them out and dried them on the towel because I thought I should.

“Lenora,” he said. “I’m going. To Trudy’s. Thursday.”

I said, “Arlo, you don’t have to.”

“I know.”

That was the whole conversation. There were two words in it I had never heard him use against me, and I stood at the sink and ran water over a clean pan so I would not have to turn around.

I want to tell you what I felt and I do not want it to sound like an excuse. I felt, first, relief. I had won. The house was going to be quiet. Then the floor went out from under the relief, and what was underneath it was the Buick, and the sleet, and a key that would not turn.

I understood, standing at the sink, that I had done to myself the exact thing I was afraid of. I had been so sure someone would put me out that I had gone and put out the one person who had never once tried. And Trudy had already paid for it, in a third of her paycheck and seven months of sleep.

On Thursday, the first of October, half the county turned up in the yard. Gus Ostby, with his flatbed. Leon Stucky, in his VFW cap, with a tool belt he did not need. Marjorie with clean sheets. Nobody looked at me. Nobody was unkind. They carried my husband’s recliner past me like a coffin being brought out of a church, and I stood in the doorway with my arms folded because I did not know what to do with them.

Arlo stopped at the bottom step on his cane. He said, “Lenora.”

I said, “Arlo.”

That was all. I had a hundred sentences and none of them was a thing a person gets to say after what I had done. He got in Trudy’s car, and I watched the taillights go down County Road 14, and when I couldn’t see them I went and stood in the front room.

There were four dents in the carpet where the recliner had been. Four pale squares, as clean as a signature. I stood on one of them in my stocking feet for a long time.