The Rent I Charged His Daughter

The Roll-Top Desk

On Saturday, Trudy called to ask me to send some of her father’s things: his reading glasses, his Bible, the blue folder of papers he kept in the desk. She said it politely. “Whenever’s convenient, Lenora.” I said I would bring them Monday.

The desk is an old oak roll-top Arlo’s father built, and it stands in the corner of the front room under the window. I had never opened more than the top drawer, for stamps. I did not feel I had the right.

I got down on my knees on the carpet in front of it. The bottom left drawer stuck, and when I got it open, under his Bible and a box of mechanical pencils, was a long envelope with corners soft as cloth, and sealed. On the front, in Arlo’s carpenter’s pencil: For Trudy. When I can say it.

I held it a good while. I had read one paper that summer that I should have carried to Arlo, and look what I made of it. I did not open this one. I laid it in the box under the Bible, and then I could not make myself drive the box to town. It sat in my front hall for eleven days.

Wednesday at Two

On the fourteenth of October, I took the nine bills out of the sugar canister, put them in a bank envelope, and drove to Walnut Street. They were the same nine bills Trudy had counted onto my table. I had never spent one.

I did not go up. I stood at the bottom of the three steps with the envelope, like a girl who has been sent to the principal. I could see the shape of Arlo’s recliner through the window, facing the street. Trudy came to the screen door.

Before she could speak, he said, from his chair, “Let her. Come in.”

I sat on the very edge of her couch. I had a whole speech and could not find the first word of it.

“I was wrong to do it,” I said finally. “Not partly wrong. Wrong. I won’t say it better than that. This is the nine hundred.”

Trudy took the envelope and counted it, out loud, the way I had made her count it. Nine bills. Then she looked at me for a long moment with her father’s square-cornered face. She did not say it was all right.

“I have not forgiven the August table,” she said. “I am letting Wednesdays happen. Here’s how it will go.”

Wednesdays at two. Sundays after church. I would knock. I would not ask Arlo to come back to the farmhouse until he asked me. And whatever I had to say to him, I would say slowly and let him finish.

Arlo nodded at every piece, one at a time, like a man signing something.