The Four Hundred Dollars at Our Kitchen Table

Jon asked me before he asked her. I want that understood. He sat at our kitchen table and said, “Erin, I’m gone half the month. If she comes, she’s mostly with you. You say no and I’ll find something else.”

I said yes. We had a spare room at the end of the upstairs hall, the one that was going to be a nursery and never was. We painted it the yellow she liked and Jon moved her bedroom set up the six stairs by himself, one piece at a time.

Nobody ever talked about rent. It would have felt wrong to charge a widow to live with her only son. She paid for her own prescriptions and her own hair appointments, and she bought her own coffee, a particular brand from the store in town. That was all.

I will not pretend Marjorie and I were close. We were polite. She called me Erin in the voice some women use for a waitress who got the order wrong. She rearranged my cupboards twice, and twice I put them back without a word. We had a kind of peace.

Then in January my mother had her hip replaced.

Mom lives alone in Grayling, about thirty miles south on I-75, in the same little ranch house where I grew up. My father died eleven years ago. She is seventy-one, sharp as a tack, and stubborn as the day is long, and her hip had been grinding for two years before she let anybody look at it.

The surgeon in Traverse City did a good job. But nobody goes home alone after a hip replacement, not at seventy-one, not to a house with a tub she could not step into and a driveway she could not shovel. The discharge nurse told us six to eight weeks with somebody in the house.

So I brought her home with me. That was never a question.

The problem was the stairs. Our house is a split-level, like half the houses built in Otsego County in the seventies. You come in on the main floor with the kitchen and living room, and then it is six steps up to the bedrooms and the bathroom and six steps down to the family room.

The first week, Mom could not manage six steps. The physical therapist at the hospital had practiced stairs with her, but only two, and only once. So we made up the living room couch with a pillow and Grandma Dorsey’s old quilt, and I moved the commode chair in beside it.

It was supposed to be for a week. Then it was two weeks, then three, then four, because Mom kept saying the couch was fine, it was perfectly fine, she did not want to put anybody out.

I should have seen it. I am angry at myself about that more than anything else in this story. Our couch is a low, soft thing, and a new hip is not supposed to sink that deep. She was waking up stiff every morning and not saying a word.

And I was working. I left at seven fifteen and got home after five, and in between, my mother and my mother-in-law were alone in that house together all day, two widows with nothing in common but me and Jon.

At the table, Mom would not look at me at first. She kept smoothing her cardigan over her knees.